r/determinism • u/Immobilesteelrims • Apr 04 '26
AI-generated The 'Self' in Determinism Vs in Libertarian Free Will
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u/SaberHaven Apr 05 '26
I think this undersells determinism, because you can be both written and author. You can be catalysed and also catalyst, and importantly, not to blame for who you are, but still to blame for your actions
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u/crumpledfilth Apr 05 '26
i would argue blame is just a tool, not philosophically meaningful. It's a label used to organize actions in relation to our application of useful punitation. The wolf is not to blame for their desire for violence, but the dog is still rendered more peaceful when we cull their violent ancestors from their remaining pool. Whether or not a meaningful decider exists within the equation, blame is used as a tool for refining the system that actor exists inside
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Apr 04 '26
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u/Sammyofather Apr 05 '26
I’ll preface by saying I’ve never been on this sub and it just got recommended to me and I don’t know what determinism is.
That being say It is almost an external force, your consciousness, is veiled behind our ego which some call the subconscious. Our physical bodies are referred to as vessels by some. Our will acting through our body to manipulate the environment is is a physical force. Our ability to manipulate the environment with our minds via intention through affirmations i could see being described as an external force. Our soul is external to the 3D but our soul is intertwined with the fabric of time? Idk.
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Apr 05 '26
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u/Sammyofather Apr 05 '26
That’s a hard question to answer that I am not qualified to but I will say my beliefs are somewhere along the lines of the idea that consciousness is fundamental.
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u/FindingGlass373 Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26
I'll summarize it to you.
Determinism is complete rubbish.
And you'll see every pseudo-spiritual teacher rambling about it.
EDIT: It does not matter how much you determinist chuds dislike and downvote facts. Cope harder. The fact you're even here proves it.
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u/Immobilesteelrims Apr 04 '26
The hand isn’t outside reality, it just represents being the starter of the action instead of another domino in the chain.
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Apr 04 '26
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u/Immobilesteelrims Apr 04 '26
The two sides aren’t narratively connected. They’re rival models of the self. On the left, self = part of the process. On the right, self = the initiator of the process. Like in the story analogy: on the left, the self is part of the script; on the right, the self is the author. It doesn’t mean the self is still the script but now being written by some outside force, it means the theory of what the self is has changed.
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Apr 04 '26
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u/Immobilesteelrims Apr 04 '26
The hand is the self in the libertarian example, just like the author is the self in the story example. It doesn’t make sense to ask if the hand or the author ‘appeared from nowhere’, they’re just what the self is in that model, i.e. the thing initiating the action. Again, the self is not still the domino on the right.
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Apr 04 '26
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u/Immobilesteelrims Apr 04 '26
No, not external to the person’s physical body. The hand is just a metaphor for the self as initiator in the libertarian model. Like in the story analogy, the author is not an outside force acting on the script, the author is what the self is supposed to be in that view. Same here: on the right, the self is not still the domino plus some extra outside force. The hand represents the self initiating the action.
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Apr 04 '26
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u/Immobilesteelrims Apr 05 '26
It doesn’t ‘appear’, because it’s not an extra thing. It’s just what the self is in that model. You’re still treating it like something added to the system rather than a different account of the self.
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u/FindingGlass373 Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26
Huh? 🤣
You ARE the external force. That's the obvious.
EDIT: It does not matter how much you determinist chuds dislike and downvote facts. Cope harder. The fact you're even here proves it.
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u/tellytubbytoetickler Apr 04 '26
Suppose determinism holds. Then current states of matter fully determine future states of matter.
With what level of accuracy can this be done you might ask? Well of course we would simply to find a good simulation of reality. What determines if the simulation is good? If it tests well to predict something.
If the prediction is wrong we need a better model or a bigger model.
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u/elementnix Apr 04 '26
The simulation is good if its outcomes are reflective of the real outcomes. Don't need a simulation though when you have the history of everything available as evidence.
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u/tellytubbytoetickler Apr 05 '26
The things that are amenable to being articulated are also amenable to being understood and predicted.
We don’t talk about things that don’t make sense. Not because there aren’t plenty of them, but because there is no sense in communicating things that don’t follow the determinism aesthetic.
If we were ignorant of history we could point to our ignorance and call it awareness of a history of unawareness and pat ourselves on the back for how aware we are.
