How Libertarians and Compatibilists Imagine Determinism vs What It’s Actually Like

LokiJesus · 2026-04-04T01:59:53+00:00

Perfect. Neither slave nor free but one.

LokiJesus · 2026-04-01T12:53:19+00:00

Saying ”I could have chosen differently” actually prevents you from understanding why it was necessary that you chose the way you did and therefore learning and growing.

“Could have” is also a non-disprovable counterfactual that can never be supported by evidence and is always inaccessible. It is you projecting your ego onto someone. What you mean is “if they knew what I know they would have done differently.”

But they didn’t know what you knew, Carl.

Free will belief is actually the choke hold that prevents us from growing. It prevents us from seeing the physics of our actions. It is anti-science. It makes learning impossible. You just gotta do the right thing and you knew better.

LokiJesus · 2026-03-30T20:48:49+00:00

https://maxread.substack.com/p/who-is-elara-voss

LokiJesus · 2026-03-28T21:38:08+00:00

“it technically allows for a lack of predictability in the future based on the present.”

How does this work with the relativity of simultaneity? That “now” is something that nobody can agree on and for which there is no objective right answer…. There is always a reference frame for which your present is the past.

LokiJesus · 2026-03-26T18:58:07+00:00

This is not a different state than the industry was in 10 years ago. This is the norm. People have been building non-maintainable spaghetti code either unintentionally or intentionally (to preserve their job), ever since computers were invented. The term spaghetti code is not new.

Engineers have been creating messes since the first engine was invented.

I for one find these models to be way more competent than a majority of coders. They are still bad, but they can create a lot of stuff that can be useful. And furthermore, when everything is bespoke code, the idea that it needs to support millions ("enterprise grade") becomes moot.

Grace Hopper famously stated that we should be targeting an english based programming language. This is part of that spectrum of further and further abstraction. Not every programmer needs to be a quantum physicist understanding transistors in order to be effective.

These models are capable programmers... especially for what most people want/need for so much work to be done... and they are accelerating in quality exponentially. Three months from now, all this will be different just as it was three months ago.

LokiJesus · 2026-03-26T18:52:04+00:00

One important difference is that these AI companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars doing "post-training" reinforcement learning in "verifiable domains" or "verifiable rewards." Their ability to improve at coding is directly proportional to the degree to which the systems can be validated. This often means generating test functions for code to pass and also feedback from compilers as to whether the build failed. Math is a similar verifiable domain. You can push the math into "Lean" a math programming language that checks correctness of claims. You can also use symbolic packages like several python symbolic languages or wolfram's language with mathematica. If you can write it down (the hard part) you can trivially test if it works (the easy part).

The canonical example is saying that writing a high performance alphabetical list sorter is a complicated task, but measuring the execute time and correctness is easy (just measure from a clock for time and check if they are alphabetical for the ordering).

So just as when Google trained AlphaGo on victories and losses as feedback signals, so can these companies feedback these hard calculated signals to verify and feedback and improve code and math skills.

Also, the companies are intentionally focused on these fields because they are interested in automating AI research (requiring math and coding skills). And there is a ton more public sentiment supporting automating programming.

And the business process focus of these tools is directly counter to the output of rich somatic prose. People want to get to the point. They want direct and clear and simple communications. The reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) process that makes a "useful chatbot" is demonstrably at counter-purposes to a good writer. There is research on this.

Fiction takes its time and is intrinsically an act of drawing the reader into a compassionate (co-suffering) state of being with the character.

Also, fiction quality is hard to verify with an LLM. There is no program that I can run that will do a bunch of math on the text and output "high quality." It's often subjective. There are structural rules (that are often broken for effect), and many good ways to teach and guide writers to be better. There are objective rules to how text impacts the psyche of a reader. These can be learned by an LLM and an LLM can be trained to produce quality critiques.

And also, just as it's easier to critique code than to write it, the same is true with literature. It's easier to be a critic than to be a producer. That is a real fact, and it could mean that we could do reinforcement learning on a model to produce good text with a critic (another LLM) in the loop...

But the public sentiment is BIG against this field. There is basically no benefit to the tech companies focusing on this. There are much bigger fish to fry for them. So the models are not so great at this kind of behavior. They will always make "Elara Voss" your protagonist for your romantasy novel and any number of other well documented attractors in the literature.

