Note that there’s a similar problem in the free will debate:
Incompatilist: “Well, if a godlike being can fix the entire life story of the universe, including your own life story, just by setting the rules of physics, and the initial conditions, then you can’t have free will.”
Compatibilist: “But in order to do that, the godlike being would have to model the people in the universe so well, that the models are people themselves. So there will still be un-modeled people living in a spontaneous way that wasn’t designed by the godlike being. (And if you say that the godlike being models the models, too, the same problem arises in another iteration; you can’t win that race, incompatibilist; it’s turtles all the way down.”)
Incompatibilist: I’m not sure that’s true. Maybe you can have models of human behavior that don’t themselves result in people. But even if that’s true, people don’t create themselves from scratch. Their entire life stories are fixed by their environment and heredity, so to speak. You may have eliminated the rhetorical device used to make my point; but the point itself remains true.
At which point, the two parties should decide what “free will” even means.
Note that there’s a similar problem in the free will debate:
Incompatilist: “Well, if a godlike being can fix the entire life story of the universe, including your own life story, just by setting the rules of physics, and the initial conditions, then you can’t have free will.”
Compatibilist: “But in order to do that, the godlike being would have to model the people in the universe so well, that the models are people themselves. So there will still be un-modeled people living in a spontaneous way that wasn’t designed by the godlike being. (And if you say that the godlike being models the models, too, the same problem arises in another iteration; you can’t win that race, incompatibilist; it’s turtles all the way down.”)
Incompatibilist: I’m not sure that’s true. Maybe you can have models of human behavior that don’t themselves result in people. But even if that’s true, people don’t create themselves from scratch. Their entire life stories are fixed by their environment and heredity, so to speak. You may have eliminated the rhetorical device used to make my point; but the point itself remains true.
At which point, the two parties should decide what “free will” even means.