How can a 'drunk' person, a marionette, a highly intelligent robot say "Yes. I take full responsibility of what I did. I own it"? Aren't such people just deluded? (belief in free will) And yet people admire them.
What do you think of responsible people (esp. leaders) from a no free will perspective?
Dramatis personae
Chad; a good looking compatibilist who recently became a partner at a prominent architectural firm. He is dropping off his motorcycle to be repaired.
Hedley; owner of the Hard Determinists motorcycle repair shop who has been checking Chads bike for the last 15 minutes.
Scene 1
Chad sits in the waiting room. Hedley returns from the garage.
Hedley: Good news, Chad
Chad: Go ahead
Hedley: I found the problem with your Harley.
Chad: Finally. What was it?
Hedley: the big bang
Chad: What? I want to know why the bike failed.
Hedley:Thats what I'm trying to tell you. It was the big bang.
Chad: I am almost certain it was the fuel injector.
Hedley: That's because you aren't treating this scientifically. The question I asked myself was what is the ultimate cause for your bike failure. A lot of mechanics would look at your bike and tell you the fuel injector failure was the cause of your bike not running. But something caused the fuel injector to stop running and that too was caused. A long chain of causes. Heat cycles, material fatigue, manufacturing variance It turns out that every time I thought I found a cause, it too was caused and therefore had no responsibility in the ultimate sense.
Chad: But I don't want an ultimate cause. I want to get my bike running again. I can't decide who is worse, I tried a libertarian motorcycle repair shop first. They said there was no cause at all. Just the injector acting how it wanted.
Hedley: The big bang is the ultimate source of your problem
Chad: So what? this is all the Big Bang’s fault?
Hedley: I wouldn’t say “fault.” I try to stay away from retributive mechanics. There are no parts to blame. I don't believe in praise or blame. The bike is a system so it has to follow the laws of physics.
Chad: So are you going to replace the injector or not?
Hedley: Replace is such a loaded term. The injector is merely participating in a deterministic unfolding.
Chad: Is the part broken?
Hedley: “Broken” presupposes a normative standard imposed upon matter.
Chad: That seems unhelpful.
Hedley: It’s only unhelpful if you think blaming a part is what you need to fix a motorcycle. No, what I'm going to do is to change the fuel injector.
Chad: That's exactly what I would have done.
Hedley: Yes but you'd have changed it as a kind of punishment. I'm going to change it compassionately.
Chad: Will that still fix it?
Hedley: Yes.
Chad: Then why bring up the Big Bang at all?
Hedley turns to leave and shakes his head. Then turns around and wipes the grease onto a rag.
Hedley: Well Chad once you understand deterministic mechanics you become more compassionate towards the parts you change.
Chad: What do you do with the parts you change?
Hedley: Oh put them in the crusher and send them to the dump. I don't think about them again. They're just parts after all.
Chad: That's more compassionate, I guess. Well go ahead and fix it.
Hedley: I don't think of it as fixing Chad, I like to think I'm rehabilitating the bike. Give me till Tuesday and come pick it up.
Chad: alright see you Tuesday.
Exeunt.
What's your opinion on his philosophy
Question inspired by a side bar I had with a poster on the other sub earlier today. I say there is a difference, perhaps subtle, but important. But I want to see what other people say before I chime in with my specific thoughts..
Free will cannot exist in a universe with either deterministism or one with determinism and randomness. Because if your will is based on factors you had no choice in, or randomness which is inherently unbound then they are not. ”free”, right?
But what does free in this context even mean?
To have no previous basis? What could for example an unborn soon to be born person.”freely” choose to be or do with no previous information nor desires?
So then the conclusion is, that the concept of free will is logically incoherent, which doesn’t necessarily mean that it is nonexistent but that its nature is outside of logic and therefore outside of human understanding? I’d imagine the nature of consciousness could also be akin to this.
What do you think?
Correction:
The way I intepret the word free is literal, meaning unbound by literally everything. This of course is incoherent since it would be unbound by logic aswell.
The words ”Freedom” and free” require constraint for logical coherence, the line you draw to assert the amount of constraint necessary is subjective and exists on a gradient to be able to determine wether the will is free or not.
