Oh I agree with this. This is one of the many reasons why I refer to said person who has been espousing such nonsense as an un-intellectual.
Yes, I believe this is the core of the usual objection to Determinism.
My explanation of the Libertarian devotion to the concept of Free Will that it is simple, and therefore much more easy to apply to the real world.
With Free Will, one person either makes a decision or not, and if they make a bad decision they are guilty. Each person is an island solely responsible for everything they choose: easy, simple, sorted.
Determinism gets exponentially more complex the larger the system in which it is operating.
This enables it to be hugely more true to reality at the cost of being even more hugely difficult to grasp. This isn’t so much of a problem when dealing with things like astral bodies in space viewed from large amounts of light years away, but it’s a lot more of a problem when it comes to detailed neuroscience. For example, whilst action potentials along a neuron are nicely discrete, since they either fire or they don’t, the connections they have with other neurons are too vast for humans to model without the aid of complex computation. The Determinism is there, it just requires a lot from someone to be able to grasp it. And this expands even further when you consider the limbic system’s hormonal responses to external stimuli, which follow nothing more than the same chemical reactions that you can recreate in a lab. Everything quickly becomes intertwined in a vast web of causation beyond “the self” that predicts reality orders of magnitude better than Free Will does, whether one understands it or not.
The issue here is that responsibility likewise branches out throughout this vast web, spreading blame to the point where it becomes unclear if any guilt applies to anyone or anything in particular at all.
How then do you apply specific rules that are teachable to all the ages and intelligence levels that you find in a typical society of humans?
I would argue that you do have to simplify it for purposes such as these, just not to the point of Free Will Libertarianism.
Even if that’s all someone is capable of understanding, and the ability to control just oneself seems so much easier than controlling things beyond that level, it simply doesn’t apply to reality anywhere near as well as Determinism does. Problems have wider contexts, and “delivering justice” would have a more effective impact beyond application to individuals only. A very human objection to this reality is that they are now much less safe from blame, which they can no longer neatly and crudely assign to any one individual scapegoat who was simply closest in proximity to the critical decision. To deal with this reality requires a great deal of humility and a secure ego that can deal with not being 100% good.
In short, Free Will only has any traction whatsoever due to human weaknesses, and its appeal does indeed appear to correlate with the weaknesses of the human who holds to the concept. Unfortunately, it also scales with the amount of “projection” that the Free Will adovate engages in: the more fervent a Libertarian they are, the more they invert this to the Determinist being the one showing human weakness due to their refusal of 100% responsibility. It becomes something of a pissing match to accept as much responsibility for something as possibility - good or bad alike. Acquiring vast riches is entirely down to you alone and your personal convictions and abilities, regardless of any help you took for granted, and accepting sole blame for the downfall of an entire institution is the most heroic and virtuous act of martyrdom. This Individualism is all peacocking and not at all to do with reality and how it works.
One of the other attractions to Free Will, than simplicity in utility, is to the machismo of peacocking.
In the case that we have a dissatisfaction and it moves us towards a position where we are not dissatisfied, that dissatisfaction is “the reason”.
I don’t just mean having a reason that we have fully and rationally parsed into conscious clarity, just that there is some reason or cause for any given movement or change.
I think we agree here that there are different degrees of consciousness of reasons why things happen. Much, probably most by a long way, of human behaviour is not fully conscious. But lack of consciousness doesn’t mean there is no reason/cause.
Would you say that it could have been otherwise before a choice is made? This leaves (realistic) choices open until the point of choosing.
If a choice could have been otherwise before it is made, this leaves open at least some degree of free will. This is one of the differences between hard and soft Determinism: soft Determinism allows free will up until the point of choice, after which it is Determined and could not have been otherwise. Hard Determinism would follow the causal chain back from the point of choice to trace the exact chain of events that resulted in the choice that could not have been otherwise after it is made - and in doing so it would establish exactly why each step before that choice could likewise not have been otherwise.
However, hard Determinism thereby establishes a much more linear progression of events, rather than the sort of convergent progression of possible timelines into one that soft Determinism implies. An image I think of for the latter is like a filmed explosion played in reverse, with all the shrapnel crystalising into one completed object at the point of explosion - symbolising the point of choice, that all of a sudden could never have been otherwise despite seeming like it could have gone any which way before it all came together into the configuration it happened to form. The fact that this conception seems to violate entropy outright ought to be a warning sign, I think.
The problem with the former is that in effect (even though not by the same means) it becomes no different to Fatalism. Both posit a point that can be pinpointed in future, at which a certain set of events will occur, even though the means by which you get there are different. Fatalism says that the future point will be reached regardless of how you get there, where hard Determinism says that the future point will be reached exactly because of a very specific set of events that are going to occur. An important distinction, I think.
Fatalism would imply that, even if you knew your fate and tried to escape it, you would still meet your fate. Hard Determinism might appear to pose much more of a problem, which might put one off the idea, that knowing the chain of events exactly would allow one to choose to not follow them. The problem with this objection is that knowing the chain of events would change the chain of events to incorporate your knowing of them, initialising an infinite chain of regression into new chains of events that incorporate knowledge of them etc. etc. until you no longer seek knowledge of them and they settle to a chain of events that you do not know, or even if you do you no longer seek to defy them. The Hard Determinism underlying such a thought experiment therefore remains unchallenged.
You’re saying pretty much exactly the same thing as what peacegirl said in her response to me - and maybe before, I’ve not properly read the thread before the point I started contributing.
So it surprises me that upon a quick skim, you seem to be disagreeing.
If I’m getting the right impression of peacegirl’s argument, she’s a soft Determinist, which is basically another word for Compatibilism, which is your stance. I might be misinterpreting her though.
Perhaps I am not among one of these intelligent beings that disprove “absolute determinism”, because I can see plenty of ways in which intelligence is not “in fact” incompatible with hard Determinism. Most obviously, why can’t you be determined to be intelligent? All superior quality and quantity of decisions that occur to you are therefore determined to occur to you due to your intelligence, and your better choices are thereby determined from this fact. And isn’t a lot of intelligence to do with understanding why you chose the way you chose, as an aside from what it was that you chose?