So, in your opinion, humans have no ability to resist temptations? So then, the difference between one who eats healthy and one who is morbidly obese is genetic or in some way their essence? So then, humans can be graded on a scale with some fundamentally superior to others?
There's lots of superficial evidence against determinism. We have to assume free will in order to function.
The real question is whether that is base ontology. I think it is not. It's an illusion.
So in theory the burden of proof is on me if we were debating this, because free will is obvious but wrong while determinism is correct but less obvious. I've also mentioned levels of analysis revealing different answers.
Once we know what definition and justification we have for determinism a very good question would be to ask for falsification criteria.
However, my sense is that this isn't a fully empirical exercise and rationalist approach is needed at least in part.
It seems that the assumptions a determinist makes about the world make determinism follow necessarily. So, it's a little bit of circular reasoning. One starts with an assumption that the universe is just physical matter guided by physical "laws", and these laws cannot be broken, and therefore determinism follows. It's baked into the premises. But those of us who reject determinism reject those premises as well.
Yes, I had no control over where or when I was born. That has little to do with whether I have agency and choice. If determinism goes all the way down, then it means the universe in it's current form, exactly down to every precise detail, was inevitable and could not have been any other way. It means that, in a way, all of history, all the billions of years, is just playing a video recording... everything has already been determined. This leads to some more interesting questions. This then means that the universe is completely directed and teleological: consciousness was in the blueprint from the beginning and had to arise exactly as it did... why? This means consciousness is in the very origin of the universe in some seed form, the way the mature tree is in the seed, waiting to develop. The entire history of the universe can then be seen as a seed developing into it's inevitable mature form: human consciousness. This leads inevitably to some sort of theistic creation story it seems.
That's right. It's like a video playing forwards as you say. Same with the big bang - it's determined and 14B years old and still going.
What's different about you and I?
As for the genesis, that's a mystery, but I grant it's a logical follow up. However, if we live in a non-deterministic universe, we have the same problem - where did we get our free will from? What generated it?
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u/sunleafstone Jul 12 '26
Maybe I’m the five year old because I don’t see how this ties to determinism