I am fucking sick of these asinine ‘free will versus determinism’ debates, where it’s obvious no one even knows the subject of their so-called debate. It’s just a bunch of feeling exchanges, a game for the philosophically inept. Determinism is not causality. Determinism is not an epistemic principle. Determinism is an ontological and metaphysical principle. It can not be contradicted by empirical facts. Empirical facts can only be interpreted and modeled according to a metaphysical theory. William James, in the Dilemma of Determinism, defined the determinist position best:
What does determinism profess?
It professes that those parts of the universe already laid down absolutely appoint and decree what the other parts shall be. The future has no ambiguous possibilities bidden in its womb; the part we call the present is compatible with only one totality. Any other future complement than the one fixed from eternity is impossible. The whole is in each and every part, and welds it with the rest into an absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or shadow of turning.
With earthʹs first clay they did the last man knead,
And there of the last harvest sowed the seed.
And the first morning of creation wrote
What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.
Thus, according to determinism, everything is mutually necessary. Forward and backwards in time. Nothing could be otherwise than it is, was and shall be. Notice it says nothing about ‘causation’. No
Suck It, Hawking, You Fucking Cripple
mention of a causing b, or c being a product of a and b’s interactions. Everything is mutually required. Why? Because of identity – the law of identity – everything must behave according to its properties, and what it is is necessary due to its being at all. If it was not specifically what it is, it would not be anything at all. Things are either determined, or nonexistent.
‘Free will‘ is not an alternative to determinism, it is a magical-thinking ‘alternative’ to caused will. It also makes absolutely no sense, since if the magical ether can somehow influence forward and in reverse the actual causal structure of consciousness (i.e., the brain) then it would itself have to be causal.
The alternative to Determinism is Indeterminism. Take the model some people (not everyone) use for Quantum Mechanics. This would in no way give you ‘free will’. This would, instead, give you random behavior instead of necessary behavior. No ‘freedom’ involved.
Sane determinists don’t think consciousness is a ‘trick’. Consciousness is what we call a self-recursive pattern. Will and intentionality are real features of this machinery. They are also necessary features. We really do want to do what we do, but we have no choice about it. This idea that there is some separation from our machinery and the processes it goes through is nonsense. From a more teleological than ontological point of view, when we act we behave according to certain definite ideas to pursue a certain value scale. If we did not act on these ideas and values, they would not be our ideas and values. Even existentially speaking, human action is deterministic.
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