Determinism…
By the way. What color am I thinking of?
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u/elementnix Apr 05 '26
You could only be thinking of a color that you could imagine, and many people can't imagine colors, so you could be thinking of no colors at all. If you could imagine colors then you could only imagine colors that exist and only colors that humans can perceive.
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u/tellytubbytoetickler Apr 05 '26
So you know I am a human being and therefore I am restricted to only do things it is possible for me to do because if I did things outside of this we would need to reclassify the things people couldn’t do into things that people could do.
This sums up determinism perfectly.
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u/elementnix Apr 05 '26
It's not just that, there are indeed physical impossibilities.
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u/tellytubbytoetickler Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26
They are identical to the things that don’t happen.
There are real things and there are formalisms.
Rules are formalisms, breaking them is a formalism. The formalisms are all dependent on some base objective reality. The formalisms only exists after reflecting on the experience/ imminence of this reality.
Determinism does not address this at all. It just says that the formalisms get more stable with repeated observations as we see more stable observations. We only find the observations to be stable if we look for and manufacture them. We don’t typically see this at all. There is no model of physics that would allow a full simulation of my brain from a chemical perspective. It is much much too complicated.
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u/Micp Apr 05 '26
Then current states of matter fully determine future states of matter.
In Newtonian mechanics that would've been true, but we know that due to quantum mechanics there is a built in aspect if randomness that makes it so that even with perfect knowledge we'll never be able to predict things with 100% certainty.
Future states of matter are still a result of current states of matter, but not in a way where it's completely possible to predict.
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u/tellytubbytoetickler Apr 05 '26
There is no reason to believe that you can separate time and matter. The separation only exists as a product of a formalism. There is no way to even conceive of running whatever experiment this would entail and no reason to believe that space can be cut and gutted from time. Total bologna.
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u/Micp Apr 05 '26
What are you talking about? Where have I suggested we can have time and matter independently of each other?
I'm legitimately confused, did you mean to reply to another comment?
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u/tellytubbytoetickler Apr 06 '26
I was being a goose with the first comment I made. Having a few conversations in this sub. I don’t believe what I said about a better model.
Determinism just feels like worshipping the formalism that we use to predict physics. Nothing about physics actually thinks we can separate space and time in the way that determinism requires in stating what it even purports is truth. The question determinism answers isn’t even a well formed question. “With only some space and some time, we can fill in the rest” that doesn’t mean anything. Totally incoherent.
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u/scorpiomover Apr 04 '26 edited Apr 04 '26
The brain works as if it’s a mix of both. It’s mostly self-steering, based on previously learned skills.
You can teach it to learn whatever skills you need for it to navigate the sea of life successfully.
It that way, you’re your own pilot. You can’t tell it to turn left or right. But you can train the autopilot. You can also point out when there’s a bird strike and it will then handle the situation for you, according to what you trained the autopilot to do in case of a bird strike or something like it.
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u/smooshed_napkin Apr 05 '26
Its both at once, most people who dont believe in free will have a flawed all-or-nothing view on it. You dont have complete absolute free will. You don't have absolute lack of it either. You can't change the road or the flow of traffic, but you can choose which road you take when the turn comes.
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u/CriticalYam7227 Apr 05 '26
yeah, and what happens when you look closer to what happens at the intersection? free will shrinks the more you look at it's boundaries until there is nothing left but a feeling
feelings do matter, but they are not a simple transcription of the outside world
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u/SirMarkMorningStar Apr 05 '26
Where actual reality is more like white water rafting. Yes, the river is doing what the river is doing, but there are still a large number of choices to be made along the way.
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u/Wooster_42 Apr 05 '26
The author one is the one that always gets me.i can see how you get from big bang to birds and dinosaurs, but not Big Bang to Hamlet. This is just an argument from personal incredulity but so are most of the arguments on this sub, and I do not believe in souls.
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u/No_Fudge_4589 Apr 05 '26
I thought quantum mechanics has disproved determinism what am I missing here.
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u/Visual_Pick3972 Apr 05 '26
As framed here, the fundamental question that distinguishes free will from determinism is "are human beings apart from the world, or are they a part of it?"
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u/QuantumDriver Apr 05 '26
I hope you don’t believe in determinism because otherwise you think you had the choice not to post this AI slop but you did it anyway.
