Determinism

“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine

But: Was Dennett ever able to not question such certainty? And how is the “element of chance” understood as the same or different from “randomness” in the universe?

Instead, from my point of view, what is seen as “chance” or “randomness” is merely a reflection of the gap between what we think we know about reality here and now and all that needs to be known such that in a wholly determined universe even interactions in the quantum world would be entirely predictable. Either by God or by a mere mortal able actually to grasp both the theory and the practice of everything.

So: Does he pull it off? Or is his own argument in and of itself just another inherent, necessary manifestion of what could only ever be?

Then we head in the direction that peacegirl always seems to go:

Which is basically my point here as well. But she somehow sees this point as missing her point. And even though I am not able to not miss her point, I still seem to be “responsible” for missing it. In a way I am simply unable to grasp.

So, “for all practical purposes” in groping to grapple with why we choose the things that we do from moment to moment, what am “I” to really make of all this?

Are the words I am typing here just another more complex [and currently ineffable] manifestation of those dominoes toppling over mindlessly, or does the part about human minds/consciousness “choosing”/choosing in a way the dominoes do not make all the difference in the world?

“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine

In other words, the arguments here get us coming and going. We can never quite pin down “I”, let alone connect this “self” to a “will” able to be examined in a definitive manner.

Or are there people here who have managed to convince themselves that folks like Hume weren’t successful because they hadn’t “thought it all through” in the right way. Like they have. They’re absolutely positive they’re in touch with the one and only “me”. And that this one and only me is calling the shots when thinking, feeling, saying and doing things. Or at least the really, really important stuff.

And the irony here is that so much that does go on inside our bodies is on automatic pilot. All those parts and pieces going about the business of interacting, doing their thing, as though “I” weren’t even around at all.

Parts like this:

We see things. We interpret what we think they mean. We react to what we think they mean. And yet there is not a one of us here who has a sophisticated enough grasp on all this to note a detailed distinction between the brain doing its thing and us taking over.

We just know it’s in there somewhere. And the thought that we could never know anything other than what we are compelled to know by brains as mindful matter having evolved along with life itself on planet Earth is just too…

Well, we don’t know exactly what that means.

Not counting those here who bundle up their words into an intellectual contraption and call that the answer.

“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine

This is basically what it comes down to. What we see can only be grappled with by making particular assumptions about the relationship between matter as mind and mind as matter. But going back how far? To an understanding of life itself and its evolution on planet Earth? To an understanding of planet earth going back to the birth of the solar system…then going back to the Milky Way galaxy’s birth…then going back to the Big Bang…then going back to God…then going back to, well, what exactly?

That’s the part that [to me] is particularly exasperating. Our “will” – free or not – would seem to be only a more or less significant component of existence itself. Then the part that our own individual “I” plays in it all. How much more “infinitesimally insignificant” can that be?

And then there are so many different ways in which to approach it…

Always it seems to come back to that most extraordinary of nature’s inventions: the mind. Matter able to probe itself as matter intertwined in this particular something groping to understand if “I” itself is able to grope about autonomously.

The part in other words where the matter in the mind and the matter in all the rest of the body coordinate their “things” into producing someone like me typing these words on a laptop computer. Here and now.

And then “I” trying to determine if what I am going to do next – go grocery shopping – is only that which I am ever able to do next.

that endless regression is a great point against any objections to eliminative materialism… but even supposing there was some mind ‘in there’, some private theater of qualia inaccessible to everyone else and which only you can experience, how could you talk meaningfully about any of it?

