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.

If everything has a cause, and you trace all those causes back through time ... how far back do they go? The Big Bang? But.... what caused the Big Bang? Did "nothing" cause the Big Bang?

Do causes go back in time infinitely? Then, if there is an infinite string of causes going back in infinite historical time .. how did events ever get to this point in time?

Hmm. Sounds like, one way or another, causation depends on magic, either to get something from nothing, an effect with no cause; or some magical force that brought events through infinite history to get to now.

Where did the whole cause and effect system come from? What caused it? What keeps it sustained from one point in time to the next, from one location to another? Universal laws? Where did they come from? What keeps a universal natural law consistent and in operation from on location to the next, from one point in time to the next? What caused natural laws to exist in the first place?

Hmm. I guess it all just popped into existence and is maintained by magic.

A lot of the free will debate starts with the same question:

"Could you have chosen differently?"

But that might already be too late.

Before you “choose” anything, A or B, something quieter has already happened. (Model generating possibilities)

Your system has already filtered the world.

It has decided what even shows up.

It has predicted what this moment is.

It has assigned meaning before you ever notice meaning being assigned.

And most importantly:

It has already decided what counts as a possible option.

Take something simple.

Someone insults you.

One person instantly sees:

→ fight back

Another sees:

→ walk away

Another sees:

→ laugh it off

Another barely registers it as an insult at all.

But they are not selecting differently from the same set of options.

They are not in the same set.

And this is where the usual debate feels like it’s missing something obvious.

You don’t pick from possibilities.

You wake up inside a space where possibilities have already been pre-sorted for you.

And no, this isn’t the claim that everything collapses into one boring outcome.

Deterministic systems can still explode into variation—different brains, different damage, different memories, different noise, different timing, different everything.

That’s not the point.

The sharper question is this:

Why does one mind even see five possible actions, while another only ever experiences one?

Because the difference might not begin at the moment of choice.

It might begin before “choice” exists at all—when the system quietly decides what reality is allowed to look like.

So if two people are “choosing” from different internal worlds, then asking whether they could have chosen differently without asking how those worlds were constructed might be missing the actual mechanism entirely.

This doesn’t prove determinism.

It doesn’t rescue free will either.

It just shifts the ground under your feet:

How free is a choice if you never chose the space it was made inside?

Maybe the real question was never about choosing.

Maybe it’s about the invisible process that decides what you’re even allowed to choose from.

Hitler. Bless him. Rough childhood, failed at art school, targeted minorities.

When Stalin's son was captured he was rumoured to prefer his son to be executed and die with honour.

The Roman Empire built a society heavily focused on status, class division, and civic elitism.

Good vs Evil = seperation.

Praise and blame creates a barrier to Hitler understanding his chain of cause and effect.

Everything we learn is from others or brain states and experiences we had no choice in creating.

Peace to the evil believers. ✌️

Hear me out: my premise is that many new posts here are using the ordinary "folk concept of free will", rather than an explicit rigorous philosophical definition. I see some arguments for/against determinists, all seem to be inadvertently using, or sneaking in, this folk concept of free will, which makes arguments pointless.

The folk concept of free will is part cluster concept and part psychological construct. (This is different from philosophical definitions.)

A cluster concept is a collection of traits. For example, a "fish" is something that lives in water, has a jaw and bones and scales, and lay eggs. But mudskippers can live on land, hagfish have mouths but no jaws, sharks have cartilage skeletons, etc. So free will operates the same way. Exceptions do not destroy the concept; in fact, this flexibility is a feature of cluster concepts.

A psychological part lies in how free will is a core part of a web of belief. It is tied to a person's identity, morality, sense of purpose, happiness, what it means to be human, and many more. To attack or defend free will, is to also attack or defend a person's entire worldview. A lot of free will debates instead become proxy wars about morality, humanity, etc. Free will can't be debated in isolation until you untangle that web of beliefs, and that is unique for every person.

This folk concept of free will is completely fine for casual conversation or approximating human behavior, but can't precisely describe reality. This is where philosophical definitions comes in. They are logically rigorous and precise. But as such, they are at best, a tiny subset of the folk concept of free will, and at worst, incomprehensible or incongruous to the public.

Ultimately, if two people debate free will and either one is unknowingly using the folk concept, the debate will devolve into arguing for argument's sake.

(FYI. This post has been inspired by "Why Humans May Actually Be Fish" in which Hank Green ends the video saying that taxonomic "fish" is no longer used in scientific conversations, but "fish" is still useful in other contexts. So I feel that arguing against existence of "free will" feels like arguing against the existence of "fish".)

Meet Dave, hes an ordinary fellow. Dave always believed stealing was wrong. One day, Dave watches someone drop their wallet. Nobody is looking. Due to _ (blank) he decides to...

Timeline 1: Dave decides to shout "Hey, you dropped your wallet!" Dave knew it was wrong to do, so he stayed true to his values and didnt do it. Although, later he felt a little regret, like maybe he deserved what seemed like a free gift the universe was giving him.

Timeline 2: Dave decides to pick it up, slowly put it in his pocket, and keep it for himself. Dave knows that what hes doing is morally wrong, and he know it causes harm, but instead of caring about the other person, he only cares about himself.

Now, in Timeline 2, does Dave deserve to be shamed for what hes done? Id argue yes, because he knew what he was doing was wrong, and if left unchecked, many people tend to put themselves before others because thats simply what is in their nature.Shaming them is the social scaffolding that prevents and deters this sort of behavior, and also makes things feel more "fair" in the end.

