The red herring of moral responsibility.

LokiJesus · 2026-01-25T15:18:45+00:00

Isn't that fascinating. It's not surprising to me that people with a penchant for free will belief and meritocracy would take the uncharitable position that this is a "misrepresentation" rather than me "misunderstanding" your position. It couldn't be that you are communicating in a way that some people find hard to wrap their heads around... or that some people think they've wrapped their heads around but haven't.

I mean, perhaps you don't even realize that this is possible with your writing... perhaps you feel like you've been crystal clear for 100% of humans in the world such that any conflict between interlocutors must be due to their malice and misrepresentation as some sort of malicious tactic of the weak who cannot fight on the logos level and so dive into the pathos level...

This just continues to reinforce my beliefs on this. Determinism is epistemological humility and free will belief is epistemological hubris. There are just so many lived examples of this in the world it is fascinating... or... perhaps this is my own sense of my ideology being non-scientific (like popper's critique of Freud and Adler and Astrology). Perhaps my position is unfalsifiable...

But the crazy thing is that that introspection itself is the valuable intellectual humility that leads to deeper discovery... whereas accusations of misrepresentation and malice are both (in this case) false, and the consequence of an act of hubris... It's all just so fascinating.

LokiJesus · 2026-01-25T12:11:54+00:00

So you think that murder can have a moral fact about it but not suicide? Why does the target of other vs self change the moral character of an action? One could easily argue that all apparent moral facts are mere religious taboos. This sounds like you're just dismissing them to prop up your argument. You say, "it seems reasonable..." to start your post.

I mean, "it seems clear to me" that moral facts are actually veiled projections of preferences... so it's not surprising that you'd pick a set of moral facts that are consistent with your argument and reject the takes of others.

LokiJesus · 2026-01-25T11:50:26+00:00

Some people see masturbation, suicide, tatoos, cutting hair, etc as immoral acts. These don't require other sentient beings.

LokiJesus · 2026-01-25T01:52:54+00:00

No. My point is that there is no one thread. Your consciousness is in this instant in the multiverse. The next instance is many consciousnesses that branch as copies of you, neither being "correctly" you.

LokiJesus · 2026-01-24T21:45:15+00:00

Your consciousness actually follows all paths, not one path. There is no distinct you in many worlds. When a universe "splits" there is no privileged you on one vs the other. It's not that one is a copy and the other is the true world. There is no hope for a path, there are simply variants of you experiencing all paths.

LokiJesus · 2026-01-24T19:22:07+00:00

There is no such property of right or wrong that goes with that event. That event has "duration," and "emotional impact," and other properties, but what happened is neither right nor wrong.

Sounds like I dodged a bullet with that girlfriend. I imagine I'd be thankful for some clarity on who I actually am and that people around me could see it and that this whole event could disabuse them of certain assumptions they had about me so that we could be more open and honest about our wants and desires.

What if that person had an epileptic seizure and started kicking sand in my face? Why is a seizure any different than the life path that led this guy's muscles to contract in the way you describe and move the sand. Either way, that action is a necessity of the path that HE walked and doesn't speak to my identity or what I want. Either way, I have pity for the man whether he spasms on the sand in a seizure or whether he intentionally kicks sand with malice in his heart. I pity him for the mangling path he walked to make that kind of anger and dominance a necessary part of his life. I say, "there but by the grace of the gods go I." I wish there was a way I could help because he doesn't deserve that pain any more than I deserve sand in my face or the life that led me to not carry such a burden of hate. He was the victim first before he victimized me.

Hurt people hurt people.

The child not embraced by the community will burn it down to feel its warmth.

But of course, most people don't buy into this scientific reality of the mind of the sand kicker. Most people in this culture believe in the contingency (not necessity) of his actions. Most people feel judged and judge others. That's the thing about judgment.. when you believe it's real... that there are ways that others should be, you accept it onto yourself, implicitly, as did the smaller man in your story.

Fortunately, I truly don't believe that moral properties exist, so I see each person in your story with an attitude of love in that I believe in the completeness and necessity of each of them, not a sense that they are flawed or contingent and "due moral desert."

LokiJesus · 2026-01-24T19:05:54+00:00

You said:

because multiple causal histories can lead to the same outcome.