i’ve always found wittgenstein’s point particularly insightful when he criticizes the common sense phrase: ‘i know i am in pain’. at first glance this should seem perfectly right… but then he says ‘we can’t speak of knowing outside of the context of doubting, therefore to say ‘i know i’m in pain’ is entirely senseless.’ wait what? let’s think about what he means here. so i can’t doubt i’m in pain - it hurts like hell… there’s no denying that - and i could say ‘i know i’m in pain’, but only under one condition; if i did not use the word pain as a representation of some content of experience, but rather simply to convey a sense in which the meaning could be used, and understood as such. so i’d be notifying others that i’m having a kind of experience. if not, the other would not be able to know the thing the word represents… and yet for other things i observe through inductive experience of which i speak about as ‘knowing’, e.g., ‘the milkman is here’ (something i could doubt… i may be hallucinating or a brain in a vat, etc.), the thing the statement represents can be experienced by the other. see the subtle difference between the statement ‘i know i’m in pain’ and ‘i know the milkman is here’? qualia… or as nagel put it, that problem of ‘knowing what it’s like to be a bat’, is a non-problem. even the bat can’t know what it’s like to be a bat, because there is no ‘bat’ in there that can be known or doubted. he can be a bat, and know he’s a bat, but there is no amount of private experience of the inner cartesian bat that would lead him to believe he, and only he can ‘know’ what it’s like to be a bat. for what about being a bat and a bat’s experiences can be doubted outside of inductive bat propositions made with a representational language? see what i mean? the same batesian dualism eventually stands to be critiqued by a battgenstein.

you can extend this little drill to demonstrate how the difference between representational meaning and use-meaning has caused so much trouble in philosophy. take the word ‘mind’. mind as something separate from the body, or an additional quality added to the body, or something the brain ‘produces’ and ‘has’… and then to speak about it with the same predication i would use to describe things in the world; the mind is free, or the mind is determined, or the mind is mad, or the mind is lost, or the mind is big, etc. i can know such expressions only as metaphor which become meaningful once i attribute to the expressions particular behaviors… which are ostensible uses of meaning that i learn through language/culture. but i can never know of something separate from these behaviors… something that exhibits such qualities as a thing might exhibit a shape or color or movement, etc. the mind as a ‘container’ of concepts. another senseless notion.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x86hLtOkou8[/youtube]

What becomes particularly surreal then is the manner in which we react to assessments of this sort only because we were never able to react to them in any other way.

Ah, but only if my brain precipitates my mind to precipitate my fingers to type these words only because I am not able to not type them.

Where does nature with its laws of matter fit in here? Descartes, his theatre. Then my reaction to Robinson’s reaction to it compelling the post above and now you being compelled to read these words. Is it all really just one necessarily intertwining reality unfolding inexorably toward what can only ever be?

Along with Wittgenstein and his boxed beetle?

My own exasperation in acknowledging that I will almost certainly go to the grave not knowing what if anything is behind it all being but one more unimaginably insignificant facet of it all in turn?

From “Pointlessness Doesn’t Follow from Determinism” at the Breaking the Free Will Illusion website

Again, the part [in my view] where everything in this debate seems to get all tangled up in what we either are or are not able to fully encompass using language.

Assuming for the moment that in using it we do have some measure of free will.

In other words, for all practical purposes, if we do live in a wholly determined universe, it would seem that however we frame the meaning of the word “pointless” and its relationship to the meaning that we give to the word “determined”, the “point” of the future doesn’t make the actual future itself any different than it seemingly must be given that the point of nature is to unfold solely in accordance with the immutable laws of matter.

And here the word “futile”. Since we are inherently/necessarily a part of nature unfolding as it must [for whatever reason], the only way that futile makes any sense to me is in discovering the reason why existence unfolds at all; and then determining that the existence of existence itself is futile. That any reason is as ultimately futile as any other.

Here we are back to the distinction that peacegirl and I seem to make between “choosing” and choosing.

