I am not arguing that you should or should not believe in determinism because of the affect it has on the quality of your decision making. The issue is whether you can make decisions at all, in a certain sense, that is making decisions that make a difference. If determinism is true, your decisions will be as good or bad as they are determined to be, but even if you are making very good decisions in a decision theoretic sense, they are not doing certain things, such as steering the course of history, making a difference, etc. They lack a “point” in that sense.
Counterfactually, if your decisions were different, the future-ward implications of those decisions would be different. In that sense, they do have a point.
I wasn’t trying to ask whether one should believe in determinism or not. I was asking what effects belief in determinism should have.
Counterfactually, if your decisions were different, the future-ward implications of those decisions would be different. In that sense, they do have a point.
What kind of things a counterfactual could be depends on the truth of (in)determinism. If determinism is true,then the path untaken was never physically possible, and counterfactuals are purely conceptual. What kind of difference-making does that support? If you didn’t exist (which is impossible) then the future would be different, likewise if you were different or made a different choice—in each of the three cases it’s not possible for the counterfactual situation to occur.
Under determinism, you can choose between physically possible outcome A and physically possible outcome B, and the counterfacutal, the untaken choice, could have been take, so your choice brings about a future that was not inevitable. That’s a much stronger sense of “making a difference”.
I wasn’t trying to ask whether one should believe in determinism or not. I was asking what effects belief in determinism should have.
If belief in determinism causes someone to make poorer choices, they’re doing it wrong. Do you agree? If not, why?
Belief in determinism shouldn’t cause someone to make poorer choices from a decision theoretic, utility-maximisation perspective, but that ins’t the whole issue. There’s also a bunch of issues starting with the fact that (in)determinism does affect what a choice is. It affects the existence of moral agency, and the justifiability of moral praise and blame. People aren’t isolated agents making decisions that affect only themselves, so treating “winning” as the only issue that matters is a evaluative mistake.
There’s long been an argument about whether (non) existence of genuine volition and moral agency should affect our thought and practice about ethics and jurisprudence.
As far as I can tell, these dissonances usually result from an ontological-type mismatch, eg. a free-willed agent judging the choices of a deterministic one. Within-universe, moral choices and moral judgments are of the same ontological type and the dissonance cancels out.
These kinds of moral judgments only make sense between roughly equal agents anyway. If one is so much more capable that it can model the other as basically deterministic, it is better off exerting influence through causal channels.
Nothing about the type of a universe determines the content of a judgement. Anyone can have a false belief in any universe. Determinists typically believe that many people have false beliefs about freedom and responsibility.
You have misunderstood the kind of issue I am talking about. I am not talking in terms of solipsistic decision-making, or ethically unloaded attempts by one agent to predict another, I am talking about why societies pin medals on one person and put another in the stocks.
I know. My claim is that the issue stems from the way our moral intuitions are grounded in the intuitive notion of free will. If we update to a deterministic world-model without updating the intuitions, we get the confusions you describe.
To clarify, deterministic agents rewarding and punishing deterministic agents only seems more problematic than the nondeterministic case because of our nondeterminist intuitions.
1. True. However, as long as we are discussing determinism, it is proper to avoid the intuitive confusion.
2. Help me out here. Which unstated assumptions do you think I have?
I’m engaging in this conversation because you seem to be almost-but-not-quite arguing against determinism in a way that suggests you may be operating from nondeterminist intuitions. I’ve been trying to figure out if that was the case and discussing the philosophy as it comes up.
What are your own assumptions on this? How do your intuitions mesh with the possibility of living in a deterministic universe?
1. The problem with that is, the standard intuitions implicitly assume that determinism is false. It’s hard to have a productive discussion about a counterintuitive topic if the contrary intuitions keep firing.
2. I believe that determinism is plausible but I don’t have strong ontological commitments at this time. Based on the trajectory of the conversation, I suspect you have a strong (implicit or explicit) commitment to nondeterminism. Do you?