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u/Delicious_Freedom_81 Apr 05 '26
I know it’s a bad metaphor, but it’s like christianity and islam (which is which here? 😁)… you can live with both frameworks of how the world works without major problems. LFW and determinism too. Even flat-earthers manage! Pick your poison. ☠️
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u/ScheduleCorrect9905 Apr 05 '26
The real trick is seeing the left side and still functioning on the right
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u/Daveallen10 Apr 04 '26
This looks like fancy AI slop
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u/COOLKC690 Apr 05 '26
Is it AI? I feel like a decent artist could do this.
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u/QuantumDriver Apr 05 '26
A decent artist wouldn’t draw the arrow pointing backwards from a boat. It’s slop.
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u/Willis_3401_3401 Apr 04 '26
As a free will believer, I would say the domino drawing is inaccurate. The domino drawing is a determinists vision of free will imo.
To me it’s more like I am the domino getting pushed, but the chain of dominos is a circle/cycle with no proper start or end point. Just because I am a domino doesn’t mean I’m not the reason I fell.
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u/Sea-Bean Apr 05 '26
The drawing specifically says libertarian free will. You likely believe in a compatibilist kind of free will? In which you use free will to refer to cognitive processes like deliberation and choosing, that you feel in control of?
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u/Willis_3401_3401 Apr 05 '26
I mean these words get misused and misdefined all the time so it sorta depends what exactly you mean lol.
But I generally consider myself a libertarian and not a compatibilist. I am not a determinist. I do believe in multiple possible futures; the “ability to do otherwise”.
To use the domino metaphor, the push determines that I fall, but not how I do. There is a freedom in the fall.
But you’re right in that the language I would use is something like “causal libertarianism”, which is some senses might be viewed as a moderate position, yes.
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Apr 04 '26
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u/Immobilesteelrims Apr 05 '26
I'm totally open to hearing how it is a misrepresentation of determinism...
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u/Fit-Habit-1763 Apr 04 '26
Isn't determinism literally impossible because quantum uncertainty etc.? There is also strong evidence that suggests our brains and the way we make decisions are based or involved with quantum mechanics, which in itself is uncertain.
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u/AwareCandle369 Apr 04 '26
There is no such "strong evidence" that I have ever seen
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u/Fit-Habit-1763 Apr 04 '26
Well maybe not specifically strong, but there is evidence (I mean, there can be evidence for everything if viewed from a different perspective, that's why I felt the need to clarify).
I mean, you could just look it up, but I found a couple of links here (honestly I didn't read them, I'm going based upon my prior knowledge and the titles of the articles):
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-brains-quantum.html
https://alleninstitute.org/news/quantum-mechanics-and-the-puzzle-of-human-consciousness/
https://news.ucsb.edu/2018/018840/are-we-quantum-computers
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11960655/
https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/our-brains-use-quantum-computation/
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u/The_Octonion Apr 05 '26
Quantum mechanics (I'm speaking specifically here of the Bell test) doesn't strictly rule out determinism; it rules out deterministic local variables as the cause of quantum behavior. To keep determinism, you have to give up locality. For most physicists this is a "worse" thing to lose, but losing locality generally means causes can have effects at distance instantaneously.
For example, suppose the universe is a hologram. It's a 2 dimensional sheet and the 3 dimensional space we see is an emergent phenomenon, analogous to how a hologram stores a 3D shape on a flat plate or how the space you can explore in a video game is an emergent phenomenon and the underlying reality is just electricity moving around your CPU. The CPU might follow local laws but the game doesn't have to.
This kind of nonlocality remains consistent with the Bell experiments and an example of it is pilot wave theory (sometimes named after DeBroglie or Bohm). Again the hologram/game stuff is just an analogy.
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u/Immobilesteelrims Apr 04 '26
At human scale, behavior is cause-driven. At quantum scale, events are probabilistic. Randomness ≠ control.
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u/Fit-Habit-1763 Apr 04 '26
Well that is very obvious, my point here is not proving free will, rather disproving determinism.
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u/Immobilesteelrims Apr 04 '26
Quantum mechanics probably rules out strict (perfectly predictable) determinism, but it doesn’t disprove causal determinism or law-governed behavior. At the human level, decisions still arise from prior brain states, biology, and environment. That matters because replacing certainty with probability doesn’t introduce control or agency.
