@FrankHubeny I agree; I wish more people would bring things to chat.

I can accept "our view that we initiated it is an illusion", under some definitions of "we", but I did have more trouble with "everything is an illusion"--unless you just meant everything to mean every action.

In any case, what you provide here seems like a clear statement, thanks.

@FrankHubeny "So our view that we initiated it is an illusion." Uhm, no.

Views per se cannot be illusory. Percepts can.

If you have the view that you're an original cause, you can at best claim that this is a delusion

And I find such percepts completely alien

There is absolutely nothing in my subjective experience that could not in principle be accounted for by a prior cause of which I am not aware

And not only do I not have percepts that there's an absence of such causes; I cannot even imagine what subjective form such percepts could take... I can sooner relate to Martian colors than such things

If you have some reason to hold a view of libertarianism, I'm okay with that. But if you're simply appealing to some presumed "what-it's-like", I'm ready to directly challenge you to relate to your own experiences

@HWalters You may be right. It might be a delusion. So, assume determinism. Can you try to do anything? Can you initiate any action at all? If you can then that would have started with free will, but that contradicts the assumption of determinism. That contradiction forces me to reject the assumption of determinism and accept free will.

@FrankHubeny I get the feeling you're conflating two distinct senses of "initiate"

In one sense, you're an original cause; in the other sense, you're merely enacting an intension

What my percepts support is simply that I enact intensions

There's nothing that "contradicts the assumptions of determinism" here; that phrase is simply a longly worded alias to "a causal mechanism plays a role in enacting an intension"

The only "assumptions" of determinism are that every effect has an antecedent cause. My percepts are entirely consistent with this; in that they appear to suggest that at some point I lose track of the ability to trace back the exact causal line, but certainly I have no positive sense that there's no causal line before that

A key example which I'm sure I brought up before is if I "think up of an original sentence"... I have a sense, ultimately, that the sentence seems to be generated "from thin air" out of nothing, but rationally I know that there must be some mechanism whereby I generate it... at least sufficient to cause those English words to come out in some sort of grammatical form

At least this mechanism... the precise means by which the sentence gets generated in English, and how it comes to be grammatical, is something I have no direct subjective sense of

That this can be generated by some causal mechanism is entirely consistent with what I know rationally should be true, and is perfectly consistent with the subjective experience of simply lacking subjective insight into the full mechanism

Now we could posit, and it for all I know could be the case, that this mechanism isn't "entirely" deterministic... that there are some "influences" that contribute to it being in English and grammatical, but that's not the issue here. The issue is that even if this were the case, there's nothing in my subjective experience that demands it; you need to appeal to evidence elsewhere to justify it

I'm kind of curious though what fundamental assumption of determinism you think is being contradicted here

@FrankHubeny I’m still having trouble understanding why we had to make a choice to begin with. If hunger is a biological response that we have no control over, then it forces us to make a choice. We don’t get to choose whether we want to have the choice of “eating” or “not eating”, because that choice is imposed upon us by our own bodies. Once we make a choice, it starts a “chain of events”, as you say; but now I must follow the chain of events that proceed my choice. Would you agree?

"assume determinism. Can you try to do anything?" Sure; why not?

"If you can then that would have started with free will" ...and this might be the problem (sorry don't mean to gang up on you, just filling in)... I'm not starting with a concept of free will here. What I'm fundamentally talking about is just the things I perceive subjectively to be the case; I've no concern whether that counts as free will or not

@anonymouswho Earlier today I suggested quickly an issue I had with the basic idea of hard determinism... let me figure out a way to address this without a wall of text

Outside of the sketch I gave yesterday, the fundamental issue I have with it is that there seems to be a fundamental confusion in the notion of "predeterminism", which I view as a kind of cognitive "trap"

The idea is that if there's a particular past state (A to keep nomenclature), and determinism is true, then there's a specific future state (C) that is entailed by the mechanics... that much I'm fine with...

