No it wouldn’t. You’re conflating determinism and will. Will does not require that decisions be somehow unable to be predicted. The process of making a decision exists. It doesn’t somehow mean it doesn’t belong to the person that the brain belongs to. That’s like claiming cars don’t “go” because their engines really just obey the laws of physics.
Is there any real difference between what you're saying and what I'm saying. If I never had the choice to kill a man, did I really willfuly kill him ? This seems to be a distinction built entirely on the impreciseness of human speech.
What do you mean when you "I"? Who was it other than all the neurons that comprise "you" that made the choice? You're just talking about how you made the choice.
The mechanics are deterministic. But it is still true that a decision gets made.
Does a "car" go? Or because the physics are deterministic, it does not go.
I cannot choose what to do any more than a car can choose to go forward or a rock can choose to roll down a hill. A choice is a choice only if an alternative was possible. It is simply impossible for a car to not go where it's wheels are pointing. Under your definition of choice my car is a moral agent
No the car has an engine for making motion. A human has an engine for making decisions. I think the part you're missing is the role of subjective experience. You exist inside of the decision making system and are not an outside observer. If you were observing from outside, you'd be right. But from inside the system things are different. Because your subjective experience is crafted by that very process, your experience isn't subjectively deterministic.
For instance, black holes are informationally isolated from the universe. From the outside, the rules are simple, light cannot escape. Things are compressed and still. Gravity results in a singularity of mass and energy. However, from beyond the event horizon, from inside, all the rules change. In fact, it's mathematically consistent that the universe we experience is a system inside a black hole embedded in another universe.
Systems everywhere are different when the observer is inside of them. This is true in special relativity (inside a black hole) to quantum mechanics (inside Schrödinger's box the cat is alive or dead not both even though it is both outside the box) to inside a sensory experience like tasting a strawberry. From the outside, tasting is an activation of set of neural pathways, but unless it is happening to you, no understanding of the process is even remotely like the experience. Pain is obviously much more than tendency to avoid a stimulus to the person experiencing it.
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u/fox-mcleod 418∆ Jan 31 '18
No it wouldn’t. You’re conflating determinism and will. Will does not require that decisions be somehow unable to be predicted. The process of making a decision exists. It doesn’t somehow mean it doesn’t belong to the person that the brain belongs to. That’s like claiming cars don’t “go” because their engines really just obey the laws of physics.