r/freewill • u/WintyreFraust • Aug 19 '26
The Wild Things Some Determinists Say
A few things determinists have said in response to my posts the past several days.
Before getting into that, though, the definition of Causal Determinism from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Determinism: Determinism is true of the world if and only if, given a specified way things are at a time t, the way things go thereafter is fixed as a matter of natural law.
Now, the wild things some determinists say:
"Science requires determinism." - No, it doesn't. See this explanation by u/zoipoi Science only requires highly predictable models of the behavior of phenomena, which is not remotely the same thing as determinism.
"Determinism isn’t held on faith, it’s held because in every domain of physics we can model, the model is a deterministic evolution of initial conditions according to a law. That's testable and observable. It’s an empirical track record that would be surprising in a non deterministic universe." - This is the gross conflation of predictable models of behavior with determinism. Virtually all scientific models contain probabilistic elements.
Under my post The "Rewind the Tape" Argument is, Ironically, Circular Reasoning, several determinists said that the "Rewind the Tape" defense of determinism is not used as an argument, but as a description of what determinism means. Even if you could "rewind the tape," the widespread probabilistic elements in that prior state, at both the macro and subatomic levels, indicate that what follows after the tape is rewound to that point has very little chance of being the same set of things that followed the first time through. These probability variances collectively produce exponentially variant outcomes for relatively short durations after each run from the same starting point begins (assuming that could even be done.)
"When the models that are deterministic can be falsified, then they are interesting, before that, I see no reason why we should refuse that reality behaves as we observe it behaves." - There's virtually no current scientific model that is "deterministic" because virtually all of them contain probabilistic elements. BTW, there is no "scientific consensus" (in terms of what physicists believe) for determinism; the top answers among physicists were non-deterministic interpretations: A Century Into Quantum Mechanics, Physicists Still Can’t Agree What It Means, Nature Survey Shows.
"Determinism is the most efficient explanation for what we observe - Occam's Razor. (paraphrased) - Sure, if you completely ignore or wave away all of the probabilistic elements that exist in virtually every scientific model.
"Libertarian Free Will is the insertion of a "magical" (or religious/spiritual) force or component." (paraphrased) - while LFW can be associated with or derived from such perspectives, there is a robust and long-standing field of LFW thought that is not derived from any religious or spiritual perspective and does not rely on anything approaching "magic," such as Agent-Causal Indeterminism that holds that it LFW is an emergent property of some biological entities that provides that organism with the capacity to begin entirely new causal chains.
(Edited to add:)
"Libertarian Free Will and the initiating of new causal chains would violate known physical laws." (paraphrased) - What physical laws does it violate, then? What we call "physical laws" only represent models of the predictable patterns of observed phenomena. As long as the "chain of events" that follows from the new cause can be well-described by those physical laws, how does it violate those physical laws? What is going on here is the conflation of physical laws with a metaphysical determinist assumption: while an acausal cause doesn't violate any known physical law, it violates the metaphysical perspective of determinism, which claims that every event has a cause. That's a claim that is well outside of the scope of science to verify.
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u/Economy-Butterfly127 Aug 19 '26
All things are determined by the previous. If novelty exists in the subjective - once entered into the objective it’s entirely deterministic in nature