Determinism Is Self Defeating

[bennyboy]

The two kinds of determinism are NOT like. "Adequate" determinism is statistical. "Real" determinism is absolute. Everyone knows that things sometimes work out how you expect.

Sure, but as has been noted several times you are now talking about our ability to work out statistics or "know" the truth of something in the absolute -...not...whether or not there is any difference in the behavior of the universe between those two propositions. What's not alike between the positions has nothing to do with the behavior of the universe as formulated - and everything to do with us.

re: things flitting about affecting things
You are attempting to paint the picture in religious or magical terms: because flitting sounds like something angels or fairies would do. I have two candidates in mind: 1) randomness; 2) mind

In my mind, moths flit about - wafty...beautiful really - but seemingly random. They clearly have no goals for their lives. In any case, care to explore the relationship between randomness and mind (our adequately non-deterministic things) and death and taxes (my adequately deterministic things)?

I jest, I jest. What sort of effect do randomness and mind have on rock?

(randomness btw, stands for itself...but why do you imagine mind to be non-deterministic?)

Let me clarify something here. I'm not arguing non-determinism; I'm a confirmed agnostic, and worse, an ambiguist.

Re the OP, I'm arguing that determinism is an assumption, not a provable position, and not one for which even sufficient evidence can be provided (due to calculation issues, and the fact that knowing 100% of the state of even a very small system is probably not even theoretically possible).

I'm not arguing that the mind is non-deterministic, though in a thread about that, I might lean that way. However, if any part of mind is outside of physical causality, then the universe is non-deterministic. If mind is, as many now believe, just the subjective experience of objective processes, then it has no effect on determinism. If it is something else, then it may represent an additional causal influence.

I don't know what mind is exactly, or what the rules of causality in the universe are, exactly, but the existence of mind leads me to suspect that there's a reason not everything is purely objective. Science has done a good job of exploring the mechanism involved, but has done a zero job of showing why that mechanism actually feels, rather than just acting as though it does.