Hmmm, I have a feeling that this post isn’t gonna solve anything, been mulling over it now for too long not to post though, so here goes my first foray into an attack on determinism. Deep breath
The trouble with determinism, and here I take it to be that you have a mapped future in front of you, is that it’s confused the past with the future. Man can take any decision he wants, at any point in time, to do anything that he is, at the time, physically able to do. So I could right now stop writing this, but I’ve decided not to. We are ultimatly so free that any one of us could do whatever we want whenever we want to (this is very Sartrean btw, but there are quite a few objections to this extreme freedom, but I think they miss the point of it). I’m not saying we will, but we do have the choice. Right now I could walk out on my degree, move country and get a job as a bartender, should I desire to do so. Or I could go downstairs and murder my housemates (hope they don’t read this! ) Determinism states that whatever I do, I could not have done otherwise, I was always going to do what I have done, I will always do what I will do. Now see, they’re on what seems to be very strong ground here. Take the example that I’m going to go downstairs, get my cigarettes and have a fag in a minute. Now a determinist would argue that all the events in my life have determined that i will do this, from the fact that I’m addicted to nicotene, to the fact that I have cigarettes downstairs, to the fact that I was born in a certain place and time so that it is time of day to have a cigarette, to the mental process that are driving me right now which say I want a cigarette. Now on the other hand, if I stubbornly refused to have one in order to prove the determinist wrong, he would say that that was predetermined too, it was always going to happen because I was going to try and prove the determinist wrong, but all I’m doing is proving him right! But you see therein lies the paradox of determinism, it is infallable. Whatever I do it will be as they predict, precisly because built in to the definition of determinism is it’s own facticity. It’s no better than extreme skeptisim, you can’t disprove it.
I think the ultimate mistake of the determinist is looking at the past, which cannot be changed and then looking to the future and saying it is similar to the past. It is not, precisily because there are all the possibilities stretching in the future before us, but there is only one behind us. There are plenty of unrealised possibilities behind us. That is why I say it is impossible to prove which is wrong or right. A determinist can (quite rightly) say that there is only one future possibility that we can take. They are right because there is only one possible future we are gonna live, the one we end up living, but who are they to say it is “determined”, there is no evidence either way, precisily because we can only ever choose one path. Whether we actually had a choice of another path is impossible to show, but is also impossible to show that we didn’t.
What I will concede is that we have certain predispositions, if offered a choice of identical goods people tend to go for the one on the right (This is from a paper by Stich and Nichols on the simulation theory of mind, not sure of it’s title). I will tend to choose Tea as a drink when offered one, or lager in a bar (student ). But as to whether this was predetermined, or whether the times I choose differently were also, a determinist cannot prove because his argument is circular.
That about wraps it up, what I hope I’ve proved is that while I can’t disprove determinism, I can’t prove it either. Much like, while I can’t prove this is “reality”, I can’t prove that it’s not.