...but there's a next step in the reasoning that's flawed, when you "appreciate" C and infer what this "means"... the line of thinking goes that if that specific future state C is the one thing that can happen, then it's "predestined" to happen; that it will happen no matter what

This line of reasoning I hold as contradictory, because C does not happen "no matter what" in determinism; it happens because

Not sure I want to do the full "program" thing, but I can refer to programs as an analog; it's trivial to write a computer program that takes an input and generates an output based on it

Imagine I write a "reverse guessing game"; you input into the program the number you think the program will generate, and it spits out a number as a result. But the game I make unfair; it simply uses your guess to generate an output that differs from it. Could be very basic; it spits out 1 if you guess it will generate anything but 1; but if you guess it will generate 1, it spits out 0

We don't need Nostradamus, perfect computational simulators of the entire universe, or God to tell us what will happen with such a program. You give it 1, it says 0. You give it 0, it says 1. This kind of program I call a "spiter", and it's trivial to make.

But the notion that our decisions are "predestined" is akin to the notion that this program will spit out some specific number "no matter what"; which means that even if you feed that number in, it will spit it out.

But that kind of reasoning if fundamentally flawed with regards to this program. There is no "prediction" you can feed to this program that will match its results. The only way you can predict its results is to not interact with it.

This program has no "free will", and is not sentient; it's so trivial that it's not really even that "special". But it's an illustration that you can't go from even these very simple, non-sentient mechanics to a "predestined" type future

As far as only one thing happening goes, this is another cognitive "trap" that's a distraction; you could say that determinism implies this, but determinism isn't really even necessary here. We might posit that the alternative to "a specific future will happen" is that "it's possible one future would happen, but it's also possible that another future would"

And that might be the case in some sort of epistemic sense of possibility, but if you want to talk about ontic senses, might I entertain a different question. Forget how many futures you think are possible; how many futures will happen?

The only way to answer such a question with "more than 1" is to entertain mechanics where futures branch off into different universes... and that's not really a terrible idea for an ontology, but it's not really the kind of idea proposed by the "possible alternate futures" concept

@HWalters just to clarify, did you mean to say “even if you don’t feed that number in, it will still spit it out”? In other words, are you saying that hard determinism implies that C will happen regardless of A or B?

Regardless of "B"

We can make the program do whatever we want; I could give actual example programs but they're just trivial

Think of this as directly addressing: "so if I’m going to eventually be a good person or stop some of my bad habits, then won’t that happen regardless of anything I do or don’t do?"...

...what you're "eventually" going to "be" is C. "Regardless of anything you do" is part of the "program" for B. What this is, IMO, literally arguing is that what happens at B doesn't matter, since C is a result of A.

What I'm arguing that this ignores is that B itself is a result of A, and C is a result of B; A only leads to C through B

In other words, what you do can indeed matter; that what you do is a result of the past is irrelevant; it is the very thing that causes the future (or in deterministic terms, you are an antecedent cause of what follows)

But just to qualify I'm not arguing for determinism; just against hard determinism

@HWalters I’m not sure I understand. You seem to be describing fatalism, which is a bit different than hard determinism- but not really. B is absolutely necessary for C, because while A eventually led to C, the conditions of A could have only produced B. Like I told Frank in a comment somewhere... if you drip water into a cup, eventually a single droplet will cause the water to spill over.

However, without the prior droplets, that particular drop will hit the bottom of the cup. To a fatalist, they would say “Turn the faucet off, and if the cup is meant to overflow, it will”. That doesn’t make any sense. Also, my question is nonsense and not an accurate description of determinism. I was just asking it from the perspective of someone who doesn’t believe in determinism.

@anonymouswho I question the meaning of: "change the future", embedded in this phrase: "there is nothing they can do (or not do) to change the future"

Change it from what?