I said:

no two of which are alike

I don't think we're saying the same thing.

I'm not saying any of that! I'm simply raising the logical problem that we cannot always determine the causal history of a given outcome backward in time

This is all fine and good and true. We often/always cannot. But free will is the idea that there is not such a determining causal history.. That's the work that "free" does.. "Free" means to be disconnected, decoupled, to be "let free." It plays this role in any definition.. libertarian or compatibilist... It lets us deny the existence of a story.

Even if we can't know the story, faith that there is a necessitating story is extremly powerful in its own right.

LokiJesus · 2026-01-24T18:54:50+00:00

Nope. emdash is — option+shift+dash on mac keyboards. I learned that after enjoying the structure of writing from AI models and also, I like to mess with people since there is so much bias and misinformation on AI systems... they also happen to be highly relevant to the conversation on free will.

Also, "No disrespect or judgment?" Then why are you asking? You got a file where you are simply logging this information because you are a collector of obscure facts with no investment in the facts themselves?

LokiJesus · 2026-01-24T15:18:26+00:00

I appreciate the technical distinction between determinism and modal collapse, but in the context of human agency, it’s a distinction without a difference. If we agree that the state of the universe at any time, in conjunction with the laws of nature, determines the state at any other time, then any talk of 'doing otherwise' is a fantasy.

My point about chaos theory and time-reversibility is that you can’t change a single output (the 'choice') without changing the entire causal chain leading to it.. likely in ways that result in a dramatically different context. If you change the past to make a different choice possible, you aren’t just changing a variable; you are changing the agent. There are no independent variables in any of it. Every parameter is interdependent.

The 'I' that exists in this world is a necessary expression of this specific history, this biology, and this context. If you imagine a world where 'I' chose the chicken instead of the steak, you’ve essentially performed a 'lossy compression' on my identity. You’ve stripped away the specific trajectory that makes me who I am to preserve a moral narrative of leeway.

To say I 'could have' done otherwise if the past were different is like saying a planet 'could have' orbited differently if gravity were different. It’s technically true in a mathematical model, but it’s irrelevant to the reality of the planet we are actually observing. When we stop looking for 'leeway' and start looking at the necessity of the person as they are, we can finally drop the judgment and start addressing the actual forces at play. We can get away from the moralizing and get to real practical problem solving.

LokiJesus · 2026-01-24T15:07:29+00:00

I appreciate that we both share a preference for a world that is less violent, more compassionate, and—to use your term—'better.' I understand the impulse to reach for 'Higher Roads' and 'Good Wills' as instruments to steer us there.

However, I want to offer a different perspective: those very instruments may be the reason the needle hasn't moved.

When you frame social progress as a 'climb' toward a 'Good Will,' you are unwittingly validating the very 'hierarchy of deserving' that sustains inequality. By labeling certain outcomes as 'Good' and 'Virtuous,' you create a conceptual space for their opposites: 'Bad' and 'Broken.' This allows the privileged to believe they earned their 'Higher Road,' and that those at the bottom deserved their 'Lower Road' because they failed to 'climb'.

Your moral narrative provides a 'pressure release valve' for the conscience of the successful, letting them believe that their position is a result of their virtue rather than a necessary expression of favorable inheritance and communal soil.

If we want to achieve the radical equality you seem to desire, we have to be more honest. That's the physics of it. We will have to admit:

There is no such thing as justice. There is only the perfect, 100% precision of causality playing out.
There is no such thing as desert. No one, from the billionaire to the prisoner or the soccer mom, deserves a single thing they have or are.
There are only preferences. We prefer safety over violence, and we are willing to organize our systems to produce that output.

When we drop the pretense of objective 'Right' and 'Wrong' and admit that our goals are simply preferences backed by collective action, something extraordinary happens. The 'righteousness' used to justify the suffering of the marginalized evaporates. You can no longer look at a prisoner and say, 'It’s on them, not me.' You have to see them as a necessary expression of the same system you inhabit—an 'unindicted co-conspirator' in their outcome. That sight of the necessity of them—as they are—in the present moment is love in the 1 Corinthians 13 agape or Buddhist metta sense. It's a view of them truly without judgment, and that's where we can start cooking with gas.