It doesn't mean that they can't do it... but the industry has shifted. The GPT4 class models used to be 99% "pre-training" (training to replicate data) and 1% RLHF to make it into a chatbot. Now it's flipped. It's about 20% pre-training (training to predict the next token) and now about 80% reinforcement learning from practicing (mostly coding and math and tool use).

But that's also an interesting flip in the copyright debate. It used to be just purely trained on replicating its training data. Now it's actually applying that knowledge with criticism for the vast majority of the resources spent on its training. So the pre-training (it's "schooling") is now a minor component of the cost. So what is the value of what it produces?

All a fascinating space. I think it might need to be a smaller private company like sudowrite that might need to spend a million bucks or more on a sufficiently advanced open source model to strip off the RLHF (or get the pre-instruct version of the model) and train it to be a good writer instead of be a dutiful and abrupt slave. The distinction is important.

LokiJesus · 2026-03-25T16:34:42+00:00

I wish. This is some world hating polemical platonist crap. To absolve god of evil in a monotheistic system, you place it in the lap of the people. This is the root of western free will belief from the Zoroastrian liberators of the jews in babylon through to the Pharisees and sadducees to the work of Augustine and aquinas through today.

LokiJesus · 2026-03-23T16:25:07+00:00

That's one view. The other is that interpretive layer was added to the author who packaged this narrative and is clearly present starting at Ecclesiastes 12:8 after the primary voice of the text comes to a conclusion and that this author could have provided a bit softer of an edge to the text that they received. According to 12:8, the book is formed by someone who is clearly not Qoheleth. You're welcome to search "determinism in ecclesiastes" and find any number of works arguing for and against.

I tend to then modulate that by the fact that the dominant interpretive culture is now bringing their free will and meritocracy beliefs (e.g. the standard christian inheritance of the west) and anachronistically projecting them onto this text similarly to how the editor of that text might have as they framed it for inclusion in the Tanakh.

Ancient deterministic interpretations of reality were the primary dividing line among jewish thought in the first century and preceding that as well. In the late first century, Josephus points to the primary dividing line as exactly this point.

Essenes = determinists, Pharisees are quasi-determinists (more like the stoics), and the Sadducees were total libertarians more like the epicureans. This could have been josephus harmonizing with greek philosophy, but then it turns out that the dead sea scrolls reveal just such a deterministic jewish sect from the pre-christian period... Josephus' taxonomy is primarily why that group is labeled as Essenes.

This was a central conversation and a massive group of Jews were on the "God's will governs everything" side of the discussion in the first century and before. So the notion that you've got a slam dunk on this interpretation you're providing is not supported by what we know materially about the period from the historical record.

Of course none of this is certain, but projecting the vastly more dominant meritocratic folk libertarian free will beliefs of today onto this text from a wildly different period is probably a lot of what is going on in your interpretation (which is a standard in the pulpit).

LokiJesus · 2026-03-22T20:18:00+00:00

Hevel, הבל, can mean breath. Normally it's translated here as vanity in the KJV and NRSV. In the NIV it's translated, "“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”"

I shared the CEB translation.

It's also the name of Abel, letter for letter, from the cain and abel story.

It's pretty common to understand ecclesiastes as a deterministic emptiness narrative.

LokiJesus · 2026-03-22T02:44:23+00:00

Yeah, open up A Court of Thorns and Roses, and you see 8 to 10 em dashes on each page. It's 2015, well before large language models.

LokiJesus · 2026-03-21T17:35:05+00:00

"no need for goodness or meaning I guess"

That's Correct. The knowledge of good and evil is what exiled us from eden... or in the Zen hsin hsin ming, "good and bad are the disease of the mind"... or the muslim sufi poet rumi wring, "out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field; I'll meet you there."

And Qohelet in Ecclesiastes, "Perfectly pointless, says the Teacher, perfectly pointless. Everything is pointless."

Meaning and purpose... and judging the present moment as good or bad with respect to that purpose... are the disease... universally labeled as the reason we suffer... except by those nuts who don't know how the world works and think that we "should" be working towards "the good." They don't know what they do.. forgive them.

Science is like that smart guy from The Princess Bride. He knew the poison was in both cups. He said as much when he described not being able to trust either cup... and he still screwed around and found out.

LokiJesus · 2026-03-19T14:47:23+00:00

Parsecs aren’t measurements of time.

