Determinism Is Self Defeating

[bennyboy]

"completely determined by prior states".

I think this is being a bit tricky. You must also say that the prior state is sufficient cause for the current one. If state (1) has 4 possible (random) outcomes, and you arrive at state (2), I do not accept looking back at state (1) and saying it caused state (2) to be deterministic.

Again, I think that having a discussion about this we ought not to short change the different positions available, or lump them all together as though they were one and the same - otherwise it's difficult to see how we could reach a powerful or compelling conclusion. If I was a predeterminist I'd be pissed if someone tried to argue against determinism or fatalism as though they were arguing against my position. I'd expect at least enough respect for the disagreement to have the differences between these positions appreciated. -On my end- If, for example, I said that the universe appears to behave in a manner such that human beings could predetermine future events - I could not argue for fatalism (because we clearly are capable of having an effect within the context of the claim) or determinism (because I have abrogated the role of cause and invoked a power all itself - the power of predetermination to be an events "cause" rather than precending events or variables) from that claim. Understand?

Of determinist, fatalist or "predeterminist," I am none of the above. To paraphrase the standard atheist statement: I lack any of these beliefs. That is because none of them is provable in any way, or to any degree, that I care about.

All I really want to say about determinism is that I do not accept equivocation between scientific determinism (where, for example, two massive objects will always be attracted by the force of gravity) and a general philosophical determinism, whereby the state of all physical objects at time t is assumed to be sufficient cause for t+1.

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Unless you're gullible, the right way to approach any new phenomenon is by studying it through the scientific method. However, if it is real magic, that is, it defies all scientific explanation, then the next question would be why that single event is magical? and are there other events that are also magical? Now if we can explain the magical, then would it be real magic?

One of the positions I hear from science is "We don't know the answer. . . yet. Maybe someday we will." This means that there are two possible states for Mystery X: 1) explained (perhaps by a new scientific theory a la QM); 2) not yet explained. There is no option 3, ever: 3) Fuck me, that's magic, and there's no point trying to fit it into science, ever. So there will never be anything you'd call magical: there are only things explained, and not yet explained.

But anyway, I don't consider randomness, or free will separate from causation, or even God (if such a being could exist, and don't think I'm going there) "magic." They would just be new variables that need to be added to new equations.

If you want magic, look to magnets instead.

Mind as separate from the brain has been postulated a long time ago. The problem is that it doesn't add anything to what we know if we don't postulate as a separate entity.

The problem isn't explaining the physical mechanism that organizes thoughts and behaviors. It's explaining why matter, in any shape or form, develops the ability to experience sensation: not just to process light, but to experience colors.

It's an important question, and just saying "well, no brain means no experience" is not the same as explaining why brains experience. Throwing in evolution, the benefit to an organism, etc. is just playing a shell game-- at the end of the day, we do not normally think of objective mechanisms as having the potential to become sentient, and any system that cannot explain why this has happened is an incomplete one, and in a very important way.

We don't have a very good theory on free will. So there's lots of work to be done before we can say what free will is.

I disagree. Free will is the ability of a sentient agent to make decisions arbitrarily based on some aspect of its nature that is not part of a chain of causal determinism. The work that has to be done is to "find out" if this is a real thing-- quotes because the scientists working on the problem are already convinced that it isn't.

What if we can produce a robot that would be sentient and would exercise free will? Would you then conceed that we have an understanding of those concepts and there is no other reality but this physical world?

How would you know it was sentient? You'd ask it-- in which case you're simply extending the existence assumption of non-solipsism to new objects. Or you'd make some other operational definition of sentience which was actually observable, like degrees of self-reference in data flow, or the ability to reword abstract concepts and have a human listener understand them.

As for free will-- I can see where this is going. Some scientist is going to say, "[technical sciency-sounding jargon], therefore we can define free will as the degree to which an organism can apply symbols learned from experience to new situations" (or any other BS that free will doesn't actually mean). Then any schmoe like me who wants free will to mean "free" + "will" will get mocked. I don't like this process, because solving problems by redefining them is not a very good solution. If you don't believe me, then tell me how many people are willing to accept that "mind" is exactly equivalent to "that process of brain function of which a person is aware." That's great if you want to get good use of your fMRI machine; it sucks if you are interested in why there is sentience rather than not.

Am I right or am I right?