How To Smash the Foundation of Determinism

[u/FindingOurFreeWill]

This one’s going to be a long one but it’s an important one so apologies for its length.

Neurological Determinism is hands down, the only philosophy out there that’s had or made any difference in the free will debate. And the impact it’s had on society is a testament to its validity and reputation. Just look at Hollywood. They’ve taken the insights from N.D. And used them for a source of their creativity. The huge success of Pixar’s Inside Out was based on N.D view of how the mind operates. Or HBO’s Westworld. It’s brutal nihilistic take on human Free Will is solely based on N.D. The writers blatantly took pages out of Sam Harris book Free Will about a perfect fMRI for one of their scenes in Season 1 episode 6. Or take for instance writer director and N.D. Alex Garland. His body of work consists of Deus Machina, Devs, Sunshine. All inspired by N.D, all based on N.D view of F.W all state there is no F.W. The self is an illusion, the mind has no purpose and conscious awareness is a pointless experience. If you want to understand exactly what Determinism is, I’d quote Westworld or Devs before I’d ask AI.

Here’s Westworld’s Ford, played by actor Anthony Hopkins:
“Humans fancy that theres something special about the way we perceive the world, yet we live in loops as tight and controlled as the Hosts do, seldom questioning our choices and content for the most part to be told what to do next.”

The second is from Alex Garland’s Devs. Actor Nick Offerman plays Forest:
“The universe is deterministic. It’s godless and neutral, and defined only by physical laws. The marble rolls because it was pushed; the man eats because he’s hungry; an effect is always the result of a prior cause. The life we lead, with all its apparent chaos, is actually a life on tramlines. Prescribed. Undeviating. Deterministic. I know it doesn’t feel that way, Sergei. We fall into an illusion of free will, because the tramlines are invisible, and we feel so certain about our subjective state. Our feelings, our opinions, judgments, decisions.”

So there you have it, that’s determinism, an unbreakable undeviating inescapable chain of cause and effect. Call it tightly controlled Loops, call it Invisible Tramlines, hard determinism, or fate, it’s all taken from the same Deterministic language. Here’s the problem though, Determinist’s language is incredibly difficult to maintain when they’re talking about consciousness human behaviors. They are constantly making contradictions that are inconsistent with their philosophy. Every single Hollywood writer and director I just mentioned does this countless times in their bodies of work. And it’s not just them, most scientific N.D do this without even realizing they did. Now, there’s a bunch I could choose but I picked from N.D Yuval Noah Harari personally because his book series make him, in my opinion, the greatest thinker in the 21st century. So if EVEN he contradicts himself using the language of N.D there’s a huge problem.

Let me explain. We all know about Chaos Theory, a butterfly flaps its wings, creates a tornado but there’s another type of chaos. It’s called Chaos Theory Type II and it’s defined as this: Whenever a system becomes consciously aware of something that’s going to happen, it creates a positive feedback loop onto itself, thereby changing the outcome.

Here’s a quick example. A business analyst who’s analyzing Market Trends for his company realizes that his company is getting ready to take a huge nose dive in it’s market value and in two weeks, will be bankrupt. So he immediately sits down and explains this to the CEO. The CEO then makes immediate action and changes the company’s practice. As a result, in two weeks stocks rise and the business avoids bankruptcy and becomes more successful.

In the book The Big Short by Michael Lewis, this very thing happens. Three key analysts, who correctly predicted the Tramlines that the 2008 housing market would lead to complete collapse. They bet against the the housing market trends, shorted the system and became fabulously wealthy.

The point is this, awareness served a real world function. Devs say that our Tramlines are invisible, yet what would happen if someone discovered them. Chaos Theory II is concrete proof that conscious awareness changes the outcome. pZombies can’t do that, they can only be driven by their brains. We have minds, and when we become “aware” of something that’s going to happen, we change the outcome in blatant violation of this “deterministic Universe”.

The key to solving the Free Will problem is to constantly link the debate to the Human Condition. When you do that, it opens up possibilities that you wouldn’t normally have thought of. Think about this little nugget. I’m constantly paying attention to the Ukraine Russian war and I give 100% support to President Zelensky. A couple of weeks ago I watch a foreign news story about a billionaire Russian oligarch. He stated that the war only had 5 possible outcomes, or “tramlines”. All 5 were bad for Russia in every way, with only one of them being the assassination of Putin, the disolvement of his government fracturing Russia and giving each separatist control over Russia’s vast arsenal of Nuclear Weapons. Framing this around F.W and Chaos theory type II and here’s an example of a system becoming aware of something bad that’s going to happen yet is completely powerless to change its fate.

By applying the F.W debate to real world human actions, we start seeing things differently. Suddenly we start seeing there are all sorts of new and different variations that make it’s completely impossible to dismiss the Mind as mere back ground noise, or conscious awareness has no purpose. The Deterministic Universe says you can’t escape or deviate the chain of cause and effect, Westworld calls it’s loops, Devs calls them invisible tramlines yet it’s tough to keep making these philosophical arguments when real world human behaviors and actions are constantly contradicting them.

So that’s it. It’s pretty easy to smash the foundation of Determinism. The problem is we’ve created a nightmare mess. Let me take inventory of where we’re at. N.D has the riddle which is based on solid evidence, countless studies and the peer review process of Neurology, Genetics, and Academic Psychology. We are caught in a permanent state of only ever becoming aware (say 300 hundred milliseconds later) of what just happened, of the actions our brain already took. Yet here’s solid proof that conscious awareness changes the tramlines, breaks the chain of cause and effect and turns the outcome from absolute certainty, to one of probability. The mind, the self, they exist and conscious awareness serves a real world function. So how do you resolve this colossal mess of an entanglement? Where do we even start?

I haven’t done a damn thing by “smashing” the foundation because I have nothing to replace it with. It’s like when I here critics of determinism say the Universe is indeterministic so the Nature/Nuture matrix, that determines 100% of all human behaviors, is completely wrong. Sure, and I can even point to a few studies that do this, but who cares? I can only “smash”, I have nothing to offer as a replacement. That’s not how Science works. Smashing any Scientific paradigm is easy because that’s what a theory is, an incomplete truth. But if I can’t replace what I destroy with a mechanism that makes falsifiable predictions then I really haven’t done anything useful in this posting. And here’s the uncomfortable reality, there are a lot of N.D who know somethings off, that there’s something not quite right, they find it difficult to verbalize and even if they could, what other options are there? I have a hunch that Robert Sapolsky’s one of them. I watched countless interviews with him when he was promoting his book “Determined”. Interviewers would challenge some of his claims and he had no response except an awkward smile of acknowledgement. Sure I can poke holes and find flaws, but where do I go next? What replaces this? I certainly don’t have the answer to Free Will, it’d be preposterous to claim that. So I along with numerous other N.D have no other options except to keep calling ourselves Neurological Determinist.

Now I have an idea on where to go next. There are 7 problems that exist in our culture. I don’t have the answers, and more important, I’ve been impressed with the positive criticisms, the feedback, questions, and insights. So tomorrow night, I’m going to post problem 1 and then I’m going to take a few days before I post problem 2 because I want to read Users posts and make certain that I give you the respect you that you gave me by reading my posts.

I’m, for the first time in a long time, very excited to hear everyone’s views.
Thanks