“I” control my choices in a sense, but this “I” is deterministic.
And I am not making any particular distinction between small and large events. Suppose I am hesitating over whether or not to eat a piece of cake. One part of me wants the cake; another part of me wants to skip the cake for the sake of my future health.
The part of me that wants the cake will use this argument: “Eat the cake. In the end, it’s predetermined whether you’re going to eat the cake or not. So you might as well take the path of least resistance. Why struggle and go through hardship? You’ll always end up doing the one and only thing you can do anyway. If you ingest more sugar than what would be optimal, then it’s because you were always predetermined to ingest that sugar. Do what feels nice.”
“Eat the cake. In the end, it’s predetermined whether you’re going to eat the cake or not. So you might as well take the path of least resistance. Why struggle and go through hardship? You’ll always end up doing the one and only thing you can do anyway. If you ingest more sugar than what would be optimal, then it’s because you were always predetermined to ingest that sugar. Do what feels nice.”
Well, if the question is about refuting this on intellectual grounds than it’s fairly easy.
This kind of reasoning implicitly assumes that under determinism you can’t choose whether to eat the cake or not (because it’s predetermined), but still can choose whether to follow the path of least resistance or not. This is wrong because the ability to make one choice implies the ability to make the other.
The reason why you would prefer not to eat the cake has nothing to do with predetermination. You would prefer that you consumed less sugar. If the amount of sugar you consumed is predetermined, than you would prefer that this amount was predetermined to not be a lot. And by refusing to eat the cake you are actively choosing which was predetermined. You can perceive it as a power to retcon the universe to always have been the case such that you made the choice that you made.
In this sense, choices under determinism are more meaningful than under indeterminism. Indeterminist choice may be just a fluke. Some randomness just happened in your brain and thus you did the thing you did. But under determinism your choices are truly yours and they retroactively affect the whole universe. You know that you are not choosing for just yourself, but for every version of yourself in this exact conditions.
It seems that you didn’t properly integrate determinism on the emotional level and that’s the source of your feelings.
Do you share an intuition that if determinism is false then it means that reality is separated into two things:
You and stuff that you directly control via choices
Everything else that is some mechanism that is just doing it’s thing and is beyond your control
And, if determinism is true, then it means that there is no 1 only 2?
“I” control my choices in a sense, but this “I” is deterministic.
And I am not making any particular distinction between small and large events. Suppose I am hesitating over whether or not to eat a piece of cake. One part of me wants the cake; another part of me wants to skip the cake for the sake of my future health.
The part of me that wants the cake will use this argument: “Eat the cake. In the end, it’s predetermined whether you’re going to eat the cake or not. So you might as well take the path of least resistance. Why struggle and go through hardship? You’ll always end up doing the one and only thing you can do anyway. If you ingest more sugar than what would be optimal, then it’s because you were always predetermined to ingest that sugar. Do what feels nice.”
I find this hard to refute.
Well, if the question is about refuting this on intellectual grounds than it’s fairly easy.
This kind of reasoning implicitly assumes that under determinism you can’t choose whether to eat the cake or not (because it’s predetermined), but still can choose whether to follow the path of least resistance or not. This is wrong because the ability to make one choice implies the ability to make the other.
The reason why you would prefer not to eat the cake has nothing to do with predetermination. You would prefer that you consumed less sugar. If the amount of sugar you consumed is predetermined, than you would prefer that this amount was predetermined to not be a lot. And by refusing to eat the cake you are actively choosing which was predetermined. You can perceive it as a power to retcon the universe to always have been the case such that you made the choice that you made.
In this sense, choices under determinism are more meaningful than under indeterminism. Indeterminist choice may be just a fluke. Some randomness just happened in your brain and thus you did the thing you did. But under determinism your choices are truly yours and they retroactively affect the whole universe. You know that you are not choosing for just yourself, but for every version of yourself in this exact conditions.
If determinism is true and control means choosing one real possibility over another, there is no 1.
But there is still causation...the machine needs it’s cogs.