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I am religious and believe in free will

71 (27.7%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

114 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (23.8%)

Total Members Voted: 251

[hector13]

I think that's called determinism? Maybe with some kind of adjective, maybe like "absolute determinism"?

Yeah it sounded like what I would consider determinism.

Fakeedit: a quick wiki search suggests there is apparently a thing called compatabilism which has something to do with free will and determinism being compatible.

Proper edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism

[Great Order]

Compatibilism sounds like it.

[MaxTheFox]

I do not believe in any sort of determinism. I believe the universe is just a very random, cold, and chaotic place where both bad and good things happen for no real reason.

[Great Order]

It can be cold, chaotic and random while still having the future be set. The coldness, chaos and randomness just happen in a specific way.

Bit like recording a double pendulum. It's chaotic, and if you've never seen the recording you don't know what's going to happen next because you can't work it out, but the chaotic nature of it doesn't change what was recorded.

[MaxTheFox]

So you think quantum fluctuations aren't random after all? Why?

[Great Order]

It's not that, it's more that... I dunno, the timeline's a thing that's there and immutable, and stretches forwards and backwards in time, we're just travelling along it. The quantum fluctuations might be completely random, but they're already set to happen in that specific random manner. It's less that everything is set by past events and more that the future's immutable and our decisions don't affect it because, on the timeline, the decision you will make is already there in the future awaiting you. Or in this case, the random quantum fluctuation was already there in the future awaiting that specific moment to happen (Not literally, just a useful way of describing what I mean)

[Egan_BW]

I believe that they're random, but don't matter that much for anything at the human level and above. After millions of years, sure, things probably begin being pretty unpredictable. Though as humans we're pretty bad at predicting anything anyways, so the distinction between a deterministic universe and a random one doesn't matter that much in a practical way.

[hector13]

The way I’m interpreting GO’s philosophy (rightly or wrongly) is that it’s kind of a matter of perspective or relativity; from the perspective of “the future” (the endpoint or destination or whatever) everything that results in getting there has “already happened”,  but we haven’t reached that point yet, so it doesn’t feel pre-determined to us.

Kind of like the difference between looking at yesterday and tomorrow relative to today. We know what happened yesterday to get to today, but we’re not yet sure how what happened today will manifest itself tomorrow.

I would disagree, but then again I feel powerless enough when I feel like my actions have consequences, so I’d rather not consider that it’s my consequences that have actions.

[Great Order]

Pretty much, like if you were able to take an outside view into the whole timeline, past present and future, the future wouldn't be some vague, nebulous shape of possibilities or foggy morass of unknown. There'd be a single timeline that's unable to be altered, and you'd see the present travelling along it (Or our present, maybe it's possible to exist beyond the "now" and our form of consciousness just happens to be limited to experiencing individual slices of time. Who knows).

So the decision you'll make on what to eat tomorrow is there on the timeline. You still made the decision, it's just that was always the decision you are going to make (Oh boy, I love borderline nonsensical tense trouble).

Of course, it's all academic regardless. If we can't see the future then we don't know, and the best thing we can do is continue to act as we are anyways.

[MaxTheFox]

Obviously we can't know, yeah. But I tend to take the assumptions that lead me to the most sensical courses of actions. Full determinism leads to jank like nobody's misdeeds ever being their fault, strictly speaking, and that just feels absurd so I don't take that.

I also don't believe there is a single timeline or a single future. In fact I believe the future is well and truly uncomputable.

The world just makes a bit more sense with free will imho.

[McTraveller]

Eh, there's determinism and then there's determinism.  Physical systems will always evolve according to the laws of physics, even if probabilistic (Quantum Mechanics) instead of fully deterministic (General Relativity).

If you have a complex decision-making agent, like a human, however, then you can make directed actions for which responsibility can be assigned, even though the physics is "determined."

The big breakthrough in understanding will be when humanity figures out how things like directed randomness (like in microbial motion) give rise to "choice."

[Egan_BW]

Obviously we can't know, yeah. But I tend to take the assumptions that lead me to the most sensical courses of actions. Full determinism leads to jank like nobody's misdeeds ever being their fault, strictly speaking, and that just feels absurd so I don't take that.

I also don't believe there is a single timeline or a single future. In fact I believe the future is well and truly uncomputable.

The world just makes a bit more sense with free will imho.

Can you explain the mechanism by which non-determinism leads to culpability? What makes much more sense to me is that everyone is culpable for their own choices and the determinism or non-determinism of the universe is irrelevant to that. If you choose to do evil, it doesn't matter that you're deterministic, since you still are the deterministic process which lead to the decision to do evil.

[Grim Portent]

Obviously we can't know, yeah. But I tend to take the assumptions that lead me to the most sensical courses of actions. Full determinism leads to jank like nobody's misdeeds ever being their fault, strictly speaking, and that just feels absurd so I don't take that.

I also don't believe there is a single timeline or a single future. In fact I believe the future is well and truly uncomputable.

The world just makes a bit more sense with free will imho.

Can you explain the mechanism by which non-determinism leads to culpability? What makes much more sense to me is that everyone is culpable for their own choices and the determinism or non-determinism of the universe is irrelevant to that. If you choose to do evil, it doesn't matter that you're deterministic, since you still are the deterministic process which lead to the decision to do evil.

It's less academic in the context of deities.

If all things are the inevitable result of prior conditions, then humans lack free will relative to a being outside of the universe (such as god). If humans lack free will, then rewarding or punishing them is immoral because their goodness/wickedness was determined by the act of creation itself.

If things are not deterministic, then humans who do bad things are at fault, and so it is ethical to reward or punish humans because they have made real decisions rather than merely appearing to have made decisions.


From a mortal perspective it makes little difference if Ted Bundy had free will or not, he needed to be locked up and/or killed for the safety of others. From the perspective of Yahweh, Odin or Vishnu or whoever, it is more relevant because if Bundy does not have free will, then all his actions were part of a divine plan and punishing him for them becomes hypocrisy of the highest order.

[Criptfeind]

I don't think that logic follows, as even in a deterministic universe with a omnipotent omniscient deity punishing Ted Bundy could be (and presumably would be like all actions from anyone and anything) also part of the divine plan.

I'd agree that it wouldn't strictly speaking be Ted Bundies fault, but it wouldn't matter. I sorta get the feeling that wasn't really what Max was saying, although I dunno, specially since I'm not sure what makes that janky or absurd.

[Grim Portent]

I don't think that logic follows, as even in a deterministic universe with a omnipotent omniscient deity punishing Ted Bundy could be (and presumably would be like all actions from anyone and anything) also part of the divine plan.

I'd agree that it wouldn't strictly speaking be Ted Bundies fault, but it wouldn't matter. I sorta get the feeling that wasn't really what Max was saying, although I dunno, specially since I'm not sure what makes that janky or absurd.

I mean it would be unethical for a god to punish someone who was evil in a deterministic universe, not unethical for other humans to do so.

If Ted Bundy being a horrible piece of shit was part of a divine plan, it is hypocritical for the divine being that made that plan to then also send Bundy to eternal torment for doing what he was created to do by said divine being.

If I made a sapient robot programmed to kill people, then tortured it for killing people, I would at minimum be a dickhead.