Thursday, January 4, 2024

Free Will is Incoherent, Thus Determinism is Incoherent

 I don't believe in free will or determinism. Kinda opposite the compatibilists. You can falsify free will by observing someone acting otherwise than they acted. It is logically impossible to observe what you didn't observe. It's an incoherent assertion.

 Popper was right: logically unfalsifiable statements are meaningless.

 Precisely because the opposite of determinism is incoherent, determinism is also incoherent. It's a wrong question. Like asking whether green is deosil or widdershins. Or: the only way to remove the back side of the coin is to also remove the front side. There is no coin here. 

 Because the positions are meaningless, it is not surprising the consequences are identical. If you want to fly a plane, you have to bolt the wings onto the plane. If green is widdershins, you have to bolt the wings onto the plane. If green is deosil, you have to bolt the wings onto the plane. Incoherent positions have no physical consequences. 

 Equivalently, because the consequences are identical, we ought to predict these 'opposites' are in fact meaningless. Which is indeed what we antedict.

 

 So, fun fact, omniscience of the future is impossible. Amusingly, this means knowledge of the present is also cosmically impossible. 

 To model a thing you have to pay overhead, which means you have to be bigger than it is. Even the alleged all-powerful God can't properly know what God is going to do next, because for God to know God, God would have to be bigger than God, either falsifying the idea he's God or falsifying logic, meaning falsifying Existence. 

 The only way to properly know what you're doing is to look at what you've already done, which means it's already in the past. 

 Even if you're God, the only way to know for sure what you're going, to find out or learn what you're going to do, is to do it. 

 If determinism is true, the future is predictable.


 Thus we find libertarianism is incoherent and determinism is false at best. 

 We can rejigger libertarianism into something, but all forms of it are trivially true. You have to accept that non-identical situations are nevertheless close enough. In other words, this time I eat the cookie but the next time I don't eat the cookie, proving I could have not eaten the cookie the first time. For some value of [could have].

 We can rejigger determinism, but not into anything useful. It's merely accepting that identical things are identical. Yes, if you make two bit-for-bit identical cosmos, they will evolve identically. If you put exactly the same person in the same mood with the same memories and subject to the same random factors in front of the same cookie, they will make the same decision. 

 You can't do that. Even a capital-G uberGod can't do that.  Even God can't do something for the first time twice. 

 Determinism allows prediction if and only if the second time is the first time, if and only if the third time is the second time. This is another angle on the fact that for the Dao to know what the Dao is going to do, it has to be bigger than the Dao, and thus you have an equivocation, not logic. 

 There is no steelman of libertarianism or of determinism. Straw is the strongest material of which you can construct positions like these.


 Generally what folk want to say with [free will] is that their will is part of the casual chain. That I ate the cookie or didn't not due to alien mind casters or because the stars caused me to but because my subjective existence drove the action. Which it true, duh, of course. Assuming the person in question has a soul and a will and aren't a zombie or what some call an NPC. 

 Generally what folk want to say with [determinism] is that the future is predictable in some limited sense. That actions have knowable consequences. That I will feel burning if I eat that cookie.

 Will is about action. Determinism is about consequences. They're not even directly related. You have to be dishonest to get a real debate on this issue. At best you must falsify your claim to having done due diligence. Falsified confidence.

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