Freedom is inherently restrictive.
Ever since I realized free will can’t even exist, I just completely lost any meaning in my life. I’m just nothing. “I” don’t even exist. My whole life is nothing, every decision I have made in my life never meant something. I seriously don’t see any solution except self-deleting. Even my conclusion isn’t exactly mine.
It is a threat response wearing philosophical clothing.
When a nervous system detects that a framework it depends on for social coordination is being destabilized, it generates urgency. Generates alarm. Generates arguments that feel like reasoning but are downstream of the threat signal..
Not upstream of it.
The philosophical defense of free will is exhaust. Post-hoc residue of a neurochemical process that had already decided what outcome to protect before the first sentence was formed.
This is not a criticism directed at any particular thinker, school, or text. It is a description of the mechanism that produces all of them.. Including this one.
The Homo genus is nearly 3 million years old.
Homo sapiens fossils date back at least 300,000 years. The biological lineage extends further.. 800,000 years is not an unreasonable estimate depending on which markers are used. And sapiens was not the only human species. Neanderthals. Denisovans. Homo heidelbergensis. Homo erectus, running for nearly 2 million years. Multiple lineages. Multiple nervous systems processing, coordinating, surviving, dying.
None of them had the concept of free will.
Not because they lacked it or not. Because the concept simply didn’t exist. There was no word for it. No philosophical framework around it. No debate. No idea, no thought.
Organisms processed. Behavior followed. The processing was not accompanied by a narrative about the processing being chosen.
The concept of free will.. As a named, debated, institutionalized idea.. Is historically recent. A few thousand years old at most. Against 3 million years of the genus. Against the biological depth of the lineage.
That proportion is the context.
Everything built on the free will framework.. Guilt architecture, moral responsibility systems, legal accountability structures, the entire emotional scaffolding of desert and blame.. Sits on a few thousand years of conceptual history inside a lineage that ran for millions of years without it.
This is not an argument that the concept is wrong.
It is a description of its scale relative to the organism that generated it.
No one has ever measured a mind.
Not weighed it. Not located it. Not isolated it, photographed it, traced its boundaries, identified its substrate, or demonstrated its existence as a thing distinct from the organ producing the behavior attributed to it.
The mind has never been found.
What exists: a brain. An organ. Approximately 1.4 kilograms of electrochemical processing tissue running prediction models against incoming sensory data, updating probability distributions, generating outputs including the output called “experience of having a mind.”
That output.. The felt sense of an inner mental space, a thinking subject, a seat of cognition that observes and deliberates and chooses.. Is itself one of the brain’s predictions. The brain models a self that has a mind. The model runs. The experience of the model running is mistaken for evidence that what the model describes exists.
The instrument is hallucinating its own operator and calling the hallucination real.
The brain is a predictive organ. Not a recording device. Not a passive receiver. A system that constructs experience from prior models, fills gaps with plausible interpolation, and delivers the finished product as perception.. As reality, directly encountered.
The color you see is not the color that exists.
The brain assigns color from wavelength data filtered through prediction. The continuity of your visual field is fabricated.. There is a blind spot in each eye where the optic nerve connects, and the brain patches it with interpolated content generated from surrounding data. You have never seen that patch. You have never noticed the gap. The organ filled it before experience arrived.
This is not a peripheral quirk of visual processing. This is the architecture. The brain does not deliver reality. It delivers a model of reality that has been optimized for survival-relevant prediction, not for accuracy.
Perception is hallucination that happens to be useful.
The "mind".. the inner space where thinking occurs, where decisions are made, where experience happens.. Is only a small part of the model. Not the modeler. The brain generates the experience of a mind the same way it generates the experience of a continuous visual field:
By producing a coherent output from fragmented, gapped, prediction-interpolated processing, and delivering it as immediate reality.
There is no mind having the experience. There is processing producing the experience of a mind having experiences.
Entire institutions are built on this assumption.
Departments of philosophy of mind. Cognitive science programs. Psychotherapy systems. Legal frameworks assigning mental states to defendants. Psychiatric diagnostic manuals cataloguing disorders of a thing whose existence has not been established.