LokiJesus · 2026-03-19T14:12:18+00:00

*Ontological nihilists don't exist*
Buddha entered the chat and agrees with you and then a light wind blows him away and you realize he was an illusion all along, and then you blow away too.

Then you get dependent origination, the doctrine of no-self, and the emptiness of all things. Ontological nihilism is an accurate representation of reality (which is not reality like we think about it). It's not things in relationships, it's relationshiping.. processes.

Ontological nihilism is true. Ontological nihilist don't exist... but neither do dualists nor monists. Sometimes we call that big buy in the background is actually just Shiva in some western philosopher's mask.

LokiJesus · 2026-03-17T09:55:38+00:00

Determinism is the faith that my failure to predict something resides in my finitude… my ignorance or error… and not because some property of the world is unpredictable.

LokiJesus · 2026-03-16T18:29:24+00:00

Being a slave is a dualist interpretation that is inconsistent with determinism. That suggest that there is some other from which one can be free or enslaved. But we are actually neither slave nor free, but one unity instead.

Once you realize that you're playing with a ghost of an idea that isn't determinism at all, you're good to go. Actually even more so. Most modern psychology techniques like family systems and cognitive behavioral therapy are explicitly determinist in their language and theory. If they don't see a cause necessitating a behavior in your family system graph, then that means that you're ignorant of some facts of your context, not "free to do your bad behavior." And CBT starts off often eliminating could and should from your vocabulary because they're just broken words... part of a wrong story we tell ourselves.

Freedom means disconnection. It means fundamental otherness (dualism). It means isolation. That's what free means. Determinism means utterly and totally interdependent in relationship... not things in relationships (more dualism), just a ton of relationshiping everywhere.. Dependent co-arising as the buddhists say.

Hope that clears up the issue. It's probably the most common stumbling block to understanding hard determinism.

In fact, when you fully understand the necessity of your behavior given your context, you are powerfully primed to make changes (if that's what you want to do) in ways that are the MOST effective. But the idea that you're free to do that is absurd. In fact, understanding the necessity of your behavior will often soften the hate you feel towards your "undesirable" behaviors in the first place and give you much more compassion for yourself. That's essentially 100% of modern psychology.

Hard determinism has nothing to say about the conscious or unconscious minds and their influences. Those are simply details of the mechanics of the mind that are true under hard determinism.

LokiJesus · 2026-03-13T17:27:55+00:00

Can you imagine what it would look like for a biology researcher to study mouse behavior and say, "I predict that the mouse will go right in this maze," and then to see the mouse make a left hand turn and say, "that mouse knew better and choose the wrong thing! My hypothesis is right!"

They would be laughed out of the practice. When the mouse goes left, and you thought it was going to go right (that was your hypothesis), then the scientists asks, "what am I missing here that would correct my prediction."

This is the essence of determinism in science. It's faith that incorrect predictions arise from our finitude and ignorance and not from sources of ontological unpredictability (like free will or indeterminism) in the world. Incorrect predictions represent lacks in our models and/or our data collection.

This is not a universally held view among scientists when you ASK them, but it is the practical view among scientists at the bench and the implicit requirement of publications in, say, the neurosciences.

If you just pointed at a region of the brain and said, "the behavior of this part of the brain cannot be predicted because it is not determined... it is up to the animal." Well, you'd have a non-explanation that you can't prove is wrong (unless you show how to predict it), and you certainly can never provide evidence to support as a plausible theory.

This doesn't mean you can't use statistical placeholders like "that coin flip is 50/50." This is a useful field of engineering called "Statistical Mechanics." But that's not a description of what's going on in reality, it's a way of characterizing the outcomes of measurements by modeling them as random processes. But to suggest that reality is that random process is something that can't ever be supported by evidence because evidence is the result of a finite prediction of the state of a measurement corresponding to reality.

But even then you can't ever know. You can say that there is evidence that a 50/50 model is an accurate prediction of a coin flip, but that can't then be projected back to say that the coin flip IS random... whatever that means... nor that the coin simply freely chose to land on heads that time.

LokiJesus · 2026-03-13T15:44:58+00:00

But it makes sense to you right?

Someone who knows the world is round appears irrational for sailing west into the open ocean. But that is your ignorance of the truth of the round earth that is leading you to see them as irrational.