Change implies that there used to be a thing of one form, and then at some later point "it's different" (e.g., the thing is of another form, it's no longer a thing, etc)

To me this sounds a bit non-sensical; at time T=0, the state of the universe at T=10 was A; but now at T=y for some y, the state of the universe at T=10 became B instead

It doesn't matter to me if you argue that y<10, y=10, or y>10; however you phrase it, this sounds like nonsense

We could entertain a non-deterministic universe; suppose wave function collapse is real, and we have some radioactive material that has a 50% chance of decaying in 14 minutes... add one Geiger counter.

Under those premises, there's "no way" for us to tell within the next 14 minutes if we're going to hear the Geiger counter click or not, with any success rate better than 50%. You could then say that it's possible that it will click, and it's possible that it won't.

However, "the next 14 minutes" is still a specific future (under these presumptions); either the Geiger Counter will click, or it will not click. We don't know which is the case, but we know one or the other is the case.

This isn't the only possible ontic viewpoint of time (we can go MWI), but it's really the sort of future typically imagined by the free will we're not supposed to have anyway

In other words, nothing really is argued against by pointing out that the future is specific.

I think hard determinism is indeed trying to argue that the future being specific implies something crucial; that's the whole point of it

"However, without the prior droplets, that particular drop will hit the bottom of the cup." Sure; each drop is a contributory cause... using specific program analogies that I've used before, a variable S is initialized to 0; then you loop from 1 to 6 and accumulate the loop value into S... the final result, 21, critically depends on all states in between

There are also cases where either conditions A or B suffice to cause C, and it so happens both conditions A and B are met

Just to emphasize, I'm not questioning "whether or not" we can change the future; I'm questioning the very coherence of the concept of "change the future"

And to make it clear, if "change the future" isn't a coherent concept, then it's meaningless to claim that we can't do it

@anonymouswho You could ask the same thing about gravity as you do of making a choice. If I ask why do we not float off the ground, you might answer because of gravity and think you are done. I might ask why do we have gravity. The answer might be because we just have gravity. The same goes with making a choice. It is part of the causes that make up the chain of events. There is no need to try to explain it away any more than there is a need to explain gravity away.

@HWalters When you write: The only "assumptions" of determinism are that every effect has an antecedent cause. if you include our free choice as one of those causes, then I would agree with you. Then everything is "determined" and there is "free will" and everything has a sufficient cause. But I don't think that is what you are saying.

@FrankHubeny I include "choice". Once you add the qualifier "free" you start dancing into an arena that I'm not quite sure how to figure out how to address, but I don't think it's necessary if we only deal with pure unadulterated choice; specifically, with "choice" being the kind of thing we subjectively observe ourselves doing every day

I'm literally claiming that there is nothing that I subjectively perceive myself as doing that couldn't in principle both be: (a) apt (that is, not illusory), and (b) deterministic

(Off to bed for me now)

@HWalters I agree that the phrase change the future is incoherent, but I don’t believe claiming we cannot change the future is meaningless. Of course, I believe in God and that provides me a certain purpose that is ultimately caused by a reason, and while all of that may be imaginary, I believe it’s logical and it helps me from going to complete nihilism.

However, I don’t believe it’s meaningless to recognize that the future cannot be changed, because that also means past events were once future events that could not be changed. This is important to me, because it means we should never punish people for their actions. You may find this question interesting. Here is the link to my own answer to my own question... which is lame, but nobody else provided a correct answer.

@HWalters I think in our previous discussions you mentioned intentionalisty and claimed that at least future self-driving cars would have intentionality. I did not agreed. Self-driving cars are machines. There is a complete explanation for their "choices". They are completely determined by environment and programming. They have no intentionality nor free will. Agents, including humans, are different.

@anonymouswho You can't be a cause of past events, nor can you be a cause of space-like events. But you can be a cause of future events.