Because we at least “choose” to do only what we are able to “choose” to do. This our part in it all must surely be less futile than the parts played by mindless matter.

well you’ve been around long enough to get the gist of my position regarding this problem of language. i took a strong post-structural turn toward philosophy after i found wittgenstein, and recently i’ve been studying derrida… something that seems almost like a grand finale to my epistemological nihilism. the timing is perfect; derrida’s concept of the ‘trace’, ‘logocentrism’, ‘différance’, ‘binary oppositions’, ‘presence’ and ‘aporia’, are all magnificent insights revealing the essential instability of philosophical text (where they are expressed most). and what’s great about all this is that i get to see it happening in real-time at these forums. it’s almost like i’m taking a class, dude. when i apply the concepts i’ve learned from wittgenstein in a deconstructive approach to what i read here, i see all these things come to life. for example, in one of the freewill threads, there is now a new binary opposition of ‘internal’ and ‘external’. now it’s not the fact that such a dichotomy would be irrelevant to what and how causation works - there is not a space or enclosure or limit at which causation starts or stops working… so ‘inside’ and outside’ are fortuitous terms here - but that even if there were such a difference of space, of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, nobody using the term could define clearly where it was. and yet, they flow right on with the discussion as if this idea is taken for granted and understood by everyone using the term. so with this you get a great example of the wittgensteinian language game - where a word used in an ordinary context to define physical, geometric locations is now transferred into a metaphysical environment where it’s usual connotations are completely missing - as well as derrida’s aporia; the stability of the terms depends solely on ‘what comes next’, but this in turn depends also on what follows, etc. being that the terms are fortuitous to begin with, there can be no ‘right’ direction, and any direction will produce the same ‘sense’ of meaningfulness for the viewers… precisely because they are meaningless. the reader takes possession of the text, decentralizes the transcendental center or intent of the writer, and re-appropriates the meaning to fit what he understands the words to mean. so you finally have a kind of self sustaining logocentric simulacrum freely operating between the writer and reader… wherein the language becomes the destabilized transcendental center rather than the intent of the writer or reader. what occurs is a meaningless freeplay or pantomime of language… by which each interlocutor is only arguing with himself.

a general principle: in language, the signifier is always incompletely defining all the possible ways the signified can be meaningful (cue W’s language games)… and yet at any point that the signifier is pinned down and becomes dependent on ‘what follows’, the aporia results and the text loses all stability by being continuously postponed.

from one nihilist to another, let me suggest that, in fact, the intuitions we experience when we observe what we can’t make any sense of (or multiple senses of… which amounts to the same thing), result from what are actually subtle structures which nonsense and ambiguity must conform to. granted that this is a deconstruction… you might think of it, paradoxically, as the last possible structural approach to language and philosophy. so no, my friend, you are not the crazy one here. on forum boards, insanity is the rule. for the nihilist, it is an exception.

i had breezed by derrida a decade ago without giving him much thought… but this was because i hadn’t yet put the necessary years in to experience exactly what he was on about. now i see it more clearly than ever. odd that many ordinary language philosophers call him an obscurantist. like wittgenstein, he’s actually waged an assault on philosophy for the purposes of returning language from it’s metaphysical environment.

in any case, check out this video.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STydy9wbAo0[/youtube]

From “Pointlessness Doesn’t Follow from Determinism” at the Breaking the Free Will Illusion website

I’ll be the first to admit that the distinction some make between determinism and fatalism is lost on me.

If the laws of nature determine what the future will be, why is it not reasonable to argue that the future is fated to be what the laws of nature inexorably make it?

Thus what we are compelled to “choose” to do is to participate in the interactions that will unfold into a future that necessarily encompasses these choices.

It’s not a question of mattering but of what we do mattering because in an autonomous world we might have chosen to do something that resulted in an entirely different future.

If, however, the future unfolds only as it must, what we choose to do matters only in the sense that it would matter how the dominoes are set up if in the future they are all to topple.

They would seem to be fated to all topple only if we are fated by nature to set them up so that they will all topple.

How then do others see this distinction between determinism and fatalism?

separate morality from free will
by Phil Goetz
at the lesswrong website

As many here might imagine, my own interest in determinism revolves fundamentally around the question that most interest me philosophically: How ought one to live?

And Kant would seem to be right in the bullseye in noting the clear connection between free will and moral responsibility. If you are not able to freely choose your own behaviors, then being held responsible for them by others is just another way of saying that they are not able to freely choose to hold you responsible.