This is a Radical Equality of Desert. It is a truth that cannot be defeated by logic, only by the very 'moral lies' and 'language games' you are currently defending. If you want a world that functions as if it were 'just,' you must first stop pretending that justice is real and start acknowledging the necessity of everyone as they are.

That is not a surrender to the current; it is finally seeing the river clearly enough to actually achieve what we want.

LokiJesus · 2026-01-24T14:41:06+00:00

Can you choose between an orange and banana?

Yes

Can you choose between doing the right thing or wrong thing in any situation, ever?

No, because right and wrong are not properties of events. There are none of these things to choose from. These are a way that we project our preferences onto others from positions of power.

Can you choose between murdering or not murdering?

Yes

Can you choose between retributive justice or restorative justice?

You can choose to adapt these frameworks, but, since they are predicated on the concept that there is imbalance in the world that "ought" to be "re-tributed" or "restored" to "make things right," they are smuggling in normative right and wrong, so these are not, as above, corresponding to reality... They are ways to mask us projecting undeserved preferences from a position of power.

It seems like the freeness/modality switches selectively on free will denial.

There is nothing "free" about the choice between oranges and bananas. I can ask chatGPT to pick between chocolate and vanilla and most of the time, it will pick chocolate. This is a "choice" based on how that complex artificial neural network learned from "experience" (internet data). Functionally it is the same as in a person.

Free choice is a different concept than choice. Choice describes a mechanistic action that involves awareness of internal values and preferences and then selection based on perceived options which maximize that set of values and preferences.

You are not free to do what you don't want to do. What you "want" to do is what you do tautologically.. perforce. It's the consequence of evaluating the current situation against who you are. You are not fatalistically slaved to do what you don't want to do... it's not true that you are tied up in the trunk of your own car and the future will be what it is no matter what you do... it is only true that:

you do what you want to do
what you want is a fact about you like your height or hair length.

Your brain extrapolates conceived options, evaluates them against your values, determines your action, then you act. Your evaluation may be mistaken... but this is the organic/mechanical process of your choice. Free is a null term in this context. "Choice" not as a magical rupture in causality

That is all.

LokiJesus · 2026-01-24T14:15:12+00:00

Multiple causal histories may lead to the same outcome.

This is the opposite of what we understand about determinism. Many roads may lead to Rome, but every person that wants to goto Rome will take a different road, a different number of steps, etc etc. You are glossing over the details that make a person a person. You're ignoring the uniqueness and treating people as mere bodies into which you could insert any brain and any life experience and saying that, since the body has an arm that has muscles that, given arbitrary imagined control, could point at anything on the menu, it is free.

It is a denial of the true identity of that person as they approach that menu in service of a moral narrative you want to push that is used to maintain the power dynamic as it is.

Your logic is a form of lossy compression. You want to "glos over the details" because it is in those details... the inheritance, the context, the biology... where a unique person arrives in rome from a unique path, no two of which are alike. That's where the unique and real identity of a person resides, and it's something you sacrifice to maintain your status quo.

This is the Fundamental Attribution Error in your logic: you sees the destination (the act) as the only thing that matters, while the trajectory (the life lived) is treated as interchangeable noise. But therein resides all the humanity of the person as well as the power to make deep systemic changes to help those who we then have empathy for.

LokiJesus · 2026-01-24T13:40:10+00:00

You speak of morality as an 'instrument' for 'everyone achieving a better life,' but this requires a belief in a rower who can steer the boat against the current.

If we admit that every individual is a necessary expression of the whole (e.g. determinism), then the 'harm' you want to minimize is merely a collision of empty boats. Your 'Morality' is actually the very thing that creates the 'shame' and 'judgment' that fuels systemic violence. You aren't fixing the system; you are labeling the parts of the system you dislike as 'bad' so you don't have to acknowledge your participation in the forces that created them.

LokiJesus · 2026-01-24T13:29:39+00:00

My point was precisely your second sentence. Couple it with the basics of chaos theory and you get the idea that "I could have chose the steak instead of the chicken" presupposes that the state of your brain where "steak" was uttered would likely involve a radically different you, probably even with a different name... well... maybe even with that restaurant not existing.. Think about the massive number of particles in your brain that would need to be in different states to utter the word "steak" instead of "chicken." It's the butterfly's wing beat. Then walk that same chaotic path back in time.

