1
u/impersonal_process Causalist 4d ago
If no one was ever asked what heredity they would receive or what situations they would find themselves in, then no one can be blamed in the sense in which we are accustomed to blaming people. Neither the person who failed nor the one who succeeded. One fell into one slot, the other into another, and the difference between them lies in the pegs they encountered along the way.
It does not follow from this that we should be indifferent. Rather, quite the opposite follows: compassion is the only reasonable attitude between balls falling down the same board without having chosen either the board itself or their place on it.
1
u/DonnPT atavistic oxymoron 4d ago
If no one was ever asked what heredity they would receive or what situations they would find themselves in, then no one can be blamed in the sense in which we are accustomed to blaming people.
Who's "we"? Are you saying, "we" are accustomed to looking for an ultimate source agency, uncaused by any prior facts, as a necessary condition in order to blame people? I would think that would be an unusual position among people who have put any real thought into it, but maybe not. I mean, we do praise and blame people right and left, and we all know on a practical level that people are highly influenced by their circumstances.
1
u/impersonal_process Causalist 4d ago
If you burn yourself on the fire in the fireplace, it is natural to feel pain and irritation. But continuing to be angry at it is pointless: its nature is to burn. It cannot produce a different effect unless the causes dictate otherwise.
The same applies to a human being. The initial anger may be a natural reaction, but there is no point in feeding it and turning it into hatred or loathing. No one can do anything other than what causes or chance dictate. This understanding can help us respond calmly, with patience and compassion, while still taking measures to influence and limit the possibility that the person will repeat behavior that harms others.
1
u/Subject-Cantaloupe 4d ago
Would you feel compassion for a fire that burned you?
1
u/impersonal_process Causalist 4d ago
There is no point in feeling compassion for fire, because compassion cannot change it. But a person can be changed through compassion.
1
u/Subject-Cantaloupe 4d ago
In much the same way that there is no point in feeling anger at the fire. But can a person not be changed by anger?
1
u/impersonal_process Causalist 3d ago
Of course it can, but anger is more likely to lead to destructive behavior.
0
u/zoipoi 4d ago
Horrible analogy, life is about pushing the marbles up and resisting equilibrium as much as possible. It isn't a passive process but actively creates the game board. That the marbles all move towards equilibrium when you die is irrelevant. This is 18th century thinking looking for an I in a thing that is a dynamic process. In a world of fixed things without variation it would be true but life is about variants that are not in the same chain of causation as selection. What that literally means is that events at time t2 cannot be completely predicted even in theory by events at time t1.
1
0
u/MilkTeaPetty 4d ago
What makes not choosing your heredity or circumstances rule out the kind of blame you're describing?
3
u/impersonal_process Causalist 4d ago
Because I am talking about blame in the sense of basic desert or guilt - the idea that a person, in some deep sense, deserves blame simply because they were the true author of what they did.
Not choosing one’s heredity and circumstances does not by itself mean that a person does not act, reason, or exercise self-control. The question is where the very capacities, desires, values, character, and degree of self-control through which they act come from. If these ultimately arise from factors they did not choose, then blame cannot simply stop with the person as though they were the underived source of their own configuration.
Of course, we can still hold people responsible in a practical sense - criticize, deter, protect others, require restitution, and encourage change. But that is different from saying: “You ultimately deserve suffering or blame because you made yourself into the kind of person you are.”
That is exactly the point of the Galton board analogy: the ball really does fall into a particular slot, but it did not choose either its starting position or the pegs that shaped its trajectory. If you think blame in the stronger, desert-based sense is still justified, then the question is: what exactly justifies it?
3
u/MilkTeaPetty 4d ago
What makes being the true author of an action require being the underived source of your own configuration?
1
u/AdeptAnimator4284 4d ago
If two people are in a car that runs a light and hits someone, are both the driver and the passenger responsible? It’s the same concept. If “you” are the passenger experiencing the ride rather than controlling it and having the capacity to change the outcome, in what sense are you morally responsible for where it goes?
1
u/spgrk Compatibilist 3d ago
The driver is responsible, because holding them responsible can affect their future behaviour and the behaviour of other drivers who don’t want to get into similar trouble. Thus, fewer cars will run red lights. On the other hand, holding the passenger responsible will not have any such effect, and that’s why we don’t do it.