Then for Kant [and philosophers of his ilk] it is merely a matter of concocting a God such that in a world where we do have autonomy, He becomes the ultimate arbiter on Judgment Day.

On the other hand, if this transcending font is omniscient, how is one able to reconcile human freedom with that?

But here [for me] things immediately get tricky. What does it mean “for all practical purposes” to refer to free will as “a mysterious philosophical phenomenological concept related to consciousness” and then to make a distinction between that and someone “pointing a gun at the agent’s head”?

How and when do the concocted concepts of free will make contact with the behaviors of conscious human beings choosing to point guns at the heads of others?

How are the laws of nature not compelling both one philosopher to define and describe free will conceptually and another philosopher to point a gun at another’s head?

What do I keep missing here?

“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine

Let’s be honest: few of us possess in tandem both the mental capacity and the educational background needed to ponder all the balls lofted up into the air inside one or another intellectual contraption like this. Conjectures that attempt to come to grips with an actual choice being made by someone in a particular set of circumstances. And even the neuroscientists who do explore the functioning brain here, do so by and large in a very narrow context: probing the brain thinking and deciding inside one or another fMRI device.

Not only that, but the balls can bump into any number of “conditions” in which the brain is [at times] fiercely tugged and pulled autonomically in any number of directions: drug use, hypnosis, delusions, dementia, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, clinical depression, psychosis; and many other physical and mental disorders.

And what of the dreams that we have? How is this particular “ball” to be grappled with [represented] other then as a classic example of how the brain itself creates these truly astonishing “realities” such that, while in the dream itself, “I” is convinced that it is calling the shots.

From “Pointlessness Doesn’t Follow from Determinism” at the Breaking the Free Will Illusion website

Another point I seem to be entirely missing. If the future unfolds only in accordance with the laws of matter in the present, it will be different only in the sense that here and now we are not around then to note the difference. But it can still only be what it must be.

It’s like nature compels John to set up a million dominoes. And, as it turns out, given the laws of matter, John is compelled to set them up such that they all do [must] topple to form a design that depicts Trump and Putin in bed together.

Now, the dominoes before they topple do not look the same as toppled dominoes. But the present and the future are still no less necessarily intertwined given my own understanding of determinism.

Of course some things would be considerably more problematic in a free will world. On the other hand, other things would change only because in the either/or world the laws of matter are applicable to the past, the present and the future. Anything that we might deem to be “significant” or “better” is still embedded in nature.

On the other other hand, in the is/ought world, free will precipitates any number of conflicts regarding those things deemed by some to be “significant” or “better” that are not deemed that way at all by others.

I must be misunderstanding the point being made here.

Separate morality from free will by Phil Goetz
[from the lesswrong web site]

Of course my own problem here is that many who insist that they do have a “distinct concept of morality”, are very often not willing [or able] to connect the dots between their concept of morality and the manner in which the definition and meaning that they give to it is rendered more substantively/descriptively in regard to their day to day interactions with others.

And if one sees another’s conception of morality as “macro”, what on earth does that mean relating to their actual reaction to the behaviors of others which conflict with their own.

Likewise where are the examples that Kant notes which take this “general description” itself out into world he lived in? And, even in assuming free will, to what extent does he delve into the components of my own moral narrative: the self as the existential agglomeration of particular experiences and relationships; Barrett’s idea of “rival goods”; the role that political power can play in a community that either worships and adores a rival God, or a secular community embedded in a No God ideology like Communism; or one revolving around the nihilistic assumption that prevails among those who are more inclined to embrace a “show me the money” social and economic ethos.

And where is Kant’s deontological morality [for mere mortals] without the transcending font?

How is one to realistically intertwine the metaphysical concept of free will with the actual nitty gritty day to day conflicts that arise from different “one of us” communities insisting that, autonomously, being morally responsible involves behaviors that clearly clash?

Determinism on the other hand subsumes all of this in but the psychological illusion of free will. The clashes are real but they were never able to unfold other than as they must.