The field of consciousness studies.. A multi-decade, heavily funded, academically prestigious research program.. Has produced no consensus on what consciousness is, where it is, or how matter produces it. This is not a sign that the question is difficult. It is a sign that the question may be built on a category error. That researchers are searching for the location of something that does not exist as a locatable thing — the same way medieval scholars could not locate the seat of the soul because there was no soul to locate.
The "hard problem of consciousness".. Why physical processes produce subjective experience.. Is treated as the deepest unsolved problem in science. It is framed as mysterious, profound, possibly beyond human comprehension.
BUT that is completely BS and the alternative explanation is: There is no hard problem. There is a brain generating the model of a subject having experiences. The mystery is the model describing itself as mysterious. The hard problem is the prediction engine producing a prediction that its own operation is inexplicable, and then treating that prediction as evidence of depth rather than as evidence of the prediction engine’s limitations in modeling itself.
The entire architecture of the problem is built inside the assumption it would need to dissolve to see clearly.
The mind sits in the same category as time.
Time is not a fact about the universe. It is a cognitive construct.. A model the brain uses to organize sequential processing into navigable experience. Physicists have known for over a century that time is not a universal constant. It dilates with velocity and gravity. At the quantum scale, the arrow of time breaks down entirely. What we experience as the flow of time.. The felt sense of past, present, future as a continuous stream.. Is ENTIRELY a neurological production. A model. Not a feature of reality that the model accurately reflects.
The mind is the same class of object.
A cognitive construct that the brain produces for processing efficiency, mistaken for a real thing that exists independently of the production process. Language then stabilizes the construct.. Gives it a name, builds categories around it, generates entire philosophical traditions treating the named thing as a phenomenon requiring explanation rather than as a naming process requiring examination.
Once named, the construct becomes socially real. Institutions organize around it. Funding follows. Careers are built on its study. The social reality of the construct is then mistaken for evidence of its objective reality.
This is not unique to mind. It is the standard mechanism by which cognitive constructs become cultural facts. The brain generates a model. Language names it. Institutions ossify it. The ossified category is then treated as a discovery rather than a construction.
Mind. Soul. Time. Free will. Consciousness. Self.
The same process. The same mechanism. Different points on the same continuum of the brain modeling its own operation, naming the model, and forgetting that the name preceded the thing.
It would be considered scientific idiocy to build a research program around the location of phlogiston after phlogiston had been shown not to exist. To fund departments studying the properties of the luminiferous ether after the Michelson-Morley experiment. To develop diagnostic systems for disorders of the four humors.
Those frameworks were abandoned when the things they posited were demonstrated not to exist as posited.
The mind has never been demonstrated to exist as posited.
The response to this observation.. In academic contexts, in philosophical circles, in everyday conversation.. Is not to examine the assumption. It is to treat the assumption as so obvious that examining it signals confusion. Of course the mind exists. You’re using yours right now. The felt certainty of having a mind is taken as proof of the mind.
This is the prediction engine treating its own output as external verification.
The felt certainty is the model. The model producing the felt certainty of its own reality is not evidence of its reality. It is evidence of how thoroughly the model runs.
A sufficiently immersive hallucination includes the hallucination of certainty that the hallucination is real.
The entire neuroscience of mind-talk.. The assumption that mental states exist as distinct entities that cause behavior, that belief and desire and intention are real things that brain states implement.. Is FOLK PSYCHOLOGY formalized into research methodology. It is the organism’s self-model being used as the conceptual framework for studying the organism’s self-model.
The instrument is contaminated from the first assumption.
The Mesopotamian legal codes. The Greek philosophical tradition. The emergence of formalized moral frameworks.
The 99.9% of the population alive during those millennia was illiterate.
Not occasionally illiterate. Structurally, systemically, by design illiterate.
The current social environment is not an accident. It is a structural design intended to keep the cyclical body invisible while maintaining a hierarchy that uses the male body as the human default. This "gender war" is maintained through specific mechanisms of conditioning that target free will.