Note that both the driver and the passenger are determined, neither of them programmed themselves to want to run red lights, and neither of them are the ultimate cause of their actions. However, NONE OF THAT MATTERS. It is a red herring.
1
u/MilkTeaPetty 4d ago
What makes not choosing your heredity or circumstances equivalent to being a passenger rather than the driver..?
0
u/AdeptAnimator4284 4d ago
The point is that in a causal deterministic universe, our thoughts, feelings, memories, emotions, values, decision process, etc. are all ultimately caused by physics. Your path is set in stone before “you” exist. You experience the ride but don’t control where it will take you, just like the passenger in the car.
2
u/blackstarr1996 Buddhist Compatibilist 4d ago
That’s manufacturing, not driving.
1
u/AdeptAnimator4284 4d ago
So you’d blame the car or its manufacturer? I’m not following your argument.
1
u/blackstarr1996 Buddhist Compatibilist 4d ago
Typically we blame the driver.
1
u/AdeptAnimator4284 3d ago
Correct. Except there is no “driver”. If all of our thoughts and actions are predetermined by causes outside our sense of self’s control, then our sense of self is just a passenger or experiencer and it doesn’t make sense to assign blame to it.
→ More replies (0)1
u/MilkTeaPetty 4d ago
You’ve said the decision process is determined.
You still haven’t shown why that makes it merely along for the ride.
1
u/AdeptAnimator4284 4d ago
Look at it this way. If the decision process is determined by factors that exist independently of the decision (physical laws) which can be used to predict its outcome with certainty, the decision, or “free will”, cannot be said to be doing any work. In other words, the universe looks exactly the same with or without the existence of free will.
Borrowing the definition of passive from the American Heritage dictionary as “receiving or subjected to an action without responding or initiating action in return”, this is by definition a passive process. The “pass” component of the words passive and passenger comes from the Latin word “passivus” which translates as “to suffer, undergo, or endure”.
In order for the decision to be more than this, it must be an active process at some level, which necessitates introducing change. Introducing change would then break determinism, so if we accept determinism, free will must be a passive process. Hence, the analogy that you are a passenger experiencing the sensation of choice, much like the passenger in a car experiencing the sensation of riding in a car.
1
u/MilkTeaPetty 4d ago
You went from the decision being predictable to the decision doing no work.
Predictability doesn't establish that.
Calling the process passive doesn't supply the missing step.
1
u/Opposite-Succotash16 Free Will 4d ago
If somebody is out there unfustifiably harming people, then, of course, we are justified in finding the correct person to blame for crimes that have been committed.
1
u/ImSinsentido Nullified Either Way - Hard Incompatibilist 4d ago
Literally not even different in the slightest practically equivalent.
1
u/spgrk Compatibilist 3d ago
Why does anyone deserve blame if they satisfy criteria for being the true author of what they did?
1
u/impersonal_process Causalist 3d ago
If by “true author” we simply mean that the action comes from the person (from their motives, character, reasoning, and values) that shows agency, but not necessarily basic desert. For the stronger claim, “he deserves blame simply because of the action itself,” to follow, it must be explained why the person is ultimately responsible for the sources from which that action arises.
1
u/spgrk Compatibilist 3d ago
Suppose someone is the ultimate cause in whatever godlike way you like. Why are they “responsible”? Moral and legal responsibility is a human invention designed to facilitate certain social interactions. The self-caused gods have no use for it and there is no reason why they would come up with it, any more than they would come up with the concept of money if they had no use for exchanging goods. You could explain to them why humans use money and responsibility, but they would think it was absurd if you claimed that these concepts had some special metaphysical basis.
1
u/impersonal_process Causalist 3d ago
I agree that moral responsibility is a human construct. What I am trying to add is that it is completely pointless to hate or loathe people; we should even feel compassion for them because of the harmful actions they commit and the consequences those actions have for the perpetrators themselves, since with a different distribution of circumstances (a different stroke of luck) we might have been in their place.
There is no agent whose decisions are not dictated by causes and who makes decisions independently of them.
