What is the point of "what is the point?" argument in re determinism?

Question

One argument/perspective that I don't understand with regard to determinism goes like this:

"If determinism obtains then there's no point in arguing about determinism or anything else"

Presumably this is because ... we will believe what we believe and that belief is not a personal decision, that being the main thrust of determinism. I can't think of any other interpretation of the statement supra. Perhaps it's clearer to other folks. Would appreciate some clarificatory prose/verse in this regard.

Answer 1

Who made this argument? Does it have a name?

Both proponents of libertarian free will as well as compatibilist would reference to that line of thought, but it has no name. Here is a quote from Eccles and Popper 1977 in "Brain and self":

That we have free will is a fact of experience. Furthermore, I state emphatically that to deny free will is neither a rational nor a logical act. This denial either presupposes free will for the deliberately chosen response in making that denial, which is a contradiction, or else it is merely the automatic response of a nervous system built by genetic coding and molded by conditioning.

But other quotes are likely to exist, in particular compatibilist responses to the libertarian view proposed in the above quote.

Is the argument sound?

In philosophy of mind there is no consensus, even if modern mainstream tends towards compatibilism. Indicating that philosophers don't strongly mind. It also seems more like a battlecry than an argument, as the question "is there a point" does not suggest falsehood, only absurdity (but life could be absurd).

Please see any of the 100s of questions on mind determinism, free will and compatibilism for details on this. Or ask specifically about the views of any single philosopher about it.

In general, evolution can be seen as the ultimate compatibility response. Fully deterministic computer simulations can show a convergence of genetic algorithms to "truth" as in "whatever solves the problem" provided there is a feedback loop. So the deterministic nature of algorithms does not prevent eventual convergence to truth, and reasoning and argument could be the evolutionary vehicle that still would work when deterministic.

Answer 2

	You think Determinism is real	You think Free will is real
Determinism being real	You don't have free will	You think you have free will, but don't
Free Will being real	You have free will, but deny it	You have free will

So if you are a deterministic part of the universe (not just live in a deterministic world), then you don't have free will and no amount of arguing about it is going to change that in any meaningful way. So in that sense it IS pointless, because your perception of the fact doesn't change the fact and your discussion could only change your perception. So no matter how you went out of that you wouldn't have moved the needle of reality even the tiniest of fractions at most you would have changed yourself.

That being said, it's also pointless to claim that it's pointless, because the universe for some strange reason has configured itself in such a way that you were determined to do that anyway... Yet arguing that it's pointless might make you stop, so it's slightly less pointless than having that discussion given that at least theoretically someone with that goal could accomplish their goal.

While if you have free will you'd have the opposite problem. In that you could argue all day long, but all that this would express is your will to argue, you'd still have it. You could awkwardly deny it and dive into insanity, but that wouldn't really rid yourself of your free will to reject your free will or to disguise it as just "A" will. So as to pretend you're just acting upon an impules rather than having chosen that impulse yourself. So again it's pointless because you wouldn't change reality and in that case probably not even your own perception of it (not an expert on how insanity would warp your felt reality in that regard though), just the way you act about that.

And if you have free will and acknowledge that you have free will, then you'd have free will and that's basically it. Wouldn't really change much either as you apparently still life in a largely deterministic world, that determines a huge part of your daily business, but at least you'd have some spare time to your creativity or be dreaded by your inability to make use of that.

So if your objective is to cross the horizontal lines then likely no amount of arguing is going to accomplish that and the discussions about it are thus pointless.

If you want to experience what it is like to cross one of the vertacle lines in the table, then arguing is also pointless because pretending to is somewhat of a you thing and you ultimately can't actually accomplish it.

Also while you could go from having free will to wanting to not have free will. I'm not so sure you could go from the absence of free will to the desire to have free will at least as an intrinsic will as that would be the thing that you wish for, wouldn't it? Also why would you want to fool yourself in the first place.

So the more likely positions of a person are to either believe they have no free will because free will doesn't exist or to believe free will because free will exists. So the point of any of these discussions would just be about convincing another person that they are on the complementary diagonal (will/det. or det/will) and to change towards a more matching position.

But if they actually believe in where they place themselves than they would also believe that such a change is impossible and thus not do it as that would just be awkward or not possible to begin with.

So there are a lot of possible interpretations of that that actually would render these conversations pointless. Now whether it is sound would require to know the answer...

Answer 3

This conflates determinism with some form of "fate", or suggests that we're non-deterministic beings bound by a deterministic world.

Fate might suggest that you're always going to end with a particular result, so it doesn't matter what you do, but this is an incorrect representation of determinism.

