Nihilism

[Edwardo Piet]

I own that book in paperback.

[emjay]

Seriously, though, forget doppelgangers, and assume Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (where things happen randomly), doesn't it mean that the future is at least partly random instead of determined fully by antecedents?

That's why contemporary metaphysics hardly considers hard determinism any longer. The replacement position is hard incompatibilism.

The incompatibilist position is: regardless of whether the universe is determined, there is no free will because all choices are caused by antecedent states and events. This allows for some indeterminism due to wave functions, but rejects the notion that randomness somehow brings free will into play. If there are non-determined events causing your actions, you are just as unfree as if determined events were.

Looking back through the thread, this is basically my position, so I guess that makes me a hard incompatibilist rather than a hard determinist with quantum reservations

But ultimately I accept that there could be so much more to this quantum world than what this simplistic hard incompatibilist view implies... for instance if there are/were quantum effects that defied time, if quantum computing as it were plays a large part in the brain's processing... which some theories suggest it does, or ultimately if there is more chaos in the world than we think, such that the brain only scratches the surface of reality... in the sense of extracting order out of chaos... rather than treating the quantum world as something that we can essentially ignore at the macro level. So with all that in mind, best call me a hard incompatibilist with extra quantum reservations

[Edwardo Piet]

I'm a hard incompatabilist too.