RE: Determinism Is Self Defeating
July 2, 2013 at 8:58 am
(This post was last modified: July 2, 2013 at 9:32 am by The Grand Nudger.)
If it had been treated as a default and left at that uncritically then it would be "goofy" sure, but it hasn't been. Determinism isn't something that we defaulted to, it's what we discovered. It isn't as though this stuff is incapable of being (and hasn't been) tested empirically. Long before we happened upon the notion of determinism, for example, we were going with the idea of "fate" which we commonly see wrapped up in peoples conception of what determinism is (and their arguments bucking against it). Fate, by the by, is a non-deterministic process...perhaps in a way that defies how we commonly think of the two terms.
Water seeks it's own level. given t (t being a time where the body of water is not level) t+1 has only one possible outcome. We can run this experiment over and over again (in the same way that we can run little experiments in organic chemistry -over and over again-). It was only a matter of time until someone raised the QM boogeyman. QM itself is deterministic (though the measurements we attempt are probabilistic), so I don't see the problem. Even here, the most recent bastion for people who wish to argue against determinism as it (somehow) applies to some other thing most likely not related, a still gets you to b, b to c, and so forth.
No, I don't require evidence of "free will". I'm comfortable that we both agree that "it" - whatever "it" is, exists. I'd like to see some evidence that free will isn't just another part of the chain of causality (and of course I;d like to see that because I;m not in the habit of writing special passes....it works for water, it works in the case of organic chemistry, but for some unstated reason it doesn't work for my wheaties?). So as above, saying "but I have free will" doesn't leave me with nothing to do but argue against the consequences of it;s negation (and why would I do that anyway?). I'll go out on a limb here and state that I'm positively certain that you and I have "free will" - and equally as certain that we appear to have really fucked the pooch about what that "free will" is.
Water seeks it's own level. given t (t being a time where the body of water is not level) t+1 has only one possible outcome. We can run this experiment over and over again (in the same way that we can run little experiments in organic chemistry -over and over again-). It was only a matter of time until someone raised the QM boogeyman. QM itself is deterministic (though the measurements we attempt are probabilistic), so I don't see the problem. Even here, the most recent bastion for people who wish to argue against determinism as it (somehow) applies to some other thing most likely not related, a still gets you to b, b to c, and so forth.
No, I don't require evidence of "free will". I'm comfortable that we both agree that "it" - whatever "it" is, exists. I'd like to see some evidence that free will isn't just another part of the chain of causality (and of course I;d like to see that because I;m not in the habit of writing special passes....it works for water, it works in the case of organic chemistry, but for some unstated reason it doesn't work for my wheaties?). So as above, saying "but I have free will" doesn't leave me with nothing to do but argue against the consequences of it;s negation (and why would I do that anyway?). I'll go out on a limb here and state that I'm positively certain that you and I have "free will" - and equally as certain that we appear to have really fucked the pooch about what that "free will" is.
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