Tu quoque, my friend. From my perspective, your reasoning is tacitly relying on intuitive assumptions that don’t apply in the (hypothetical) domain of a deterministic universe. In other words, you’re implicitly assuming your conclusion.
If determinism is true, you’re already a deterministic being in a deterministic universe. I suppose there’s a mental trick of flipping the perspective from the outside to the inside, but that may require taking the hypothesis more seriously than you’re likely to do.
Remember, people like me started out with the intuition of nondeterminism. We’ve already worked through the basic objections about things like choices, consequences and morality. If your wish is to engage productively on this topic, you may want to rethink your approach.
Tu quoque, my friend. From my perspective, your reasoning is tacitly relying on intuitive assumptions that don’t apply in the (hypothetical) domain of a deterministic universe. In other words, you’re implicitly assuming your conclusion.
What do you think I am reasoning toward?
Remember, people like me started out with the intuition of nondeterminism. We’ve already worked through the basic objections about things like choices, consequences and morality.
But you don’t have a proof of determinism. People like you keep advising me that I need to “update” and treat determinism as true, and drop all intuitions counter to it, ahead of the evidence.
You keep commenting on determinism but given your intuitions, you end up sounding a bit like “Nondeterminism, therefore X.” In reply, people tell you something like “If determinism, then Y.”
This is the important point. If determinism is true, then nondeterminist intuitions are mistaken. What’s the point of participating in discussions of determinism if you keep applying intuitions that take its falsity as an axiom?
If determinism is true, then nondeterminist intuitions are mistaken.
If determinism is true and compatibilism is false.
You keep commenting on determinism but given your intuitions, you end up sounding a bit like “Nondeterminism, therefore X.”
I have pointed out what people worry they are going to lose under determinism. Yes, they only going to have those things under nondeterminism..that’s just another way of saying the same thing.
I have pointed out what people worry they are going to lose under determinism. Yes, they only going to have those things under nondeterminism.
You just said that nondeterminist intuitions are only mistaken if determinism is true and compatibilism is false. So what exactly is being lost if you subscribe to both determinism and compatibilism?
That’s the bone of contention. Compatiblists say nothing that’s “worth having”, their opponents say otherwise. It’s hard to dispute that the ability to choose between really possible alternatives goes missing.
If determinism is true and compatibilism is false.
Huh. Going by the wikipedia definition of compatibilism, it seems like a distinction without a difference. How does it help in your view?
I have pointed out what people worry they are going to lose under determinism.
This feels like worrying about losing the colors of the rainbow if optics is true. Maybe add that worry to the list of potentially mistaken intuitions.
Previously, you said that people need to give up their intuitions about free will.
Well, under full strength compatibilism, they don’t. That’s the difference.
This feels like worrying about losing the colors of the rainbow if optics is true.
Not giving up, updating. The whole point is that determinism (or timelessness for that matter) need not invalidate our notions of agency, consequence or morality. If it feels like it does, that’s a bug in the system.
Imagine someone giving you orders while holding a gun to your head. That situation feels distinctly unfree, even though you’re entirely free to disobey and take the bullet to the head.
Our intuitive sense of freedom may actually refer to a lack of externally imposed constraints on our decision process, as opposed to some inherent internal quality. The mistake would then be imagining determinism as an external imposition when it would in fact be a quality of the decision process itself.
Thats a standard argument for compatibilism. It isn’t considered a proof of compatibilism, because that would require assuaging all the worries that people have, and not just the subset compatibilist have ready answers for. I’ve already put forward another issue which is harder to answer from the compatibilist perspective: making a difference.
Are you sure that isn’t the same type of confusion? The way your decision process goes does make a difference to the outcomes of the universe. Again, being predictable-in-principle is a property of the process, not an external imposition.
If my decision making process could not be different , how does it make a difference? I have already covered the difference between logical counterfactuals and real countefactuals.