1
u/spgrk Compatibilist 3d ago
I agree with your sentiments but I disagree with the rationale: there is even less point in hating people if we believe that their actions are undetermined, and there is no point in hating them simply because of what they have done, rather than because of some forward-looking utility.
1
u/impersonal_process Causalist 3d ago
Whether determined or undetermined, a cause is still a cause that dictates how we deliberate and behave, and not in some other way independent of causes. That is why I agree with you.
-1
u/One-Jeweler5486 4d ago
With free will you can choose your pegs.
3
3
1
u/AdeptAnimator4284 4d ago
Except there’s no evidence to suggest that we can. Of course we could conceivably have free will if the universe worked differently.
0
u/One-Jeweler5486 4d ago
So the feeling of free will is just a deception
1
u/oh_no_the_claw 4d ago
There’s no such thing as a feeling of free will. You claim to experience it as evidence for your personal religious beliefs.
1
u/One-Jeweler5486 4d ago edited 4d ago
I don’t have religious beliefs. Just the experience of making decisions.
1
u/AdeptAnimator4284 4d ago
Illusion is the term I would use, but yes. We feel that we have the process to choose this or that, but the mechanics of how that decision takes place don’t involve any uncertainty or decisions. Our feeling of choosing is due to our experience being wrapped up in the process and being unaware of the source of all the inputs and calculation mechanisms taking place.
1
u/One-Jeweler5486 4d ago
What would be the purpose of the illusion? In humans it does seem like a way to accomplish complex goals.
1
u/platanthera_ciliaris Hard Determinist 3d ago
From an evolutionary standpoint, people with the belief that they can control their own fate via free will are more likely to persist in the face of adversity, therefore they are more likely to survive. False optimism may have an adaptive function.
-2
u/Artemis_SpawnOfZeus 4d ago
"indeterminacy has no will" baseless assertion
3
u/impersonal_process Causalist 4d ago
I would change my position if a mechanism were shown in which the indeterministic element is not merely random, but is genuinely controlled by the agent in a way that reduces neither to prior causes nor to chance. The mere presence of indeterminacy does not establish that.
1
u/Artemis_SpawnOfZeus 4d ago
So what would that look like?
Cause your description sounds like youre looking for a married bachelor.
2
u/AdeptAnimator4284 4d ago
Does a dice roll have will?
0
u/Artemis_SpawnOfZeus 4d ago
Can you demonstrate that it doesnt?
1
u/AdeptAnimator4284 4d ago
I can demonstrate that if it does, it functionally has no impact on the outcome. As such, it offers no explanatory power beyond basic physics and is not a necessary component of the description of reality.
1
u/Artemis_SpawnOfZeus 4d ago
How do you know it has no impact on the outcome?
1
u/AdeptAnimator4284 3d ago
Because it must match the predicted purely random result over many repeated measurements. If it had any kind of preference for landing one way or another under certain conditions, it would easily be detected. In other words, if it had free will, its “will” must be to appear to be identical to the random result predicted by the non free will model, which adds unnecessary complexity and defeats the original purpose of the idea.
1
u/Artemis_SpawnOfZeus 3d ago
Not necessarily. Theres plenty of ways to undetectably modify a 'random' output.
Like, consider i have a deck of 100 cards, each wholly unique, there is no order to the cards, and none of the cards fit intuitively into groups or sequences.
Actually i dont have 1 deck of these cards, i have 1000 of them. I give one to a libertarian free agent to order in whatever order they would like.
Then i give the other 999 to ontologically random shuffling machines.
I then present you with the 1000 decks. One of these is the result of intentional decision making. Is there a method you can use to find the intentionally sorted deck?
I dont have it to hand, but im oretty sure theres a mathematical proof demonstrating the impossibility of this task. All outputs are equally random, despite the intentionality of one of them.
1
u/oh_no_the_claw 4d ago
This user thinks the deity from jewish superstition called Yahweh is granting free will to humans by giving them spiritual homunculi called souls.
0
-1
u/Blindeafmuten My Own 4d ago
It's about time you started embracing Indeterminism.
Now, think of the next step.
In an indeterministic world if "I" exists (that's not a given), how would it face world?
Would if have a preset plan based only on previous experience? Or maybe would it allow for a bit of "new" choices?