The Mechanics of Conditioning
Systemic power relies on two primary forms of behavioral conditioning to maintain the status quo. These methods are used to turn free will into automated obedience.
Classical Conditioning (Pavlovian): This is the conditioning of obedience. It is seen in systems like compulsory education where requirements (like running a mile) are used to put individuals in their place of obedience. It trains the subject to comply in order to "graduate" or move forward.
Operant Conditioning (Skinnerian): This involves the "box" and the "lever." By rewarding certain behaviors and punishing others, the system keeps people pushing the same buttons. If you stay inside the box and push the levers you are told to push, you remain a "dog in a cage with the door always unlocked."
Why the System Stays in Power
The system remains "okay" by societal standards because those who benefit from the status quo write the rules.
The Economic Machine: Capitalism assumes a 24-hour hormone cycle (male). To admit the 28-day cycle exists would require a total restructuring of labor.
Knowledge Monopoly: For most of history, men were the only ones allowed to be doctors and scientists. They studied what they knew. If they didn't experience the cycle, it wasn't "real" science.
Cultural Gaslighting: When women speak up about endocrine reality, it is labeled as "hysteria" or "being sensitive." If you convince someone their reality is just a "mood," you don't have to change the system for them.
The Physics of Free Will
Free will is the choice to engage or participate in reality. It is as simple as the choice to live or to kill yourself. If you have the ability to make a choice, no matter the guidance of your past, you have free will.
Life as Physics: Every action causes an equal and opposite reaction. Life is physics. By hypothesizing outcomes and experimenting, you can define your own reality.
Quantum Entanglement: On a micro-molecular scale, consciousness is sourced from the engagement of cells. These "microtubules" converse through translation and synapses. We are larger molecular structures communicating in a quantum mechanically entangled biology.
The Scientist Perspective: We are born scientists. We experiment on how life will turn out. Alchemizing life is making choices and creating consequences.
The "Disgust" Tool and Social Backlash
The treatment of menstruation as "disgusting" is a historical tactic used to justify exclusion from religious, political, and academic circles.
The Backlash Effect: Every major advancement in women's rights is met with intense resistance. This creates a "one step forward, two steps back" sensation.
Pathologizing Nature: Instead of seeing the 28-day cycle as a complex endocrine system performing massive metabolic labor (144 cycles per decade), it is framed as a sickness to be managed by men.
Displacement of Anxiety: During economic instability, traditional hierarchies are framed as a "lost golden age," and women's autonomy is blamed for a perceived loss of status.
Taking Responsibility: Breaking the Cycle
The solution to the "Why me?" loop is recognizing that the problem is the method of solving the equation.
Ownership of Action: Taking responsibility means claiming ownership of actions and recognizing consequences. It is the end of blaming influences or parents for current behavior.
Awareness of Flaws: Recognizing recurring patterns as flaws in development allows for the creation of new structures of influence.
Connection vs. Competition: Primal human nature is collective and rooted in gathering. Competition is not a biological inheritance; it is a symptom of a lack of community.
The system is not broken. It is working exactly as designed to keep the cyclical body invisible. Breaking free requires recognizing the door to the cage is unlocked and choosing to stop pulling the levers that bring the same poor results.
The question is that whether everything in life is predetermined has got me thinking. If every event, decision and outcome is already fixed. It raises a deeper concern do our actions truly matter, especially when we think about the possibility of a "next life".
Note: I’m 18, I’m not a master of philosophy but just hear me out
Biological Determinism in summary is the theory that genetics and evolutionary traits predetermines your character choices and fate, Determinism believes that the universe is “causation” but it is a theory denied by most because it indirectly states that everything in the universe not just life is predetermined. Predetermination is stagnant it is linear and is challenged by many ideas such as Paradox of Deliberation and the argument of Free Will.
The only reason why we think of Determinism as flawed is because we are trying to rationalize it in our cognition, The same cognition that evolved to be biased on what we believe is real. By accepting Determinism it creates a Paradox of Deliberation and that is Nihilistic, BUT if you ignore cognition bias it is logical. Free Will shouldn’t be a counterargument to Determinism in the same way General Relativity Laws cannot be applied to Quantum Mechanics LITERALLY because Free Will is from a conceptual reality, It is a cognitive bias.