Let's consider a basic calculator. Most people would agree that's something which deterministically takes some input and produces some output. But it's clearly the case that giving it different input produces different output. 2+2 is 4, but 3*3 is 9.

Following the analogy, it's trivially the case that humans, when presented with different data and arguments, end up with different conclusions. We also have direct evidence of this happening, of people changing their mind in response to what's presented to them (even if this doesn't happen as often as we'd maybe like, for a range of reasons such as cognitive biases).

So there would be "the point" in arguing about things.

Is there a point to trying to choose under determinism?

If determinism is true, it would be the case that you can't "choose" to try to change anyone's mind about anything - you'd either do it or you wouldn't do it.

But to realise that you can't choose this, and then to use this information to act in one way or the other, is a self-undermining line of reasoning. This reasoning presumes that you're able to choose whether to be subject to determinism, that you can notice determinism and then either submit or not. But the issue is that this process itself would be deterministic. You can't use whether determinism is true to shirk responsibility of making decisions. It's an invalid factor of consideration, and you'd be "choosing" (whether deterministically or not) to use this factor, instead of, say, considering how your actions would affect others. It's a bad excuse for someone to be a bad person or to give in to hopelessness.

* This doesn't "presuppose free will" or make determinism self-defeating, like others might say. It's merely a matter of fact that reasoning based on the foundation of one's reasoning is often invalid (particularly to conclude that one cannot reason) due to circularity. It would be similarly invalid to say "My reasoning is random, so I have no ability to influence my choices, so I can't decide to not go out and stab some people".

But you can absolutely use whether determinism is true to determine how to best act with respect to others or one's future self, e.g. you know your future self will be unable to resist eating snacks you have in your house, so your present self decides to not have snacks in the house as a result. This supposes some level of determinism is true (regardless of whether determinism is true more broadly), and it's a line of reasoning that most people use on a daily basis.

See also: What are the implications of accepting that we don't have free will?

Does determinism undermine its connection to truth?

"deterministic acquisition of beliefs arguably undermines their connection to the truth"

Does the calculator's deterministic acquisition of a result undermine its connection to the truth? Would we trust a calculator more if 2+2 doesn't necessarily give 4, but could instead give any number of results?

The very reason that we trust it is because it's deterministic. It actually seems to be non-determinism (particularly libertarian free will) which has this problem, because that means being able to end up with any number of results given the same input, which makes it questionable to say the result corresponds to a true thing in reality.

Quantum randomness?

Note: The possible fundamental randomness of particles due to quantum effects would mean determinism isn't true. But what I said above still applies. Randomness doesn't help get you to a meaningful concept of free will. To the point that things are random, there wouldn't be any point in trying to affect them... because they're random. So we can try to determine which things are deterministic, and try to affect those, while accepting that random (or things we can't accurately predict at this point in time) things are just things we need to accept.

Answer 4

Simply put, if we live in a strictly deterministic world then any speech we make has the same valence as the sounds that boulders make when they roll down a hill. Speech would merely be a series of sounds made by the vocal apparatus in response to a cascade of neuro-electrical impulses that is itself strictly deterministic. The pretext that we are 'making an argument' or 'trying to convince someone' is entirely vapid, because we can't choose to try to convince someone, and no one can choose to be convinced. Of course, no one can choose not to make the argument either, so the whole exercise is futile.

It's like two people at the crest of a rollercoaster arguing about whether gravity exists. It doesn't matter how passionate they are, the outcome isn't going to change.

The "What's the point?" approach is a type of reductio ad absurdum (though not a strongly formulated one), asserting something like: "If what you say is true, then what you say is utterly void and meaningless". It's supposed to make people reflect on the idea that the argument is self-defeating because people who truly believe it must also truly believe that they have no capacity to make arguments. But not too many people think it through that way.

Answer 5

I think the argument that determinism steals science's and philosophy's thunder is sound and correct, when such determinism is conceived as reductionist, i.e. if our ideas are seen as meaningless noise made by the brain machinery. In this case of course, the whole of science and philosophy would be meaningless noise. A reductionist determinist should really shut up, if he could, because by his own account he's only making noise.

But things are different if determinism works in non-reductionist ways, i.e. if it takes into account the power of ideas within its causality mechanisms.^ In this compatibilist view, ideas can be both predetermined and meaningful. So a compatibilist determinist has no reason to shut up. His ideas have status in his own world view.

^ by that i mean that, simply put, ideas are considered causal. They have causes and consequences in the world. IOW, thoughts are necessary for certain outcomes, and a brain unable to create thoughts, like the brain of a p-zombie, would be a dysfunctional brain, aka unable to fulfill its function, which is to produce thoughts, which will then do their thing (cause whatever they cause).