How can I be determined ‘by’ anything if I am, myself, a determined thing?
JJ
I don’t believe that “anything†determines us. It is the fact that we are predetermined that makes our determination unnecessary. That which has predetermined us has ensured that it does not need to watch over us like a prison-guard. An analogy of this would be: There is a list of the names of every person on the planet that has ever or will ever be; it is inevitable that your name will be called at some point on that list. You can change your name, you can stop referring to yourself by name, but in the end, whatever you call yourself—the “I†for example—will be on that list.
the fact that you are a determined thing has been pre-determined. if electron #45893 where five feet to the left 1 minute after the big bang, you would be quite lazy.
You are saying that I have been predetermined, but once I turn up, I am no longer determined. So you are adopting both a deterministic stance and a non-deterministic stance. The apparant incompatibility is not really resolved by placing a time-gap between the determining act and what is determined. It is not resolved because in order to determine the length of time between the determining act and the non-determined acts made by myself I need to invoke clocks to measure the time gap between them - and these clocks tick according to a determined order.
Also, the fact that you say that to be determined is to be determined by a supernatural force rather than a physical cause was not quite what I meant by ‘deterministic’.
JJ
But if I am a determined thing, what can determine me? Where do I draw this boundary - ‘before this boundary I am not, after this boundary I am’.
You see, the problem here is that determinism can place no boundaries as to what I am to distinguish me from what I am not. This is a major flaw of materialism. My original post was intended to bring this point out.
JJ
if your decisions are based on things like the position of electrons in your brain, and that is affecting by things like where was your mom in relation to some magnetic field while you were a fetus.
developing in the southern hemisphere could make you different from the way you have developed in the north, due only to some difference in the earths magnetic field and the effect that it had on the placement of the electrons in your brain.
the theory says that if we knew the position of all particles at the beginning of time and their velocity, then we could calculate, using the laws of physics, where exactly will all those particles end up, including those that determine your decisions. we can tell which direction the electron will take in the fork in the road in your brain using the laws of physics.
lets say it is possible in theory to know the position and velocity of all. if we dont actually know it, what difference does it make if our future is written down if we cant read it.
we should still be making all the correct decisions that will lead us to a better life, and hopefully our neighbors’ too. the big difference though is theres no way the universe is a morality test. then again, maybe the path of the guy who is nice is good. and the path of the evil guy is bad, but at some predetermined point it becomes good, coincidentally at the same time the evil guy mends his ways. it was designed to do that by god at the time of the big bang. and this is why you should ‘try’ to be good.
You can’t be bothered to punctuate, I can’t be bothered to read.
JJ
I hate to seem like I’m squibbling over semantics, but, well, perhaps I am.
I’ll agree with you in that whether or not we have free will, it certainly does “feel” like we do. If that’s good enough for you, I think you’d enjoy reading a bit of Locke, who (pretty much) would agree.
For me, this becomes a meta-metaphysical question: “Does the answer to the question of free will v. determinism matter?”
Well, in a way, no. Nothing we do in philosophy really matters all that much.
On the other hand, as long as we’re going to be discussing metaphysics, let’s stick with discussing metaphysics. I may agree that the answer to the question doesn’t really matter, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want the answer anyway.
My take on determinism, perhaps to re-invigorate the discussion, is thus: from what I know of Quantum Mechanics, there is a degree of randomness to the paths which electrons take while travelling through their shells. Now, this does not imply free-will directly, but it does refute the central assumption on which determinism is founded.
“If we could know the positions of all particles, and all of the rules of physics, wouldn’t that mean with enough computational power we could predict everything?”
No. So long as there is a random factor on a sub-atomic particle, no matter how small this factor is, there is a bit of un-predictability here.
Like an onion, the layers of the question reveal themself. It seems that this Randomness, instead of giving us a serious of cause-effect relations (I know, my fellow skeptics, HUME! always HUME! but let’s just accept for the sake of this discussion that inference is possible) telling us exactly what will happen, we have an inverted funnel. At each moment, due to the randomness, there is a certain Set of possible “next moments”, each possible “next moment” with it’s own degree of probability. From each of these moments comes another set of possible “next moments”, etc etc ad infinitum.
However, this does not seem to give us free-will. It gives us a world in which knowing the future is impossible, which means free will is possible.
However, to prove free-will, you’d have to prove that this “randomness” of electrons within their shells compiles to end up as what we as concious beings interpret as thought. This is entirely possible, just not proven–one way or the other.
So, I would say that we definitely do not live in a pre-determined world, which means that free will is not Necessarily non-existant. My verdict on whether or not we actually do have free-will is withheld for the moment.