They can coexist and not be the absolute truth, In fact for Will to be meaningful your choices must have predictable results, You choose the most rational choices out the millions and that is deterministic and free in the sense that you rationalized it. Determinism is not nihilistic it is existentialistic and knowing Free Will is limited shouldn’t bind you a to meaningless life but give you hope that some things can be certain. You can have your cake and eat it too but just know calories exists.
In short Determinism exists in the scientific world Free Will exists in conceptual or human world, Both can exists and still be logical atleast to us as a human because the universe is not absolute, Also I know it is biased but it is the only way to rationalize it atleast in our understanding in the “Human Realm”.
Determinism basically says that randomness doesn’t really exist, that anything we would perceive as random is actually just a system so complex and chaotic that it would be impossible to predict.
But, on a fundamental level, don’t subatomic particles behave probabilistically, rather than just unpredictably? If so, wouldn’t that mean that, if you could “rewind time”, there could be a different outcome from the same conditions, or in other words, a new first cause?
Both Sam Harris and Robert Sapolskey agree that if we lost our sense of moral desert, our system of justice would necessarily become more compassionate. I think this fundamentally misunderstands both our own system and what a more deterministic system would entail. I will go into the structure and mission of our own system first and then investigate a more rehabilitative system historically and show that the underlying drivers of cruelty in justice are not philosophical but economic and political.
In both federal sentencing law and judicial practice, retributive considerations are present but rarely operate as the sole or explicit governing rationale for punishment. Judges are required to justify sentences through a framework that includes deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and proportionality constraints. Even when sentences have a retributive structure in effect, retribution is embedded within broader conceptual language rather than stated as an independent aim. The contemporary U.S. system is not straightforwardly organized around retribution in its official reasoning, undermining the claim that abandoning belief in free will would transform our retributive system into a more compassionate system.
When the Federal Bureau of Prisons says incarceration is given
“as punishment, not for punishment”
It is trying to express two ideas. First, that it is the loss of liberty it seeks to enact, and second, that the sentence doesn't entail any metaphysical desert.
There is a conceptual error on the part of sapolskey and Harris because Retribution (in the philosophical sense) means harm is justified because the offender deserves to suffer. But the Bureau of Prisons does not say anything like that. It doesn't rely on the idea of moral desert as an organizing principle. It actually aligns more with an administrative theory of punishment than a retributive one. It says only that punishment is the consequence of conviction. It also affirms respect for the “inherent dignity of all human beings” and providing “opportunities for self-improvement."
In the courts Federal sentencing law includes retribution but explicitly subordinates it within a plural, constrained framework.
Under 18 U.S.C. § 3553:
Courts must impose a sentence “sufficient, but not greater than necessary” and among the purposes to “reflect the seriousness of the offense… and to provide just punishment”
alongside
“adequate deterrence”
“protect the public”
“provide… training, medical care, or treatment”
18 U.S.C. § 3553
My point in this isn't to defend our current prison system. It is broken as I think most people would agree. It's to show that changing beliefs from our current system to a hard deterministic model of justice alone wouldn't make it more compassionate necessarily.
It is tempting to think that penal systems reflect philosophies, retributive systems produce punitive outcomes, rehabilitative systems produce humane ones, and determinist frameworks would naturally reduce punishment severity. However, historical comparison show otherwise. Systems such as Soviet “corrective labor” institutions or Vietnamese reducation camps and contemporary prison systems like those in the United States differ radically in their stated moral justifications, yet both produced horrific outcomes that depended more on economic incentives, and political pressures than any philosophical commitments for or against free will and determinism. The lived reality of punishment is only loosely connected to its official philosophical framing. Debates about determinism and free will, may be less germaine to punishment and prison than is often assumed in philosophical arguments.
According to the classical view of determinism, if I had enough information about the past states of the universe (including my brain states etc.), I could predict everything. For example, whether tonight I will go to bed at 9 or after 9.