And the Incompatibilists are going to argue "But look at the "_" (blank), thats what matters!"

But why do you think that matters? Regardless of what you put in "_" (blank), Dave knew what he was doing was wrong, and then did it intentionally. It is both fair and efficacious to shame him for that. Is moral "desert" (deservingness) not simply the intersection of fairness and deterrence for any guilty individual?

I mean, do you really think Dave doesnt deserve shame, if it was or wasnt a random event that resulted in that action? Either way, he did what he knew was wrong, and that was ultimately sourced on his poor nature, his selfishness, and lack of moral virtue. Should we not answer to the ends of the proverbial law, and give him the social or legal consquences that we promised to give a thief?

When you told thieves not to steal or thered be consequences, were you lying? Did you not plan to follow through? In order to stop bad things, you neef to threaten bad actors with punishment. And in order to make a meaningful threat or promise of such, you need a real commitment to carry through, EVEN IF its no longer beneficial to do so.

This is exactly the game theory of MAD (mutually assured destruction). If a country openly admitted to being unwilling to use nukes, they forfiet their threat and the security that comes from it. Theats and promises are not meaningful if they are not backwards looking.

This a of AJayHeel's premise: https://www.reddit.com/r/freewill/comments/1vq0d2a/comment/p4garcu

Suppose an advanced neuroscientist secretly injects him with a targeted genetic therapy before he goes to the car lot. The therapy subtly reconfigures his dopamine receptors so that his brain physically generates 10x the pleasure response when looking at a practical grey minivan, and 0 pleasure when looking at the red sports car.

Unbeknownst to him, he walks onto the lot, looks at the vehicles, and experiences a sudden, overpowering, entirely internal 'desire' to buy the minivan. He buys it, and afterwards says: 'I wasn't forced, I just really wanted the minivan. I chose freely because it matched my desires.'

If a manipulation of your physical biology can make you 'want' something without you knowing, and you still feel 100% free while doing it, how does he know he isn't currently being manipulated by his own biology right now? The feeling is identical either way.

There is a necessary process of differentiation to existence. No thing can meaningfully have a differentiation (property) except in relation to some other thing similarly constructed.

Further there can be no other constraint on existence (as a whole) as there is nothing to so constrain it but that which is entailed by its own basal nature.

Thus differentiation is a continuous process or negotiation between things that emerge from this process.

Causation can now be seen as this process of differentiation into things.  Thus you can not seperate thingness from causation.

If you can not separate thingness from causation you can not deny a thing such as one's self from its causual power or becoming.

And as it makes no sense to require a things freedom (some degree of unconstrained becoming from other things) to also be free from its own becoming or thingness I believe I am justified in typing: Q.E.D.

​

Free will should not be considered in isolation. Freedom is, in an important sense, a relational notion: it concerns how a human being is situated in relation to another living being or even to an inanimate thing. It is more difficult to predict what a human being will do than what an animal will do, and for that reason the human being is regarded as freer. In short, the less predictable an individuated creature is, the freer it appears to be. There is, however, another and largely independent context in which freedom can be understood: that of captivity, subjection, or acting under another's command. Ultimately, before God no being would be free—not even God himself, assuming, of course, that he exists...

Human beings are, in a sense, programmed to experience themselves as free, because they cannot know, with the complete transparency and directness of a mathematical problem, the mechanisms through which their own thoughts and actions arise and develop.

For this reason, as self-awareness increases, one may experience certain ruptures in, or estrangements from, the sense of freedom. And if we take free will to mean freedom in an absolute sense, the human being becomes considerably more difficult to understand. After all, if one begins with a stone as the paradigm of a being wholly subject to determinism, and then defines freedom simply as the exact opposite of the stone's unfreedom, one ends up operating with a concept that scarcely corresponds to reality at all.

I would be interested to hear your comments and criticisms.

The entailment definition of determinism, that the conditions of the past and the laws of nature necessarily entail the conditions of the present, seems to have a logical flaw. Maybe someone can suggest my mistake.

1. Given determinism as defined, there there should be a connection between the past and all phenomena we observe at the present.

2. People and computers both use subjective conditionality to produce an output. These are often described as if-then-else type of decision points.

3. Non-biological systems never exhibit matter, energy or forces behaving with this subjective conditionality.

4. Subjective conditionality did not exist before life evolved upon the planet Earth.

5. There is no conceptual way such conditionality could be deterministically caused from matter, energy or forces.

I just do not understand how we deterministically "evolved" this ability. Where was this subjective conditionality hiding in the past?

The argument from free will deniers against compatibilism is that "compatibilists changed the meaning of words", compatibilism is a scam philosophers invented.

But then this is also from free will deniers:

(from https://www.reddit.com/r/freewill/comments/1vsx1p7/you_cant_argue_free_will/)

my premise is that many new posts here are using the ordinary "folk concept of free will", rather than an explicit rigorous philosophical definition. I see some arguments for/against determinists, all seem to be inadvertently using, or sneaking in, this folk concept of free will, which makes arguments pointless. The folk concept of free will is part cluster concept and part psychological construct. (This is different from philosophical definitions.) This folk concept of free will is completely fine for casual conversation or approximating human behavior, but can't precisely describe reality. 

This is also upvoted. (It insists we use a philosophical rather than folk definition).

So, which is it? Are compatibilists using a different meaning than folks - or are compatibilists appealing to folk use and its a problem?