This is the part that is particularly problematic to me. Here I’m simply confused regarding the ability of language like this to be brought down to earth and intertwined in an examination, description and analysis of the choices we make.

What on earth is this supposed to mean with respect to the behaviors that we do opt for existentially?

Human consciousness certainly seems able to think up [autonomously or not] an abstraction like a “mysterious philosophical phenomenological concept related to consciousness”. But how “for all practical purposes” is this applicable to someone who does point a gun at another’s head?

“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine

Really well put, right?

To think that “I”, given all of the extraordinary ways in which we are able to experience and express it, can have somehow just evolved “mechanically” from matter that consisted basically of the elements hydrogen and helium just after the Big Bang, seems, well, preposterous.

And yet, come on, who has ever really been able to pin down this “real me”? And look what the brute facticity of the human brain can construct in the way of “I” in dreams. How are “you” then not just a chemical and neurological “contraption”? How are dreams themselves not just the brains very own SIM worlds or Matrix perceptions?

Yet it is here again that I am unable to “think through” speculations of this sort and decide if they are an explanation enough. How might Dennett’s “atmosphere of free will” not be just another manifestation of a brain able to “produce” thinking like this in sync with the psychology [illusion] of free will in sync with a metaphysical determinism?

What on earth can really be demonstrated to be “independent” of a wholly determined universe? Even the “thought experiment” above could be seen as but another necessary manifestation of that which can only ever be.

From “Pointlessness Doesn’t Follow from Determinism” at the Breaking the Free Will Illusion website
by Trick Slattery

But: Is not a determinist compelled by nature to recognize everything only as he or she was ever able to?

And being a nihilist in a determined universe doesn’t make these recognitions any less compelled. And, sure, there might be hundreds of different types of nihilists…but what they would all seem to share in common is their inability to choose to be anything other than what the laws of matter propel them towards.

I’m always perplexed by this sort of thinking. In a determined universe as I understand it, nihilists would seem to be interchangeable with Platonists or Christians or Communists or anarchists or hedonists or sociopaths. No one actually has the free will to choose to be these things. No more so then I have the free will to choose to type these words.

And would not ethical nihilists [like me] necessarily follow along our determined paths?

How could they not?

Instead, there’s a part of me unable to actually believe there isn’t a part of me able to actually choose freely among alternative options. If only, in particular contexts, as an existential contraption.

But this always takes me back to the extraordinary dreams that I have. It simply boggles my mind how convinced I am “in the dream” that it is not a dream at all. That “I” am real, choosing freely to do this instead of that. Then, waking up, I immediately realize that none of it was real. It was al a virtual reality “world” that my brain created out of…what exactly?

separate morality from free will
by Phil Goetz
at the lesswrong website

From my frame of mind, morality in a wholly determined universe is just another example of nature manifesting itself as it does in, say, the unfolding of a natural disaster.

Only unlike the mindless matter interacting in, say, a tornado, the matter in the human brain is able to delude itself into believing that human interactions are qualitatively different. Why? Because, through human consciousness, matter “chooses” to unfold only as it must.

Always and ever the mystery of mind.

An ignorant [but autonomous] alien would note human interactions as seemingly predicated on the free will of the men and women they are observing. But a more sophisticated [and autonomous] alien would point out that nothing they “choose” to do in interacting was ever really of their own volition. Just as we understand that when we see characters in a film, we know they are not “in the moment” up on the screen choosing to do what they do. And, besides, the director and the screen writer are choreographing “the action”. But that too is only another manifestation of nature. They are no less compelled to do only what they must.

But even if our species does in fact interact as autonomous beings, morality [as I understand it] is still not something that can be pinned down essentially.

The problem I have with Kant [in an autonomous universe] is the extent to which he failed to take into account the components of my own moral narrative. Through his own rendition of God, he provided us with a font that enabled him to argue that moral interactions can be embedded categorically and imperatively in rational moral obligations.