You consider a number of choices. You judge them according to your decision criteria and choose the one that seems best. What difference does it make if some hypothetical omniscient observer could tell in advance which choice you’ll make? You’ll still choose just one, and you want it to be the best one.
In what sense is the unchosen counterfactual a real one?
You consider a number of choices. You judge them according to your decision criteria and choose the one that seems best. What difference does it make if some hypothetical omniscient observer could tell in advance which choice you’ll make? You’ll still choose just one, and you want it to be the best one.
You are portraying decision making as always having a determinate outcome, and that isn’t even true if computational decision making.
In what sense is the unchosen counterfactual a real one.
As examined before the… in the sense that if my decision making was indeterminate, then I could have decided differently, meaning that counterfactual was real in the sense that it could have occurred.
Unless you want to postulate some sort of branching-future superposition, there will be one eventual outcome. How do we disambiguate between objective indeterminacy in a nondeterministic world and subjective indeterminacy in a deterministic one?
It now occurs to me to wonder how antideterminists feel about books and movies. Does it diminish their enjoyment to know that the plot has already been determined?
Unless you want to postulate some sort of branching-future superposition, there will be one eventual outcome.
That’s not the point. Under determinism, the one outcome had to happen, had prior probability 1.0. etc. Under indeterminism, it didn’t have to happen and the alternatives had non-zero probability. You can’t infer from the fact that something happened to the conclusion that it happened inevitably and necessarily.
How do we disambiguate between objective indeterminacy in a nondeterministic world and subjective indeterminacy in a deterministic one?
I’m asking because I expect the two to be subjectively indistinguishable and your answer should help shed light on the nature of our disagreement.
I don’t expect them to be be objectively indistinguishable for reasons I’ve already stated, to do with Bell’s theorem and so on. (And even if they are not distinguishable, they have very different implications).
The books and movies question seems like a disguised argument. People don’t like reading the same thing over and over, and don’t like spoilers, so there is a case that the subjective surprise if the ending is what matters even if it is determined. But that doesn’t generalise to subjective indeterminism being the only kind that matters. Because people don’t just passively consume books and movies, people also try to change objective states of affairs.
Because people don’t just passively consume books and movies, people also try to change objective states of affairs.
Deterministic or not, we are the process by which change happens. I now wonder what kind of agency would satisfy your objection. Must our choices be uncaused causes? If not, what kind of causal influence is permitted?
Naturalistic libertarians usually appeal to mixtures of determinism and indeterminism, occurring in different parts of the brain or at different stages in the decision making process.
I am not arguing that you should or should not believe in determinism because of the affect it has on the quality of your decision making. The issue is whether you can make decisions at all, in a certain sense, that is making decisions that make a difference. If determinism is true, your decisions will be as good or bad as they are determined to be, but even if you are making very good decisions in a decision theoretic sense, they are not doing certain things, such as steering the course of history, making a difference, etc. They lack a “point” in that sense.
Counterfactually, if your decisions were different, the future-ward implications of those decisions would be different. In that sense, they do have a point.
I wasn’t trying to ask whether one should believe in determinism or not. I was asking what effects belief in determinism should have.
What kind of things a counterfactual could be depends on the truth of (in)determinism. If determinism is true,then the path untaken was never physically possible, and counterfactuals are purely conceptual. What kind of difference-making does that support? If you didn’t exist (which is impossible) then the future would be different, likewise if you were different or made a different choice—in each of the three cases it’s not possible for the counterfactual situation to occur.
Under determinism, you can choose between physically possible outcome A and physically possible outcome B, and the counterfacutal, the untaken choice, could have been take, so your choice brings about a future that was not inevitable. That’s a much stronger sense of “making a difference”.
Belief in determinism shouldn’t cause someone to make poorer choices from a decision theoretic, utility-maximisation perspective, but that ins’t the whole issue. There’s also a bunch of issues starting with the fact that (in)determinism does affect what a choice is. It affects the existence of moral agency, and the justifiability of moral praise and blame. People aren’t isolated agents making decisions that affect only themselves, so treating “winning” as the only issue that matters is a evaluative mistake.
