Is there any reason not to be a determinist? Why not? Sorry if this is the wrong forum.
If you rewound life as if it were a video tape, and played it back with no alterations, you would have the same outcome, correct?
What do you mean ‘be’?
It’s not a choice, unless you mean is there any reason to not believe in determinism. If that’s the question, then I think some religions might answer it. They would probably punt to libertarian free will being a response to the argument from evil.
If there were, you wouldn’t be a determinist.
Actually, the best argument against being a determinist that I’ve ever heard is that it leads to worse results. I think free choice is an illusion, but believing in that illusion tends to get people to live their lives in better, more productive, less harmful ways.
That depends; if the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, then you have a great many purely random processes occurring that will skew events into occurring entirely differently. The real problem is the assertion of some “free will” that is neither deterministic nor random. Which would make it…what?
An example:
Today I had a kid who was really acting up. When I’d ask other students to do something, he’d laugh at them: “Haaaa haaaa!” and sneer. It got bad enough that I separated him from the group and told him to do some writing. He sat in the back of the room and glared at me, not doing any of his work; so I had him take his work to recess. Over 30 minutes he wrote 11 words. He’ll be taking it to recess tomorrow.
When we returned to the classroom from recess, I drew him some diagrams, showing him how one part of his brain (labeled “worker”) was telling him, “Dude, just do the work and get it over with!” while another part (labeled “slacker”) was saying, “Man, I hate Mr. Dorkness, I hate this school, I’m not gonna do anything, he can’t make me do anything, this sucks.” I drew arrows from both these parts to a bigger part (labeled “Decider”) and told him this was his prefrontal cortex, the part that listened to all the other parts of his brain and decided what to do. I asked him which part he wished he’d listened to; he pointed to “worker”. I showed him that he’d listened to “slacker” instead, and that he needed to work on listening to “worker” so he could get what he wanted.
It’s a complicated explanation of free will, and I believe that on some level the “decider” is an illusion. (On another level it’s real, but that other level is way too complicated for a second-grader). Nevertheless, if I can get him to believe in the decider, his life will improve.
So will mine.
Haha, thanks for the example.
But do you really think he could choose the other option instead? That for whatever reason, he was destined to make *that *choice, and all other choices.
I looked up Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, and I admit, I don’t get it.
I’m sorry, but if “free choice is an illusion,” how can anything we believe actually “get people to live their lives in better, more productive, less harmful ways,” which to me seems like a pleonastic way of saying “get people to make better choices about what they’re doing,” which, I think you’ll agree, is pretty inconsistent with “free choice is an illusion.”
Isn’t that just incentive? “If I work harder, I will do better in life”. It may be a choice, but not without reason.
But if physics experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles ! (This was published in a physics journal as “The Free Will Theorem” .)
As far as I know, there’s no way of testing this. It’s not a scientifically falsifiable hypothesis.
There are two notions that share the name “determinism.”
The first is the notion that proceeds from materialism: because all matter follows physical laws and because the mind/consciousness is merely the product or chemical or electrical changes in the material brain (and if you don’t believe this, you have to explain how the non-physical, incorporeal mind affects as well as is affected by the physical world), all mental states and activities—feelings, beliefs, judgments, and intentions—are inevitably caused by prior states of the physical universe, all the way back to the beginning of time and space.
The second seems to be a little less cut-and-dried. Instead, it seems to suggest that our mental states and activities are influenced in ways beyond our control by our upbringing, circumstances, culture, and a host of other things. It is called determinism because its proponents hold that because it suggests that we are not free to choose otherwise. Or at least, not completely free to choose otherwise—our spectrum of choices is bounded by these external factors. (I’ll admit, I’ve never found this version of determinism to be worthy of the name.) Nevertheless, if this version of the world is true, it needs to be discussed in the context of moral responsibility, since most think that we are not responsible for actions where we could not have done otherwise. And moral responsibility is the area where most discussions about determinism occur.
So I find LHoD’s claim to be self-contradictory, because I think determinism, properly considered, should be limited to the first notion. But, if LHoD is of the second stripe, he may believe that inculcating a belief about personal accountability will “deterministically” lead to (whereas I would just say “influence,” and not bring metaphysics into it all) better actions by the student. Not because of the ineluctable effects of natural laws, as the first notion concentrates on, but because of something like “force of habit” (and this way of phrasing it does reveal that we commonly attribute something like the “force” of a natural law to mental habits).
I abhor determinism because it renders invalid human autonomy, human initiative,
and human responsibility.
We are all puppets of some Science or God? I can think of no fate more demeaning
and unholy.
Kimmy, you’re smarter than me. Most people here are.
Can’t both notions come into play when one makes a decision? Working together… all a part of what leads to who we are?
Or am I missing the point?
The two phrases aren’t identical. I don’t think my tomatoes have free will, but I can structure their environment such that they live in more productive ways. Sort of the same thing here.
If Don believes that others are responsible for his behavior–“John distracted me,” “I can’t work because you made me angry”–the result will be that he’ll engage in behavior that’s immediately satisfactory but leads to long-term poor results, because he blames those long-term poor results on others and accepts the short-term rewards. If he believes that everything he does is his choice, then those excuses are removed, and he suffers the shame of personal responsibility for any consequences of bad choices that he suffers. Without being able to blame bad consequences on other people, those bad consequences are felt more acutely; his internal equations change, and good behavior starts to win out.
It can all be explained through cause-and-effect without resorting to some nebulous concept of free will.
This is actually not an example of determinism. Determinism, as it comes up in philosophy and physics, is the proposition: if you know absolutely everything about the current state of the universe, then you could predict all future states of the universe with perfect accuracy.*
Despite the fact that video tapes show the same thing every time, they are not deterministic. If you knew everything about the first n frames of a video, you could not (in general) predict the (n+1)st frame with perfect accuracy.
*In principle, at least. There are computational reasons why this could never actually occur.
^This
Determinism only holds true if there is no randomness in the universe. Quantum Mechanics is playing serious havoc with that point of view. We still have much to learn, but I think we know enough to say determinism has been ‘debunked’.
Yes. The Universe is stochastic at heart.
No, you would not.
Yes, but what I believe Kimmy is saying, is that if there is no such thing as free will, then the matter of whether or not we attribute our actions to determinism or free choice, is also something about which we have no choice. Whatever will be, will be.
The physical world, at any rate, apparently is not deterministic even though Newton believed it was; too many chaotic unpredictables.
We have no choice, but that doesn’t mean it makes no difference. If he attributes his actions to free choice, he will act better, even if he doesn’t choose that interpretation.