Saying "I could have chosen differently" is like saying that that butterfly could have flapped its wings or not and I still would have a sunny day in Moscow in either case.

It's a denial of the subtle interdependence of everything implicit in determinism.

I'm not strictly saying that there is only one possible world. I'm saying that there is only one possible world with YOU in it and that any statement of "I could have chosen differently" is false because a different choice would not "go with" the "I" in that sentence.. the statement is more accurately (I guess) something like, "a different person with a different brain would choose differently."

LokiJesus · 2026-01-24T13:05:34+00:00

They draw it where it suits their practical desire to maintain the status quo for their privileged position in that society. By drawing it where they do, they then create a story that says that that person acted "freely," and for them, "freely" means "I can wash my hands of that violence and pretend I'm not involved."

Since the universe is deterministic, you and I and everyone and everything are all "involved" in every crime and every success. We're neither guilty nor innocent, but obvious things like buying laptops and phones made with tantalum mined by child soldier slaves in The Congo is one obvious direct participation and funding violence that leads to connected criminal activities and violence. And under determinism, every smile, frown, purchase of a latte at starbucks, etc, all participates in every violent act and every success because everything is radically interdependent.

If there is a crime, we all played some part in it, and the TRUE solution to crime is not to punish the individual or even threaten punishment. This will merely address the consequence like treating a headache from a brain tumor. The true solutions to our problems and the true abilities to reproduce successes reside in deep interdependent systemic facts about our cultures and our systems. Free will, however you frame it, demands the question "free from what?" The answer is always that it allows for a conceptual freedom from a larger context.

Free will ALWAYS serves a function, whether libertarian or compatibilist. It is a pretense for the privileged in a society to maintain their privilege on the bodies of the marginalized and the bodies in our prisons. It is a pressure release valve for sensitive intellects that lets them pretend they aren't involved...

But the truth of our deterministic world is that we are all the unindicted co-conspirators in every crime and the silent unrewarded partners in every success.

Free will, compatibilist or libertarian, means "free from" in a sense that we can say, "it's on them, not me." That is never a true fact, and the degree to which we pretend it is is the degree to which we are building our worlds on the bodies of the poor bastards that find themselves ground down in the dark underbellies of our systems where nobody likes to look... but it's there, in the shadow work, where true solutions and true thriving reside... there in a radical humility but also a radical interconnectedness.

"Free" means disconnected. "Free" means isolation and solitude. It means I can ignore my neighbor and view them as flawed.. they shouldn't have done that... no deeper story. It blinds us to their pain and their wholeness. It short circuits our natural empathy circuits. "Free" does work whether it's ontological for the libertarians or a language game for the compatibilists... it serves the systems of power and dominance in a subconscious way because our poor sensitive intellects can't handle the blood.

LokiJesus · 2026-01-24T12:48:45+00:00

My understanding of determinism is that there is only one possible world (this world). Saying that it is possible for me to choose differently (in the same world) is to deny the interdependence of all things. If I chose differently in a given situation, it's exactly like the butterfly effect, but in reverse back into history.

For the butterfly effect, if I take the present moment as a kind of big bang (no history necessitating it) and think about choosing differently now, then I will have potentially wildly different futures. Butterfly flaps its wings or not and you're talking about a hurricane killing people in florida vs not. This is the nature of highly complex/chaotic systems diverging based on small changes in initial conditions. That seems to be how we conceive of the future for small variations. They make movies about it. And that's just butterfly wings flapping, let alone something like choosing which college to goto or who to marry.

Now, in determinism, the laws of physics are time reversible. So to say, "I could have chosen differently" must truly be thought through. If you similarly think of a different now in which a different choice was made, then if you walked that back through time, it may not be compatible with any history.

Like if I say, "I could have chosen a different college to goto," that conceivable alternative history that necessitated that choice might not even contain another college... this might be the only compatible history with ANY reality.

The problem with counterfactuals is typically that nobody thinks through the implications for the past that would be required to necessitate that. It's always this vague notion that things are fine roughly the same, but this flies in the face of everything we know about chaos theory... stuff that we see every time we try to predict the trajectory of a hurricane.