There’s long been an argument about whether (non) existence of genuine volition and moral agency should affect our thought and practice about ethics and jurisprudence.
As far as I can tell, these dissonances usually result from an ontological-type mismatch, eg. a free-willed agent judging the choices of a deterministic one. Within-universe, moral choices and moral judgments are of the same ontological type and the dissonance cancels out.
These kinds of moral judgments only make sense between roughly equal agents anyway. If one is so much more capable that it can model the other as basically deterministic, it is better off exerting influence through causal channels.
Nothing about the type of a universe determines the content of a judgement. Anyone can have a false belief in any universe. Determinists typically believe that many people have false beliefs about freedom and responsibility.
You have misunderstood the kind of issue I am talking about. I am not talking in terms of solipsistic decision-making, or ethically unloaded attempts by one agent to predict another, I am talking about why societies pin medals on one person and put another in the stocks.
This sort of thing: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-responsibility/
I know. My claim is that the issue stems from the way our moral intuitions are grounded in the intuitive notion of free will. If we update to a deterministic world-model without updating the intuitions, we get the confusions you describe.
To clarify, deterministic agents rewarding and punishing deterministic agents only seems more problematic than the nondeterministic case because of our nondeterminist intuitions.
We have no pressing need to update, since we don’t know that determinism is true or that compatibilism is false.
Please state your assumptions. Other people might not agree with them.
1. True. However, as long as we are discussing determinism, it is proper to avoid the intuitive confusion.
2. Help me out here. Which unstated assumptions do you think I have?
I’m engaging in this conversation because you seem to be almost-but-not-quite arguing against determinism in a way that suggests you may be operating from nondeterminist intuitions. I’ve been trying to figure out if that was the case and discussing the philosophy as it comes up.
What are your own assumptions on this? How do your intuitions mesh with the possibility of living in a deterministic universe?
In which direction? Remember, if compatibilism is true there is no need to give on standard intuitions.
Determinism=true, compatibilism-false.
1. The problem with that is, the standard intuitions implicitly assume that determinism is false. It’s hard to have a productive discussion about a counterintuitive topic if the contrary intuitions keep firing.
2. I believe that determinism is plausible but I don’t have strong ontological commitments at this time. Based on the trajectory of the conversation, I suspect you have a strong (implicit or explicit) commitment to nondeterminism. Do you?
It’s also hard to have a good discussion under the tacit assumption that determinism is true, and the answer is to avoid tacit assumptions.
Tu quoque, my friend. From my perspective, your reasoning is tacitly relying on intuitive assumptions that don’t apply in the (hypothetical) domain of a deterministic universe. In other words, you’re implicitly assuming your conclusion.
If determinism is true, you’re already a deterministic being in a deterministic universe. I suppose there’s a mental trick of flipping the perspective from the outside to the inside, but that may require taking the hypothesis more seriously than you’re likely to do.
Remember, people like me started out with the intuition of nondeterminism. We’ve already worked through the basic objections about things like choices, consequences and morality. If your wish is to engage productively on this topic, you may want to rethink your approach.
What do you think I am reasoning toward?
But you don’t have a proof of determinism. People like you keep advising me that I need to “update” and treat determinism as true, and drop all intuitions counter to it, ahead of the evidence.
You keep commenting on determinism but given your intuitions, you end up sounding a bit like “Nondeterminism, therefore X.” In reply, people tell you something like “If determinism, then Y.”
This is the important point. If determinism is true, then nondeterminist intuitions are mistaken. What’s the point of participating in discussions of determinism if you keep applying intuitions that take its falsity as an axiom?
If determinism is true and compatibilism is false.
I have pointed out what people worry they are going to lose under determinism. Yes, they only going to have those things under nondeterminism..that’s just another way of saying the same thing.
