Determinism would mean there is no free will, since your thoughts are also influenced and controlled by the random nature of particles and such, meaning you don’t actually control your own thoughts but simply are at the mercy of “fate.” This is part of the debate the article is about.
Hmm. I disagree a bit with this idea, but more on the grounds of semantics. In a deterministic world, you might fret over a decision for weeks, taking influence from several factors. You are free to make any decision, and your will may be driven by rational desires.
In this model, at an atomic level, you have no special, privileged position. A magical being with a perfect physical simulation could perfectly predict your actions in the same way as the movement of a falling stone.
However, unlike a stone, your mind is tuned by all sorts of important human factors. Your memories, habits, biases, education, relationships, and perception. Just because they are the result of the same fundimental physical properties doesn’t mean they are suddenly devoid of meaning or random.
Alternatively, if we imagine a world where the human mind is dependent on non physical, non deterministic factors. Does it actually change our previous hypothetical decision? Probably not. You’d still make a similar decision based on all of those human factors. Perhaps, this hypothetical non deterministic human might occasionally decide to “flip a coin” so to speak, and do something truly random, but to me that feels uninformed and uninteresting to my own experience. Few definitions of free will demand that we be able to make random decisions.
Determinism would mean there is no free will, since your thoughts are also influenced and controlled by the random nature of particles and such, meaning you don’t actually control your own thoughts but simply are at the mercy of “fate.” This is part of the debate the article is about.
Determinism doesn’t mean you’re at the will of some particles, it just means that you were always going to make that decision
I mean Causal Determinism.
Hmm. I disagree a bit with this idea, but more on the grounds of semantics. In a deterministic world, you might fret over a decision for weeks, taking influence from several factors. You are free to make any decision, and your will may be driven by rational desires.
In this model, at an atomic level, you have no special, privileged position. A magical being with a perfect physical simulation could perfectly predict your actions in the same way as the movement of a falling stone.
However, unlike a stone, your mind is tuned by all sorts of important human factors. Your memories, habits, biases, education, relationships, and perception. Just because they are the result of the same fundimental physical properties doesn’t mean they are suddenly devoid of meaning or random.
Alternatively, if we imagine a world where the human mind is dependent on non physical, non deterministic factors. Does it actually change our previous hypothetical decision? Probably not. You’d still make a similar decision based on all of those human factors. Perhaps, this hypothetical non deterministic human might occasionally decide to “flip a coin” so to speak, and do something truly random, but to me that feels uninformed and uninteresting to my own experience. Few definitions of free will demand that we be able to make random decisions.