Determinism Is Self Defeating

[Red Celt]

Suddenly, that's a matter that is under dispute?

Suddenly?
That is what I've been saying all along.

That Koolay isn't stupid?

So therefore I'm putting you on ignore.

Goodbye asshole

One less stupid person on my people-who-I-encounter list?

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The most obvious point that can be taken from most of this conversation is that people generally don't understand what determinism is.

Chaos Theory isn't non-deterministic. Chaos Theory allows for the tiniest of complicated differences that an evolved ape might easily ignore... simply because it is so damned complicated. And some of us (for some reason) consider ourselves to be judge and jury on the level of complexity that the universe can exhibit before a metaphorical wand is produced and words like "magic" bubble in our ape-brain subconsciousness.

And that very much includes the human mind. It isn't that the universe is deterministic, but our brains aren't. We value our minds so dearly and imagine them to be so inherently awesome, unpredictable, almost magic-like because we don't fully understand them...

...yet.

And that "yet" is an important one.

A determinist would argue that the mind is every bit as deterministic as everything else in the universe. And for good reason.

Here's an analogy:-

Imagine the engine of a car. You're a mechanic and you understand what component does what, because you've been trained to do so and trial-and-error easily allows you to use cause-and-effect to find any problems that might arise. Put simply, you understand how it works because it isn't too complex.

Now imagine a million car engines put side-to-side, but all interacting with their neighbours. But that comes nowhere near the complexity of the human brain, so imagine components (that you don't recognise) interacting with further neighbours via mechanisms that you also don't recognise. And imagine the whole mass as one distinct engine. Now, as we're still nowhere near the complexity of a human brain, imagine the equivalent of a billion engines acting as one.

The level of complexity means that the engine is well beyond your ability to understand what is happening. It is, however, still an engine. It isn't running on magic.

It might hurt our self-esteem and be a difficult concept to accept... but guess what, folks, the universe isn't driven by the ego of one sentient race on one remote planet in one remote star system in one remote galaxy. As atheists, we should be much more capable of accepting that premise, without using falling rocks on remote hills to defend our pride so desperately.