You just said that nondeterminist intuitions are only mistaken if determinism is true and compatibilism is false. So what exactly is being lost if you subscribe to both determinism and compatibilism?
That’s the bone of contention. Compatiblists say nothing that’s “worth having”, their opponents say otherwise. It’s hard to dispute that the ability to choose between really possible alternatives goes missing.
Huh. Going by the wikipedia definition of compatibilism, it seems like a distinction without a difference. How does it help in your view?
This feels like worrying about losing the colors of the rainbow if optics is true. Maybe add that worry to the list of potentially mistaken intuitions.
Previously, you said that people need to give up their intuitions about free will. Well, under full strength compatibilism, they don’t. That’s the difference.
Care to turn that feeling into an argument?
Not giving up, updating. The whole point is that determinism (or timelessness for that matter) need not invalidate our notions of agency, consequence or morality. If it feels like it does, that’s a bug in the system.
Care to turn that assertion into an argument?
Okay, let me try to put it this way.
Imagine someone giving you orders while holding a gun to your head. That situation feels distinctly unfree, even though you’re entirely free to disobey and take the bullet to the head.
Our intuitive sense of freedom may actually refer to a lack of externally imposed constraints on our decision process, as opposed to some inherent internal quality. The mistake would then be imagining determinism as an external imposition when it would in fact be a quality of the decision process itself.
Does that help?
Thats a standard argument for compatibilism. It isn’t considered a proof of compatibilism, because that would require assuaging all the worries that people have, and not just the subset compatibilist have ready answers for. I’ve already put forward another issue which is harder to answer from the compatibilist perspective: making a difference.
Are you sure that isn’t the same type of confusion? The way your decision process goes does make a difference to the outcomes of the universe. Again, being predictable-in-principle is a property of the process, not an external imposition.
If my decision making process could not be different , how does it make a difference? I have already covered the difference between logical counterfactuals and real countefactuals.
You consider a number of choices. You judge them according to your decision criteria and choose the one that seems best. What difference does it make if some hypothetical omniscient observer could tell in advance which choice you’ll make? You’ll still choose just one, and you want it to be the best one.
In what sense is the unchosen counterfactual a real one?
You are portraying decision making as always having a determinate outcome, and that isn’t even true if computational decision making.
As examined before the… in the sense that if my decision making was indeterminate, then I could have decided differently, meaning that counterfactual was real in the sense that it could have occurred.
Unless you want to postulate some sort of branching-future superposition, there will be one eventual outcome. How do we disambiguate between objective indeterminacy in a nondeterministic world and subjective indeterminacy in a deterministic one?
It now occurs to me to wonder how antideterminists feel about books and movies. Does it diminish their enjoyment to know that the plot has already been determined?
That’s not the point. Under determinism, the one outcome had to happen, had prior probability 1.0. etc. Under indeterminism, it didn’t have to happen and the alternatives had non-zero probability. You can’t infer from the fact that something happened to the conclusion that it happened inevitably and necessarily.
I agree and didn’t intend that to be the main thrust of my reply. Let me repeat:
I’m asking because I expect the two to be subjectively indistinguishable and your answer should help shed light on the nature of our disagreement.
I’d also like to hear your take on the books-and-movies question.
I don’t expect them to be be objectively indistinguishable for reasons I’ve already stated, to do with Bell’s theorem and so on. (And even if they are not distinguishable, they have very different implications).
The books and movies question seems like a disguised argument. People don’t like reading the same thing over and over, and don’t like spoilers, so there is a case that the subjective surprise if the ending is what matters even if it is determined. But that doesn’t generalise to subjective indeterminism being the only kind that matters. Because people don’t just passively consume books and movies, people also try to change objective states of affairs.
Deterministic or not, we are the process by which change happens. I now wonder what kind of agency would satisfy your objection. Must our choices be uncaused causes? If not, what kind of causal influence is permitted?
Naturalistic libertarians usually appeal to mixtures of determinism and indeterminism, occurring in different parts of the brain or at different stages in the decision making process.