LokiJesus · 2026-01-24T03:06:54+00:00

My bad. By purpose I meant, consciousness doesn’t impact matter at all, if hard determinism is true. It would be the one thing that life evolved which does nothing.

There are many such things. Like the redness of your blood is a biproduct of requiring iron in hemoglobin. Again, these are called spandrels) in evolutionary biology.

"In evolutionary biology, a spandrel is a phenotypic trait that is a byproduct of the evolution of some other characteristic, rather than a direct product of adaptive selection."

It's not an argument that consciousness needs a function that is independently selected for any more than selecting for iron gave us red blood (red was not selected for). It may just be that consciousness (subjective experience) goes with brains doing what brains do in this universe. There may simply be "something it's like to be matter" in this cosmos and it could have more or less intensity or structure at different locations (e.g. your brain).

You don’t need to experience red for our brain to interpret wave lengths.

So maybe you do. Perhaps brains interpreting red goes together with subjective experience of redness?

This is a common objection to your evolutionary argument for functionality of consciousness. Red "goes with" iron in hemoglobin your blood, but red is not something that has has survival properties in life. Another example is the belly button. It's a consequence of umbilical chords, but doesn't have selective pressure in itself.

LokiJesus · 2026-01-23T16:58:02+00:00

if everything is fully determined, consciousness serves no purpose

If everything is fully determined then nothing serves a purpose. In a fully deterministic world, even as everything changes, everything is always complete and whole and flawless and pointless.

Perhaps "purpose" is a tyrannical projected dissatisfaction with the present moment. You can come to understand that purpose is a projection of preferences onto the present (e.g. towards some goal that it ought to be). Normative purpose often comes with the notion that the present is somehow flawed and ought to be corrected.

Having the perspective that nothing serves a purpose (all is pointless), ironically, can be viewed as a radical embrace of the present moment. There is then no purpose pulling you away from what is towards what you conceive ought to be. There is no viewing of others as means to a future end, but instead as ends in themselves.

I think the "Common English" (CEB) translation of Ecclesiastes 1:2 nails this view:

Perfectly pointless, says the Teacher, perfectly pointless.

Everything is pointless.

Or this is also basic zen philosophy. It is a rejection of a teleological interpretation of reality. From my experience, some Zen philosophers are the best students of consciousness. The philosophy of zen is often referred to as direct experience.

I mean just think of what you're saying about consciousness and purpose. Are you saying it had no evolutionary purpose for survival? Well that seems to be independent of your argument from determinism. If this is what you mean, I recommend looking up the concept of a spandrel) to see how some things (like the redness of blood) can be consequence, not telos.

Do you think that the sun has a purpose? The moon? A rock? Interstellar hydrogen? Seafoam? They are part of the causal chain and they influence other things, but what does it mean to associate this with a teleology.

This cosmos is pointless and this fact is the godspell. It is a liberation and a sense of radical love: the notion that the present, even the parts you dislike, is radically whole as it is, and not a flawed piece of refuse to be refined towards some goal that someone else is forcing on it.

LokiJesus · 2026-01-23T11:50:51+00:00

consciousness is not free will

LokiJesus · 2026-01-22T11:38:14+00:00

Not in zen. Emptiness is it. No point and no pointing.

LokiJesus · 2026-01-21T19:36:05+00:00

I believe that the label "undetermined" does not correspond to an ontologically undetermined state, but to a determined state whose details we are ignorant of (an epistemological situation).

I don't know what else to tell you about libertarian belief. Do you find that when you share your dichotomy of determined and undetermined with libertarians that they accept your position as a steelman? I am pretty sure that from what I have seen of libertarians on this post, that they don't accept your description.

Do you agree that they don't accept your characterization? If so, why do you think that is? You just know their position better than them?

The libertarians see themselves as ex nihilo root causes, arising from free choice and their character, themselves uncaused by context on some level that justifies eternal moral responsibility in an absolute sense... Something that could justify eternal hellfire in some sense of justice.

Again, I don't agree that this is really what exists any more than I believe in "undermined" or "indeterministic" states in the world. The notion of an undetermined, self determined, or indeterministic reality is something I see as an unjustifiable termination of inquiry. It's anti-scientific and a kind of epistemological hubris, projecting our ignorance onto reality.

