A deterministic universe can contain a correct implementation of a calculator that returns 2+2=4 or an incorrect one that returns 2+2=5.
Sure it can. But it is possible to declare one of them as valid only because you are outside of both and you have a notion of what the result should be.
But to avoid the confusion over the use of words I will restate what I said earlier slightly differently.
In a deterministic universe, neither of a pair of opposites like valid/invalid, right/wrong, true/false etc has more significance than the other. Everything just is. Every belief and action is just as significant as any other because that is exactly how each of them has been determined to be.
I thought about your argument a bit and I think I understand it better now. Let’s unpack it.
First off, if a deterministic world contains a (deterministic) agent that believes the world is deterministic, that agent’s belief is correct. So no need to be outside the world to define “correctness”.
Another matter is verifying the correctness of beliefs if you’re within the world. You seem to argue that a verifier can’t trust its own conclusion if it knows itself to be a deterministic program. This is debatable—it depends on how you define “trust”—but let’s provisionally accept this. From this you somehow conclude that the world and your mind must be in fact non-deterministic. To me this doesn’t follow. Could you explain?
So your argument against determinism is that certain things in your brain appear to have “significance” to you, but in a deterministic world that would be impossible? Does this restatement suffice as a reductio ad absurdum, or do I need to dismantle it further?
I’m kind of confused about your argument. Sometimes I get a glimpse of sense in it, but then I notice some corollary that looks just ridiculously wrong and snap back out. Are you saying that the validity of the statement 2+2=4 depends on whether we live in a deterministic universe? That’s a rather extreme form of belief relativism; how in the world can anyone hope to convince you that anything is true?
Sure it can. But it is possible to declare one of them as valid only because you are outside of both and you have a notion of what the result should be.
But to avoid the confusion over the use of words I will restate what I said earlier slightly differently.
In a deterministic universe, neither of a pair of opposites like valid/invalid, right/wrong, true/false etc has more significance than the other. Everything just is. Every belief and action is just as significant as any other because that is exactly how each of them has been determined to be.
I thought about your argument a bit and I think I understand it better now. Let’s unpack it.
First off, if a deterministic world contains a (deterministic) agent that believes the world is deterministic, that agent’s belief is correct. So no need to be outside the world to define “correctness”.
Another matter is verifying the correctness of beliefs if you’re within the world. You seem to argue that a verifier can’t trust its own conclusion if it knows itself to be a deterministic program. This is debatable—it depends on how you define “trust”—but let’s provisionally accept this. From this you somehow conclude that the world and your mind must be in fact non-deterministic. To me this doesn’t follow. Could you explain?
So your argument against determinism is that certain things in your brain appear to have “significance” to you, but in a deterministic world that would be impossible? Does this restatement suffice as a reductio ad absurdum, or do I need to dismantle it further?
I’m kind of confused about your argument. Sometimes I get a glimpse of sense in it, but then I notice some corollary that looks just ridiculously wrong and snap back out. Are you saying that the validity of the statement 2+2=4 depends on whether we live in a deterministic universe? That’s a rather extreme form of belief relativism; how in the world can anyone hope to convince you that anything is true?