“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine

This is basically what I keep coming back to. Are the laws of matter compelling nature to compel my brain to compel my fingers to types these words…or is there some facet of “I” here that does in fact participate in “changing the outcome” such that my posting these words and your reading them might possibly have been other then what in fact it turns out to be?

Sans the demon or God.

Can we somehow choose to duck and not be hit by the ball? Or does the autonomous alien note that we did in fact duck, but recognizes that our “choice” to duck was only embedded in the psychological illusion of free will embedded ontologically in the immutable laws of matter?

And this gets us to the nitty gritty for many in regard to the correct answer here. If the swing is only as a result of “a million little deterministic factors” [going back presumably to the Big Bang or to whatever else explains Existence] then the golfer who believes this can insist that he missed the putt only because there was never a chance of him making it.

Whereas the golfer who refuses to believe in a determined putt, makes it, and then insists this revolves solely around his great skill as a golfer.

From “Pointlessness Doesn’t Follow from Determinism” at the Breaking the Free Will Illusion website
by Trick Slattery

Here however I make the distinction between existential and essential meaning. Having free will would certainly seem to permit us to ascribe particular meaning to particular things, interactions, relationships. But in the is/ought world the ascriptions relating to conflicting goods would be embedded more in existential contraptions than in essential truths rooted in Gods or deontological philosophical concoctions or nature or political ideology.

But having some measure of autonomy is clearly of fundamental importance.

After all, any meaning we ascribed to anything in a determined universe is only meaning we were never able not to ascribe.

Over and again: I must be missing something here. In our waking hours, the entirety of our coherent thought in a determined world would be the equivalent of the entirety of our coherent thought in our dreams: wholly compelled by a brain wholly compelled by the laws of matter.

The difference is merely embedded in all that we are yet to grasp about the physiological relationship between the brain, the mind and “I”.

From my perspective, he seems to make his argument as though he is somehow able to insert “I” into it in much the same manner as someone who believed in free will would.

The fact of the matter. Exactly. How is that not the fact of the matter here?

“Causality and consistency” as it is applicable in determining “what matters” and what is “important” to us, regarding the behaviors we choose, is determined by nature.

Nature has merely evolved into brains evolving into minds evolving into an “I” that is able to delude itself into thinking that what matters and what is important to “me” is because that’s what “I” was able to freely discern for myself.

separate morality from free will
by Phil Goetz
at the lesswrong website

If there is no free will then whatever we call human interactions [inside or outside the law] is in turn necessarily embedded in the laws of matter. So, what difference [ultimately] does it make regarding discussions and debates like this, if they are determined/fated/inexorably compelled by nature to unfold only as they must.

All “practical questions” would seem to be interchangeable with all “practical answers” here: wholly determined.

You can never choose autonomously to do either the right or the wrong thing in a determined universe. Why? Because “right” and “wrong” are just words that were compelled to be invented by those compelled to speak the English language embedded in the psychological illusion of free will. Which is then embedded ontologically in whatever brought into existence nature and its material laws.

If, again, that, in and of itself, can ever actually be known for sure.

Or, again, I am missing something crucial here.

I found this not clear at all. So if you know what he is trying to say, can you paraphrase it.

Do you mean ‘is determined’ by 'is embedded in the laws of nature`?.

Well, it does seem like if one truly believed in determinism one would be interested in other activities. That’s my take. I’d rather eat cake. Of course, the determinist can argue that he or she is compelled to participate in the discussion, but then, I find it odd that their belief in determinism wouldn’t compell them to lose interest in such discussions. What odd machines they are?

It seems like you are saying that determinism, if it is the case, precludes morality. I think I agree. We might still desire to punish people. We might loathe and dislike certain acts. But moral judgments seem odd, yes. Unlike peacegirl, I do not see any of this necessitating turning the other cheek. I will still be interested in responding to slaps with a slap. At least in many cases. I will still want certain people behind bars. But I may be missing things in your post. I found your writing a bit hard to understand. I think I agree, but I might be misunderstanding you.

Well, if “autonomous” is the the opposite of “determined” then it’s just true by definition. :-k