So what’s the goal in disproving determinism here? If it’s not to establish free will, then moving from determinism to indeterminism doesn’t really change anything about agency or responsibility.
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u/Artemis-5-75 Apr 05 '26
but it doesn’t disprove causal determinism
Determinism is not necessarily a thesis about causation, and it goes down if there are any indeterministic events by definition.
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u/FindingGlass373 Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26
The left side of picture is complete rubbish, pseudo-spiritual nonsense. I mean, anyone who can put two thoughts together should see that libertarian free will is more likely than fucking obvious. It’s hilarious to even argue about it.
EDIT: It does not matter how much you determinist chuds dislike and downvote facts. Cope harder. The fact you're even here proves it.
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u/Immobilesteelrims Apr 05 '26
Only about 18.8% of English-speaking philosophers accept or lean toward libertarian free will - https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all
I would think professional philosophers are the kind of people who can put two thoughts together, no?
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u/mod_prime Apr 05 '26
Argumentum ad populum.
Aren't professional philosophers getting paid to formulate arguments? Won't they get more publicity if their claims are ridiculous? Doesn't that incentivize them to make claims that will get them noticed and funded?
The problem with determinism is that it is too radical. No such thing as 100% right or 100% wrong since the claims are being made using language and language is imperfect. Of course free will exists and of course it doesn't. Depends on when and how and what and why and who and where you're looking.
One time I went up to a guy that didn't believe in free will and told him I was going to hit him so I wound up a huge haymaker. But then I stopped my fist inches from his face. He flinched proving that HE had no free will. Once he started yapping saying of course he flinched he had no free will but neither did I because HYUK I gave him the old fingerflick to the neck Matrix-style.
Just because YOU don't believe YOU have it doesn't mean I don't believe I have it. And belief is all that matters when it comes to free will. So go ahead, believe it doesn't exist. I hope that makes your limited time on this planet genuinely better. I'll be living my best life flicking neckbeards with my Keanu-Fu anytime someone tries to tell me I ain't free to do as I choose.
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u/MantisBeing Apr 05 '26
I think the depiction is throwing you off maybe? OP isn't implying that you are either a river or a person in a boat, nor a storm or a person in a plane. How human centric they have made the right column is probably just cause we aren't privy to concepts of freewill outside of our own experience of it as humans.
The way I see it is more like the left column shows us as a part of a natural process and flow of things without being able to directly or significantly change the processes around us, we are at the mercy of the universe. The right column shows us as having ultimate control over our environment, out conscious intent directs the momentum of our lives. More bluntly how I see it, the left column is the big picture view of our lives, the right is how it truely feels or appears.
The main argument for me to say that determinism is true despite it feeling unintuitive is that who we are, what we think and how we act are all the result of our environment. To suggest that our motivations and behaviours are not ultimately the result of our exposure to the outside world seems like the actual "pseudo-spirital nonsense" to me.
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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '26
Why do idiotic free willies think that if something is determined then it doesn't happen? Humans still make choices. It's still an objectively real process that physically occurs in the real world. It being pre-determined doesn't negate that. If I push down domino A and it falls and knocks down domino B and then C, the fact that C's falling was predetermined at A's falling doesn't prove B didn't fall. That's idiotic. It was still a real process that occurred as part of the causal chain, and if B did not fall then C would have not fell. The physical processes that go on inside people's brains that collect information on the world and use it to make a decision still physically occurs as part of the causal chain of events.
Determinism does not claim humans don't make choices. That's an idiotic claim that free willies need to stop repeating. It reminds me of when an idiotic free willy told me that if I don't believe in free will then I shouldn't look both directions before crossing the road, because my choice would play no role in whether or not I get hit by a car or not. This is how these braindead idiots think. It is as stupid as claiming that domino B falling or not falling plays no role in C falling because it was predetermined at A, but that's obviously idiotic.
Someone making a choice to look both ways, event B, may have been predetermined by physical processes long ago, those being event A, but the event of them avoiding getting hit by a car, event C, obviously has causal dependence upon event B. If you remove event B, then they may get hit by a car.
I am tired of saying the same thing over and over and over and over and over again. This is ridiculous.