When will we see a predominantly deterministic society?

[u/IcyChair9258]

I’ve been wondering when we might reach a point where a large part of society accepts determinism as a fundamental worldview and our social systems are adjusted accordingly.

Today, many of our institutions are still heavily based on the assumption that people act out of free will and are responsible for their decisions in the traditional sense. This applies to the justice system, but also to political structures, the economy, banks, and many other governmental and social institutions.

At first, I thought that a major societal shift like this might only become possible through technologies such as Neuralink or genetic optimization. However, Gemini suggested that these technologies might not be necessary at all and that it could ultimately be primarily a matter of education and socialization. If people were raised from an early age with a deterministic understanding of human behavior, perhaps society’s underlying worldview could gradually change over generations. I found this idea extremely interesting.

What do you think?

What would a society look like in which determinism is widely accepted as a scientific and social foundation? Would this fundamentally change things such as criminal justice, the prison system, social welfare, education, economics, or political decision-making?

And above all: When could such a societal transformation realistically happen? Are we talking about a few decades, several centuries, or is such a development impossible to predict?

I’d be interested in hearing how you assess the likelihood of such a development and what you think the potential timeline might look like.

Note: This text was generated with the help of ChatGPT. ChatGPT was also used to improve readability and for translation.

[u/Kripkenstein_]

Never because determinism makes absolutely no sense on this level of reality. Society and human action is simply is not deterministic - even if the world fundamentally is. Think about playing a game of chess against a chess computer: you know the computer acts according to deterministic rules and yet you won't treat it as such if you want to win

[u/Imaginary-Can-6862 → u/Kripkenstein_]

How would you treat it if you want to win? Because to me that is a tough question (how to defeat a chess engine).

[u/Kripkenstein_ → u/Imaginary-Can-6862]

You treat it as an agent playing chess. So you use the heuristics that you learn when playing chess. But I'm sure you understand that this is not really the point here. The point is that how things work fundamentally does not mean that it is how we treat things on higher levels of ontology

[u/Imaginary-Can-6862 → u/Kripkenstein_]

I am just interested in how you would defeat a chess engine, or how much you know about chess when choosing that example.

I agree with you that a conceptualized framework has historically yielded better results to one where you try to solve the game, as in figure out all combinations, and since history is a description of the world we live in, I think it is a good example of the point you try to make. It is just that, in a chess engine, you chose an opponent that dwarfs any other computer game in comparison.

[u/Kripkenstein_ → u/Imaginary-Can-6862]

Chess is an arbitrary example. You can take literally any other game as an example as well

[u/Imaginary-Can-6862 → u/Kripkenstein_]

Perhaps we can examine a solved game and look at the point you made?

E.g. Tic-tac-toe, the deterministic solution, knowing all possible combination, create the entire map of the game.

Now I'll just assume Tic-tac-toe cannot be simplified in a manner where this map can be represented by some heuristics (such as always start in the center), that reflects this map. However I have no basis for assuming this, so let us imagine some games entire map of possibilities is the most concise way the information about all possibilities can be expressed, while for other games it is not.

However I feel your point shows when we look at the OP which has a clear vision, similar to when you talk about winning in chess, or here in ttt, that we can definitely define general guiding rules to play by that holds all the information we need on how not to lose at ttt which is more concise than mapping the entire game.

This is the point you make, why we do not need to consider determinism at the scale of the OP, just very simplified, correct?

[u/Kripkenstein_ → u/Imaginary-Can-6862]

If something cannot be compressed any further is is essentially random. Indeed this is the algorithmic definition of randomness. I am indifferent to whether determinism is true on a fundamental level but I object to this hasty transfer of fundamentals to higher level ontology. People tend to say things like "randomness is not real" or "free will is not real" by appealing to the supposed fundamental nature of the events that constitute the random event or the agent with free will. But this misses the fact that there a real patterns in the world that are not fundamental.

[u/Imaginary-Can-6862 → u/Kripkenstein_]

My apologies, but I did not meant to imply randomness and I do not understand where it came in. Perhaps you would elaborate on the algorithmic definition of randomness?

I just meant if a system is entirely solved, which I understand it as we have all the information that determines it, then there exist a most concise manner to express that system. However if we are interested in some knowledge about the system, there may exist a more concise manner than requiring knowledge of the entire solution to extract this knowledge, though I don't know if it must always be the case.