Suppose I build a "Laplace machine" that analyzes and computes all of the above and each day produces the above prediction.
Suppose I read this prediction every evening at 8. Let's say that today's prediction is "before 9 pm."
It seems strange to say that I am compelled to do what the prediction says, rather than that, once I have taken note of the prediction, I could act differently — and go to bed after 9. Perhaps that is the case, but "experientially" it runs against every intuition and experience we have.
One might reply: but the machine might have in fact predicted that you would go to bed after 9, since it also knew that you would have the impulse to defy the prediction in order to prove that you are free; therefore, the causal chain that resulted in your going to bed later also included the fact of you reading the prediction that you would go earlier.
That is perfectly fine; I agree.
BUT my point is: in this case the machine has not provided me with the correct prediction, but with a false one. In other words, I have not acquired true/adequate KNOWLEDGE of my future states.
So the issue remains: if I did have access to the correct and complete prediction, I could, arguably, had changed it again.
And you could certainly say once more: in that case the machine would also have predicted this, making a further sub-prediction. Sure, but again, it has not given me that further correct complete prediction, or I could defy that as well. And so in an infinite regress.
Nor can the machine resort to semantic tricks like the liar's paradox, or use a multiple-outputs model, like: "if I say you will go before nine, you will go after; if I say after, you will go before," or "I predict that you will do the opposite of whatever I predict," since these are not deterministic models. A deterministic model requires a unique, necessary final output deducible from the past states. After 9, or before 9. Not: if X then at 9, if Y then before 9. There is no real ontological "if" in a deterministic universe. I've asked you to locate a certain future event at given space-time coordinates, and you simply have to tell me where and when the event is compelled by its cone of causality to take place. Why can't you?
*** *** ***
Now, the machine in question of course does not exist and probably cannot exist, but what is argued above also applies when — let's say — a group of scientists is trying to make adequate predictions about my behavior. If I do not acquire/get entangled with those predictions, they will probably be very accurate; but if I do acquire those predictions, they will suddenly become very unstable.
Why??
Of course, here too one can include in the prediction the fact that I am in "rebel mood"; but if this factor/variable is also included in the prediction I acquire (so that I can, so to speak, rebel against my own rebel attitude), once again the prediction will turn out to be much less solid and accurate.
It is as if, the moment a system capable of having knowledge becomes part of — gets entangled, so to speak, with — a true/adequate prediction about itself (it acquires knowledge about its own future states), the smooth deterministic evolution that that system had before (and would have had if it had not become entangled) "collapses."
If the past states of the universe predetermine that tonight I will go to bed at 9, the fact that I acquire knowledge of this should not have these disruptive and "looping" effects.
What is the mechanism by force of which a deterministic adequate and complete prediction about a system "capable of knowledge", when such predictions becomes part of the system itself (that is, the system acquires self-referential knowledge about itslef) causes the system to cease to be deterministic? Or better, seems to create an emergent new causal chain that was not entailed and contained, that cannot be “extracted” from past physical states.
That's quite testable. But how it is explained?
Liberal capitalist society’s fundamental reinforcing philosophy is a dualist idealism, aka “free will”. Wealth inequality is a matter of merit. Crimes, legal or otherwise, are a matter of moral agency, and must be dealt with punitively. Poverty is personal, rather than systemic, failure. Basically, liberalism insists that historic societal change is fundamentally driven at the superstructural level (the realm of “ideas”) rather than at the structural economic level, and that liberal subjects are individual moral agents of free will.
Socialist theory is built off of a philosophy of monist materialism. While not all socialist philosophers outright embrace determinism, it is entirely compatible with the fundamentals of socialist theory (dialectical and historical materialism) in a way that liberalism fundamentally is not. Socialism accepts that human wills exist, but that they are ultimately a part of the dialectical material chain of causality just like everything else.
Please ask any questions or let me know your thoughts!I’ve tried to write this in as thoughtful of a manner as possible. I am not endorsing determinism, free will, liberalism, capitalism, or socialism in this post. I’m just trying to make a case for how compatible determinism is with the two most prominent political ideologies currently governing the human race.
