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Is it weird that I have to resort the idea of "Determinism" to be able to move on?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
45 points (94.1% liked)
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Determinism is extremely comforting to me. I took philosophy in uni and when it came to debating free will and determinism I was absolutely the odd one out.
I think it'd be an awful and arbitrary world if we were held morally responsible (in a cosmic sense - nothing as inaccurate as the legal system or whatever) for actions we could not control. Every expression I've ever seen for Free Will tends to include some widget or gear somewhere in that picture that could - in the precise same situation - choose either outcome randomly. If that is how the universe operates then I personally think that it actually divorces us from agency since our decision making can in some cases be reduced to how this die we have no control over happened to be rolled.
To contrast, in a deterministic world there are a lot of actions that may be described to someone casually that are extremely inaccurate - in many legal systems there is a consideration of mental competency as an example... but, again at a cosmic level, the shit you actually do is clearly and incontrovertibly assigned to you. If in scenario X where you could push a button to slap someone in the face and get a hundred bucks (with all other variables constant) your decision on whether to push the button is 100% your decision.
Now, some people are uncomfortable with the prospect of being reduced into something mechanical but it's important to recognize the absolutely staggering complexity of that machine. I am comfortable being reduced to a simple machine as long as it's acknowledged that that machine is composed of my entire physical being and every interaction I've ever had in my life... and that every one of those interactions are composed of the entire physical being of those actors and all of their interactions... and ditto (it's turtles all the way down).
Admitting the existence of such a complex system of indecipherably complex links and nodes and then saying "And after all that, I rolled a d6 and it came up 5 so you pushed the button" is actually deeply discomforting to me.
@[email protected], you describe the problem in details and very well in my opinion.
Do you see the root comment from @[email protected] in here as a good answer to your questioning ?
I popped reply onto that comment because I think hard vs. soft determinism is also an important point to ponder - I'd omitted diving into that above because 1) you see how long my comment already is, and 2) I genuinely think it's a more settled question.
I agree, the idea that free will depends on nondeterminism is flawed, but I believe that's widely accepted now. Your explanation shows very nicely that it cannot be just about rolling dice, because essentially that doesn't make sense.