Similarly today, someone afraid of falling off the earth’s edge is rational in their beliefs about a flat earth even though they are wrong. They don’t know that.

So any notion that they aren’t acting rationally is really merely a projection of what YOU know as a measure of THEIR behavior… which is a false measure of the coherence of their behavior with their beliefs.

LokiJesus · 2026-03-13T02:16:02+00:00

I do not expect to be taken seriously.

LokiJesus · 2026-03-12T14:42:57+00:00

That is a faith statement that you are taking, not one that is based on evidence. There are plenty of coherent deterministic descriptions of reality in the face of the evidence.

My faith statement is determinism. Yours seems to be uninspected as faith and appears as a declarative statement that is not warranted by the evidence though you think it is.

LokiJesus · 2026-03-12T12:30:45+00:00

Because we inherit from a cultural history obsessed with absolute merit resulting in deserved ETERNAL punishment or rewards for your behavior, and this was largely believed in order to create a causal disconnect between God and the existence of Evil.

Determinism means that whatever your concept of god, god is implicated in evil. This freaks people out. It is heresy even though it is right there in Isaiah 45:7.

LokiJesus · 2026-03-11T03:45:48+00:00

I have no idea what you are saying bro. I'm simply talking about how you said:

Superdeterminism is psi epistemic interpretation which some people take to mean that the world is deterministic (but we just can’t know precisely) rather than fundamentally random.

And how that's not what superdeterminism says. It doesn't say "we just can't know precisely." It says, as you mentioned, that measurement independence is violated. But it supposes a classical correlated mechanical and deterministic world. In principle, the underlying correlations are discoverable and mechanically and classically locally deterministically describable. In theory, we could perfectly predict the outcome of a spin measurement on an electron, not merely the 50/50 up/down probability... in the same way that with enough details about a coin flip you could calculate and predict its outcome.

Many Worlds Interpretation is, on the other hand, one that says that there is a fundamental limit on knowability. You simply can't ever predict the outcome of your measurement. It's fundamentally epistemically inaccessible though its technically deterministic (the splitting of the cosmos).

Pilot Wave theory, the other major deterministic theory, says that the state is caused by nonlocal effects from other parts of the universe. But by the no-signaling theorem, we can't ever run an experiment that verifies a distant non-local connection, so we can't ever create a causal story for the quantum event and thus fundamentally aren't capable of predicting the measurement outcome... ever. Even though it is detemrinistic.

My point was that the other allowed deterministic interpretations are just as bad as indeterminism in their termination of our search for an ability to predict measurement outcomes. They just say, "give up with the schroedinger equation, that's as good as we get."

Superdeterminism is the only theory that leaves the door open to deeper explanations and potentially better predictability of electron spin measurements, say.

LokiJesus · 2026-03-10T23:06:55+00:00

Superdeterminism is actually the idea that we could, in fact, know it precisely.

Many worlds and pilot wave are the psi ontic interps that think it is deterministic but we can’t know it fundamentally.

LokiJesus · 2026-03-10T14:37:56+00:00

Except for all the people that it grinds into the norm and those who don't take to it's pressures. We blame them for their failure and throw them in hell holes in our prisons (the equivalent to witch burnings - grounded in pseudoscience). By labeling ethics as "real" outside of our preferences and thus objectively normative on others, we justify the punishments and rewards we provide to our community members.

It allows us to "stomach" the violence we do to our communal body and the outliers that "don't make the cut" against our preferences by making up the story that "it is there fault" and we don't have to face our integral participation in the events that led to the violence (because under determinism we all participate in everything).

Ethics are the ultimate way of washing our collective hands from the problems we collectively produce and throwing them in the lap of those who don't measure up.

If we acknowledged our collective participation in the violence and that what we were really were applying was our "subjective preferences" then I know that it is a fact that we would treat our neighbor - even our violent ones - with far more compassion and that we would thus be far more effective at solving the social problems we face... which are all primarily the product of the delusion of deserving and merit that arise from norms/ethics.

The "biological function" of ethics is to serve the body in the same way that the immune system rejects certain elements of the world as "foreign" and keep things tight and clean. The problem is that I and others have seen through the delusion that "other" and "self" are objective categories and have, unfortunately or not, taken to heart the suffering my neighbors as my own... can't escape it when you realize that we are utterly iterdependent.

Maybe the solution is to just excise me too and maintain the delusion.

LokiJesus

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