Free Will - Yes/No?

[Edwardo Piet]

Just jumping in here. In my view determinism is not the same thing as fatalism. From the perspective of the system it's logically impossible to have knowledge of the future, so I disagree that determinism should have any negative effect on the quality of life. Thinking like that for that warrior would be a futile exercise and lead to all sorts of paradoxes. As a hard determinist I certainly don't think like that. If you start trying to second-guess a 'foretold' future, you can always change it so it's impossible, even hypothetically for the experience of free will and knowledge of the future to co-exist.

I am in full agreement here. As a caveat I would add that although any particular future is indeed 100% unknowable and fatalism is false... the future whatever it is, whatever will happen, is unavoidable or in other words inevitable, whether determinism is true or false. If we define the future itself as "whatever will happen" then that's gonna happen, whatever it is, we can't avoid that.

I would say that determinism is the notion that there is always only one physically possible future, we just have no idea what that future is.

Fatalism is false because it's like pretending we're not part of the causal chain, when we are. It makes no sense to behave as if determinism implies the attitude of "Why bother doing anything?": To paraphrase Sam Harris who is a hard determinist himself, he said about his book on the matter "If I had not decided to write my book it would not have written itself."

-Hammy