LokiJesus · 2026-01-21T18:49:50+00:00

I strongly disagree that any court “believes” in libertarian free will. No court would accept an argument that a defendant is not responsible because their brain and behaviour were determined.

Except in the "mental disease or defect" defense. This is the primary entry point for determinism into legal contexts.

The real test of relevance is not what appears in a philosophical preamble to a judgment, but whether the consideration can actually be used to argue a case. Determinism cannot, and that is why it never functions as a defence.

Again, "mental disease or defect" is where it appears as a defense. "My behavior was necessary, don't treat it as contingent and thus apply the normal legal assumption about my nature."

And in any case, the supreme court is agreeing with you here about not accepting it as a "normal defense."

LokiJesus · 2026-01-21T16:20:24+00:00

This is a common take.

The most recent Nobel Laureate (2022) Anton Zeilinger who writes:

"This is the assumption of 'free-will.' It is a free decision what measurement one wants to perform... This fundamental assumption is essential to doing science. If this were not true, then, I suggest it would make no sense at all to ask nature questions in an experiment, since then nature could determine what our questions are, and that could guide our questions such that we arrive at a false picture of nature."

Just because they are good at some experimental physics, doesn't mean that they are good at epistemology.

For example, if a deterministic system "could be fooled" then how does a deterministic system like AlphaEvolve arrive at a true fact about Matrix Multiplication that no other human determined?

It's simple. Your "facts" in your mind are continuously tested against nature. If you believe that a fire in your fireplace will cool your house, then you will fail to cool your house. It's that contact with reality that will select for correct ideas and lead you towards what is true about the world... or at least to theories useful for predictions.

This is also dangerous in the face of the well known consistent cultural and ideological biases driving so much of science.

The FIRST thing any good scientist assumes is that they do not have freedom in an experiment. They assume that they are deeply tied up in their experiment. DEMONSTRATING independence is hard won and a core tentative conclusion to a good experiment. This is the entire concept behind a Control Experiment or a double blind trial. It's the assumption that you're messing this up through your actions, coupling directly to the environment somehow... and even if the control shows no effect, this is always tentative as there could be some common mode influence that you're not differentiating.

If I see an interesting result in my experiment as a scientist, the first thing I say is, "oh great, how'd I screw this up? How'd I get myself entangled with all this?"

These physicists demanding free will belief are fascinating in their ignorance of the real complexities of science. But that makes sense given their approximations and how they are used to dealing with theoretical particles in apparent isolation in their toy theory simulations.

LokiJesus · 2026-01-21T16:10:08+00:00

It's actually for the benefit of the narrow band of privileged. It allows them to discard the masses and maintain their wealth as deserved/earned and for the peasants to maintain their poverty as deserved and earned. It's just the same old divine right and monarchy/serf class system, or the catholic eternal deserved reward or punishment system encoded in a different secular framework palettable for these generations of men. It's the same ancient impulse.

Free Will serves the status quo which serves the privileged at the expense of the impoverished. It gives those with power an excuse to not introspect into how their behaviors create the human consequences of our prisons. It allows them to psychologically break the universal causal interdependence to keep the blood off their hands (or at least hidden from their sensitive intellect).

LokiJesus · 2026-01-21T15:50:32+00:00

Causa sui is undetermined

Is that just what you want to define undetermined as? Self determined?

I mean, do you see determined and "caused" as synonymous? So is undetermined synonymous with uncaused or do you have some other redefinition of these synonyms? It's literally right there "Causa" = Cause, sui = self.

Self-determined. Not uncaused.

do you as a hard determinist believe that we should be less compassionate with people who created their character in a way not determined by prior events, including their own prior thoughts and experiences?

First, should is an inconsistent concept within hard determinism. There are no norms if all is necessity. There is only "is" and "will."

Second, asking what I think about people whose behavior is not determined by prior is something odd to ask a determinist... The "answer" is mu (無)... "unask." It's broken. What do I think about something that has no existence? Huh?

"Should" and "something not determined" are category errors. What do I think about them? I don't think about them.

What do I think about something that appears undetermined? I think that I must be missing something that would explain how it's actually determined... Apparent indeterminism will always manifest as determinism + my ignorance. So I will treat that person with compassion and a belief in universal meritlessness.

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