Your Aversion To Determinism Is Itself Predetermined

[boost]

I'm not sure free will plays into it. One could be a hard determinist and still have an idiosyncratic, subjective view on what's happening.

True, and I may have focused too much on free will, but then again I think it ultimately does come to free will in a roundabout way. So the idea that things could have been different necessitates free will if you dig deep enough. What else would have provided a fork in the road?

I also question whether we have a 'pragmatic need' for free will. I think we have a natural tendency to believe in it because it matches our phenomonology - "Why did I do that? Because I decided to" is a much more straightforward chain of thought than "I did it because of neural processes over which I have no control."

I don't disagree that we have an innate tendency to believe we have free will, but in the context of trying to find root causes of current events, I think we are in abstract enough territory that our predisposition to believe in free will isn't really at play, or is to a lesser degree.

Maybe the point I'm trying to make is that all histories start with an action of free will, and which action we chose(lol) as the starting point sets a bias for what follows-- and maybe I'm simply proposing that it be more common to include a caveat that the prime mover was actually not so, and that the prime mover themselves have a robust history.

The time travel to assassinate Hitler thought experiment comes to mind. If he's already Chancellor, it's likely far too late, but if he's just a baby, you're committing infanticide. That distinction belies the truth that even Hitler has a history that combined to become his actions.

[wufwugy]

Maybe the point I'm trying to make is that all histories start with an action of free will, and which action we chose(lol) as the starting point sets a bias for what follows-- and maybe I'm simply proposing that it be more common to include a caveat that the prime mover was actually not so, and that the prime mover themselves have a robust history.

This sounds like a biased causal chain instead of a deterministic one.

[boost]

This sounds like a biased causal chain instead of a deterministic one.

I'm not following, but I'd like to.

[wufwugy]

I'm not following, but I'd like to.

Decisions could exist within a probability field, where an effect might never be determined 100% by its causes. There could be a range of effects with a range of probabilities that derive from the causes that come before.

If decisions are viewed as if they are chemistry or similar, they probably look determined. But I'm not sure decisions should be viewed like that. For all we know the causal chain of complex organisms contains randomness or something else.

If at a later date we perfectly model the universe and perfectly model causality, we might find ourselves saying things like this: "well in this situation the entity says yes 84% of the time and no 16% of the time".

[MadMojoMonkey]

[...] if determinism is the way of the universe.

Well... it's complicated. We need to be careful about how we define and use the word "determinism" in this context.

The universe is deterministic within a rigidly defined spread of probabilistic "allowed" outcomes.

If at a later date we perfectly model the universe and perfectly model causality, we might find ourselves saying things like this: "well in this situation the entity says yes 84% of the time and no 16% of the time".

This is pretty much what QM has revealed to us.

For the systems which we can model perfectly, we see exactly this kind of causality. There are certain "allowed" evolutions of the prepared system, and those outcomes will happen at very well-defined probabilities. Plenty of systems will have only 1 allowed future, which happens at 100%, but plenty systems are not so straight-forward.