35
votes
Accepted
How can a person truly love another if hard determinism is true?
Hard determinism does not entail that your love is a chemical reaction in your brain.
Hard determinism is roughly the view that :
For every event, E2, there is another event, E1, that precedes E2 ...
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34
votes
Who Bears the Burden of Proof Regarding Free Will: Advocates or Skeptics
The Burden of Proof isn't an absolute property. There's no experiment you can perform on a person, a brain, or a position to show that that thing has the burden of proof.
The Burden of Proof is a ...
- 3,967
30
votes
Why do people still believe in free will?
Most academic philosophers (around 60%, according to the PhilPapers survey) lean toward compatibilism: the view that determinism (which is what you are getting at, more or less) is compatible with ...
- 2,677
28
votes
How can a fundamentally random process follow a probability distribution?
Nothing "keeps track" of a probability distribution other than us observers. The physical processes are whatever they are, and to us, this may manifest as observable probability ...
- 5,844
24
votes
Who Bears the Burden of Proof Regarding Free Will: Advocates or Skeptics
Human beings work on a presumption of free will; few people (outside of certain psychological disorders) believe they have absolutely no control over their actions moment to moment. Therefore the ...
- 24.2k
21
votes
Does a rock falling down a hill perform computation?
I think your example is overly complex for the question you are asking. Consider instead a pachinko-like device with a slot at the top, and 4 slots or holes at the bottom. In between the top and the ...
- 1,097
20
votes
Why do people still believe in free will?
Schiphol's answer is correct, in that you need to first say what kind of free will you're talking about. I'm going to answer your question assuming that you're talking about libertarian free will. It'...
- 3,904
19
votes
Doesn't our awareness of qualia imply the brain is non-deterministic?
Qualia are consistent with both deterministic and non-deterministic theories.
Now to your specific propositions...
if this description was deterministic, we could simulate a brain
This is not ...
- 5,844
17
votes
Accepted
Can I predict my future by observing all humans/events
Can I predict my future by observing all humans/events
According to Wolpert's theorem, no you can't.
What you are describing here:
I believe everything happened/happening in the universe is not ...
- 27.9k
16
votes
Accepted
Doesn't our awareness of qualia imply the brain is non-deterministic?
Here's a picture of how it works according to the opposing side. You may not agree with this picture, but it should answer your question, by showing you a point of view where the contradictions you ...
- 18.9k
16
votes
How can a fundamentally random process follow a probability distribution?
Good, you think about the difference between objects and attributes, what Hoffstader called figure and ground.
At the world's fair, I watched in amazement as rubber balls fell through a series of pegs ...
- 1,880
15
votes
Accepted
Who Bears the Burden of Proof Regarding Free Will: Advocates or Skeptics
Honestly most of the answers here are absolute waffle. Here's the actual answer. Both of them. Burden of proof applies if you are making a claim. That's it. Sometimes people will emphasise the point ...
- 166
14
votes
Does a rock falling down a hill perform computation?
Computation is a deliberate mapping of inputs to outputs according to a finite list of specific instructions. An accidental process cannot be computation. A process with infinite or unknowable ...
- 8,413
14
votes
How can a fundamentally random process follow a probability distribution?
What "keeps track" of the statistics of the random process and "ensures" that its outcomes align with the probability distribution it is supposed to "obey" over the long ...
- 4,186
13
votes
Accepted
Are there different types of randomness?
The core intuition underlying randomness is that of unpredictability. For simplicity, I'll use a discrete time stochastic process as an example.
We say process X is "random" if knowing its ...
- 4,186
12
votes
How can a fundamentally random process follow a probability distribution?
What "keeps track" of the statistics of the random process and "ensures" that its outcomes align with the probability distribution it is supposed to "obey" over the long ...
- 1,292
11
votes
Aren't Determinism and Free Will indiscernible from the mortal perspective?
Your point, "Determinism and free will are not discernible from the mortal perspective" is indeed the third antinomy (paradox) of Kant. According to Kant, human capacity for knowledge is innately ...
- 3,657
11
votes
Why do people still believe in free will?
We believe in free will because — aside from a few people with particular psychological conditions — we experience ourselves as beings capable of making choices and exercising free will. When someone ...
- 24.2k
10
votes
Accepted
If hard determinism is true, why should we try to better ourselves?
Contrary to the other answer and the assumptions in your question: Hard determinism does not, in any way, mean that trying to better yourself does not work. Rather, under hard determinism, whether you ...
- 3,109
10
votes
'Free will' as a 'confused concept': Is Ned Block correct?
Determinism means that every event is completely determined by the previous event.
The negation, indeterminism, therefore means that every event is incompletely determined (=there is probabilistic ...
- 3,888
9
votes
Proof for the absence of free will?
Seems like no one brought up Frankfurt and hierarchical compatabilism.
First-order desires: desires that are directed to objects or states of affairs.
We desire things like being healthy, being well-...
- 3,560
9
votes
Accepted
Strawson on Free Will: What are the most persuasive challenges to his position?
Strawson's argument is about ultimate moral responsibility not stritly about free will (although related).
The tricky phrase here is "ultimate". One can argue that free will is not about ...
- 2,948
9
votes
Accepted
The Mediocrity Principle, The Laws of Nature and Free Will
This is a coherent argument, but most of its premises are false. First, laws of science are regularities, not "laws" and all of them are broken. See 'The role of symmetry in fundamental ...
- 17.4k
8
votes
Is it possible to program free will?
I think the answer is simple based on the wording;
"construct a program which can be construed as free will"
and the answer is yes. Whether or not free will actually exists is irrelevant considering ...
- 178
8
votes
How can a person truly love another if hard determinism is true?
If hard determinism is correct then there is no other option so "true" love would be defined as you having the moments you've had and experiencing the corresponding chemical response that you have.
- 198
8
votes
Does a rock falling down a hill perform computation?
Speaking as a computer scientist, I would say that every such hill is performing a computation. Namely, it computes the state that the rock is in once it reaches the bottom. More precisely, the input ...
- 127
8
votes
Does the want to seek determinism in physics come from a fallacy that it explains more?
You seem to have it backwards with regards to what science (in particular physics) is doing. Where mathematics, logic and to some extend religion build a universe from the ground up, so where they ...
- 8,148
7
votes
Can I predict my future by observing all humans/events
Whether or not you can predict your future actually depends on your definitions of the world. In particular, you have the emphasized "if" regarding the monitoring and processing of the data. ...
- 18.8k
7
votes
How can a person truly love another if hard determinism is true?
The usual question is whether free will is possible under hard determinism. However, love, particularly romantic love as conceived in the western culture, certainly is not construed as an act of free ...
- 387
7
votes
Proof for the absence of free will?
This argument constructs a paradox of the type popularized by Zeno, i.e.:
one cannot do x until one has done x'
one cannot do x' until one has done x''
one cannot do x'' until one has done x'''...
...
- 24.2k
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