Assuming something like relativity, you can be a cause for any event in "your" future light cone

Punishment still fits in here from restitution/deterrence like models

@FrankHubeny Your objection really doesn't make any sense at all to me. That you bring it up here indicates only that you completely missed the point of that long previous discussion.

What was being claimed about SDC's by me are that they are agents, not that they are "the same as us".

By my definition given previously, we too are agents

Everything I said about SDC's in terms of agency applies equally well to us

And yes, we're different than SDC's

So what? A cat is different than from a mouse, but both cats and mice are mammals

You might have a definition of agency that excludes SDC's and includes us; that's fine. But mine includes SDC's, and us, and excludes washing machines

I think you're committing false dichotomies all across the board here... you seem to completely refuse any definition that includes me and a SDC, but excludes a washing machine, on the flimsy basis that we're different than a SDC

But all that having been said, it has nothing to do with the thing you're objecting to now

I make no claims that the SDC has "all of the subjective experiences we do"; I claim that "all of the subjective experiences we have" can be in principle both apt and deterministic

So my definition of agency is a red herring

I view your task of objecting to me something like this... show me something in my subjective experience... a percept... that cannot be explained using deterministic mechanics

If you can do that, I'm wrong.

@anonymouswho Let's take deterrence as an example... and for now, let's simply drop the consideration of whether or not we should deter behavior, and focus only on whether or not we can

The idea of deterrence is that we set up a penalty for a class of behaviors with the hope that the penalty will result in less people exhibiting those behaviors

If we presume that we work in a deterministic fashion, it's not at all unreasonable that the deterrents can be contributory causes in our behaviors, which implies that they indeed can deter behaviors; i.e., that the act of having penalties for a class of behaviors can be a cause that can have as effects reduced exhibition of those behaviors

Now, if deterrence can work, the issue of whether we should deter behaviors becomes a bit more straightforward. If those behaviors result in harm, and we don't want harm to come to individuals, and deterrence can work, it's perfectly valid for us to prescribe deterrence (i.e., to say we should deter behaviors)

None of this requires "changing" the future; only causing it

Incidentally, if by punishment you're referring to retribution, I have a hard time justifying that anyway

@FrankHubeny I can perhaps merge these two conversations. Suppose I really like squirrels, but my car hits a squirrel. I'm very broken about it, but there's nothing to blame for hitting that squirrel except possibly myself (or perhaps, the squirrel).

Let's say I don't fully appreciate this though, and the next time I drive, I speak to my car; I say, "please try to avoid hitting more squirrels"

If I truly believe this could have any effect, I'm in error. One way to describe this error is, as how you previously mentioned, that I'm anthropomorphizing my car. The fundamental problem here is nothing about my car that can appreciate the request, or even do anything about it.

But what if I had a different sort of car? In particular, what is loosely the minimal sort of feature this car should have so that, fuzzily speaking, were I to say "please try to avoid hitting more squirrels", it would not be erroneous?

One way to have such a non-erroneous situation would be for the car to be capable of processing my request in such a way that it can reflect a "class of behaviors" resulting from it, such that this class of behaviors incorporates avoidance of hitting squirrels

If I had such a car now, can we say that we are the same as those cars? Of course not! There's a lot more to being human than being capable of responding to requests not to hit squirrels

But such behaviors would be agentive; it requires the car be able to sense its environment, recognize a squirrel, and specifically adjust behaviors such that it would not hit the squirrel. If instead of a SDC I simply hired a driver, and told him to try not to hit squirrels, it would be identical in this restricted way

The fact that this driver is different than a self driving car is irrelevant... what's relevant is that I can use the English language to communicate an intention that effects a desired class of behaviors for a goal

Another way for me to avoid hitting squirrels would be to just drive more carefully; that is also in a sense "doing something" to the car... not speaking English phrases, but "doing something else". But in this case, the blameworthy entity would be me... the entity capable of behaving according to an intention

"Views per se cannot be illusory." What does this mean? If I view a mirage, is that not illusory?

Is a view not a percept?