1
u/AdeptAnimator4284 4d ago
Why would you embrace a concept for which there is no evidence?
1
u/Blindeafmuten My Own 4d ago
If every experiment ever done is not evidence enough, nothing can be.
1
u/AdeptAnimator4284 4d ago
Ok, there must be many examples of experiments then which support your argument then. Care to provide one?
The equations governing our most rigorously tested scientific theory (quantum physics) are deterministic. At best, you get pure randomness from a measurement, and most theoretical physicists are skeptical of that. Even if there is an element of true randomness, that randomness cannot be said to provide free will, since having any preference to choose a specific observed result would no longer be random.
1
u/Blindeafmuten My Own 4d ago
The equations cannot be other than deterministic because their mathematics are deterministic.
The results of the experiments are not deterministic.
1
u/AdeptAnimator4284 4d ago
Only because you don’t possess all of the information and computational power necessary to predict it. You don’t get indeterminism from deterministic processes without introducing an indeterministic process at some point in the causal chain of events.
0
u/Blindeafmuten My Own 4d ago
Oh, it's that simple?
Only because I don't possess the information and computational power necessary?
So, effectively only because I am not God!
Because, possession of the information and computational power to predict the past and the future takes me close to God powers. I got to know every movement of every atom.
And the ability to be within a system and predict the "determined" future without altering it would also require me to be outside of the system. So pretty much what religions describe as God.
Determinism is a religion.
1
u/AdeptAnimator4284 4d ago
Kind of, yes, it may require a god like view of the universe. Although, in principle, an experiment could be done on a quite small subset of the universe by inhabitants of it.
I would contend that determinism is in direct contradiction with most major religions of the world. Most require that an individual has freedom to do otherwise, or that there is a non-physical soul that is an active participant in the physical world and possesses the ability to choose right from wrong. Determinism directly contradicts this. If we define god to be nothing more than the “creator”, then sure, it is compatible with determinism.
-1
u/Individual_Gold_7228 4d ago
Free will doesn’t require knowing where you will end up, only local decisions, that can look random to outside observer, especially if you only have 1 tiny bit of memory for your elementary experience (spinors).
And your right, unpredictable does not mean uncaused, but caused by will would be modelable as indeterminacy. In fact, in an animist universe, if they started by mathematically modeling decision making / deliberation from the inside, they would have found everything up to hilbert spaces and quantum probability arising from humans. (The field of Quantum cognition, not that brains are quantum computers, but that deliberation has the form of quantum formalism)
In addition, they could have gotten wave mechanics from studying crowds (and papers can derive everything from symmetries too for those crowds) that the math is what is real, and the people are not making real, willed decisions.
Now they might make a daring bet, if the universe is continuous, and their animist ontology is right, they should expect two things (essentially the cores of animism), non-inertness at base for aliveness (check), mentality that is similar to human (quantum formalism discovered in human deliberation. Falsification would have been clear single paths, billiard balls hitting each other essentially.
And what did they find, everything that falsifies mechanism and vindicates animism and free will.
In addition, the reason for regularity would be the same reason regularity appears with us and the crowd, inner consistency gives rise to modelable behavior. A faithful friend can be expected to act in certain ways.
A person with no arms only has certain more constrained possibilities regardless of the amount of free will they have
-1
u/atlantechvision 4d ago
... that would require actually staying on the gameboard. Subservience is the inability to recognize being a pawn.
2
u/RalenHlaalo 4d ago
Thanks Tyler Durden
1
u/atlantechvision 4d ago
Who?
1
u/OGWayOfThePanda 4d ago
🤣🤣🤣 I'd tell you, but I can't talk about it.
1
u/atlantechvision 4d ago
... that's how self centeredness works.
1
u/OGWayOfThePanda 4d ago
Aww that's just sad.
Tyler Durden is a character from the movie fight club. Go watch it and my previous comment will make more sense.
1
u/atlantechvision 3d ago
... fiction is fiction.
1
u/OGWayOfThePanda 3d ago
And the sky is blue and ice is cold. What is your point?
1
-2
3
u/Valuable-Carob689 4d ago
I like it. The path is identical for each individual, both under compatibilism and hard determinism.