I would like to first express my appreciation to Tab for accepting my open challenge, and to whoever decides they want to participate in this Debate by Judging. That having been said, my final post will mirror Tab’s in that I am not going to, “Quote and shoot,” but it will differ from Tab’s in that I am going to approach my conclusion more traditionally and will not be telling a story.
If this Debate has established anything, it is that respectable, sound and logical arguments can be made both for the Compatabilist position, and for the Inevitabilist position. It is apparent that my opponent used primarily examples that focused on the world, as a whole, to support the deterministic aspect of his argument, whereas my tendency was to use examples focused more on the individual to support my argument. Of course, my opponent also threw out a few individual examples and I threw out a few world-wide examples.
It is an immutable fact that the external world has effects on an individual, and further, that there are certain aspects of the external world (as well as one’s own individual existence) that cannot be changed. To that extent, it can be said that certain aspects of an individual have been determined prior to the individual’s birth, are presently being determined, and will continue to be determined as long as that individual lives. For instance, an individual born with certain mental defects will be very limited in what he/she can and cannot do.
This probably sounds like an argument in support of the opposition’s argument, but be assured that it is quite the opposite. The facts stated above merely create an illusion of Determinism that will not necessarily hold true in practice. The actions of an individual can be predicted (to an extent) based upon the history of that individual, how the individual has seen others behave in similar situations, the success rate that the individual has experienced or has witnessed given those decisions and on how an individual thinks. Ergo, the more that one knows about the individual in question whose actions we are attempting to predict, the more likely we are to arrive at the correct conclusion about what the individual will do/experience in a certain situation.
It was touched on briefly that this process of predicting future actions will only work if the individual in question is a rational agent, if the individual in question is not a rational agent, then the predictor (who is bound by rational thought processes) will generally make an erroneous prediction of the other individual’s actions. Therefore, it is difficult to legitimately say that the actions of an irrational individual are pre-determined because you may set a bowl of cereal and a pitcher of milk in front of that individual and he decides to pour the milk down the back of his pants and urinate in the cereal! Who would predict that?
Of course, this is not merely a question of sane vs. insane.
With respect to predicting the behavior of even a rational individual, there are still going to be fundamental differences between the predictor and the subject whose actions are being predicted. As it pertains to rational thought, one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor, so a difference in intelligence may result in the predictor attempting to predict the, “Rational,” action the subject will take and the subject may take an action that the predictor did not think of. Perhaps the subject will take an action that the predictor could not have thought of.
Subjectivity dominates the world, so when surrounded by things that are empirically observable, the same agent may see two different things when viewing one physical object, and both agents can rationally explain what it is they are seeing and why they are seeing it that way.
The point of the matter is that certain circumstances may lead an individual to be in a position in which he can rise to a position of power and influence, but it is what that individual chooses to do with that power that can ultimately make a difference in the world. There are no less than a dozen individuals who became the President of The United States of America, arguably the most powerful man in the world, and didn’t really do much of anything with it.
Regardless of the size of the stage and the props, anyone can get up from the audience, (and may occasionally find themselves pulled up from the audience) but it is the decisions that individual makes while on stage that makes him an influential actor, not the conditions by which he found himself on stage to begin with.
The Compatabilist believes in mobility, horizontal, vertical, rotational and circular mobility. In other words, the Compatabilist understands and accepts that there are going to be aspects of his own individual experience that are beyond his control, but that there are also aspects fully within the realm of his control. To wit, while some things have been determined, many things (quite possibly, most things) have not.
Nagasaki and Hiroshima, for example, one man’s call at the end of the day.
perhaps we could create a ‘self-bumping’ thread in which to vote that would appear at the top of the boards for a fixed period - 5-10 days or something…?
