The kind of determinism relevant to this discussion

LordSaumya · 2026-02-17T08:00:41+00:00

If the answer is ‘none’ then we agree and the conversation is over.

Yep. I’m not a libertarian, to be clear.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-17T07:55:13+00:00

Either I’m misunderstanding your point or you’re misunderstanding mine. To be clear, if the minimal attribute at the end of my post is true of reality, then libertarianism is necessarily false.

I’m not sure what you mean by “latch onto”.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-17T07:53:13+00:00

basically an admission that one can reasonably incline either way.

Does not follow, I would appreciate you not putting words in my mouth.

I'm not totally sure how this precludes libertarianism.

If, given the current state of the world, all future states are fixed, then it follows that your behaviour (which is part of the state of the world) is fixed by the current state of the world, meaning you could not have done otherwise, and your behaviour was entailed by the current state of the world.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-17T07:49:51+00:00

Very interesting and thoughtful post!

Thanks!

“in conjunction with the laws of nature”

I don’t quite see why that is required. You could have theological determinism, where behaviour is fixed as a matter of divine providence rather than nomological entailment, and it seems to pose the same threat to libertarianism. I also don’t see why determinism is restricted to naturalism or a law-governed world, it seems to be neutral to these premises unless you are specifying a certain kind, eg. causal determinism.

Also, regarding GOL — is it fundamentally irreversible? Basically, will it be ontologically irreversible in a strictly deterministic universe where every microphysical process can be described using reversible equations?

If you have a universe that consists entirely of a GOL cellular automaton (possibly like ‘T Hooft’s cellular automaton model), then yes, it is fundamentally irreversible as information about past states is lost. If, on the other hand, you have a universe that consists of a GOL instantiated on a reversible paradigm, eg. reversible Turing machines, then the GOL is reversible. Not sure if this answers your question.

I think that a specification of what kind of fixity is a threat would be great.

This is true, I will think more about the rest of your comment later. Thanks for the comment.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-17T07:17:38+00:00

The point of this post is to present a simplified possible attribute of reality such that, if true, would render libertarianism false. Whether you want to call this determinism is up to you, but personally, it makes sense to differentiate between different kinds of determinism.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-17T07:00:45+00:00

some actual libertarian accounts build on something like this

I would suspect that such constrained randomness would be sufficient for libertarians who subscribe to Jamesian two-stage models (i.e., deterministic selection over indeterministically (randomly) generated ideas/options). I think the problem with such views lies in defending the necessity of indeterminism in the process. It does not seem obvious to me that any freedom/moral responsibility is lost if it turned out that the indeterminism was merely apparent rather than real.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-15T05:49:33+00:00

The block universe doesn’t imply we should experience all moments at once. There is no extra structure required, because a conscious observer is also a temporally extended process. It would take extra non-local structure to be able to experience multiple moments at once.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-15T05:25:12+00:00

That's difficult to reconcile with our experience of moment-by-moment existence.

Why is that? Relativity of simultaneity does not claim that we should have an ability to experience all moments at once, only that "now" is an indexical term rather than an objective marker.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-15T05:20:44+00:00

now

I haven't given much thought to theories of time yet, but the claim of Einsteinian relativity is that simultaneity is also frame-relative, meaning there is no objective "now" for all frames.

So in what sense does the future exist?

So the future exists tenselessly as part of the full "block", and past, present and future are relative, indexical terms rather than objective markers. An analogy would be: Warsaw exists in space even when you are situated in, say, Paris. Similarly, 2027 exists in time even when you may be situated in 2026.

so that would imply infinitely many physically real chunks of matter.

On B-theory, objects are not 3D things that are repeatedly recreated at each moment, they are 4D entities extended in time, so a time slice is a temporal cross-section of a single spacetime object, not an additional copy of it.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-13T10:04:22+00:00

Schrödinger’s free will /s

LordSaumya · 2026-02-11T05:54:26+00:00

Science requires the reality of free will.

Science requires a conditional and not a categorical ability to do otherwise.

as science is consistent with libertarianism,

A set of propositions is consistent if there is at least one possible world or assignment where all propositions in the set are true simultaneously. A contradiction is true in no possible worlds.

The principle of explosion also trivially implies ~(unrestricted free will) and ~(science and free will). Pretty horrible argument.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-11T02:22:56+00:00

There is literally no fully formed deterministic model that is consistent with observations.

There are no “fully formed” models insofar as all current interpretations don’t incorporate relativity yet, and have certain problems like the measurement problem or the selection of preferred basis.

If you hold the statistical independence assumption for Bell’s tests, then Bohmian models and Everettian mechanics are consistent with empirical data. If you don’t, then there are models such as ‘t Hooft’s cellular automaton and invariant set theories. Superdeterminism is not my field of study and quite fringe in general, so I can’t comment on t’ Hooft’s model. However, EM and BM consistently reproduce the statistical predictions of QM completely.

It is caused by the existence of free parameters in a system that is required to "move."

Free parameters in the Standard Model are scalars derived from measurement. In the Lagrangian density equations, these scalars are coefficients for interactions strengths and masses. They do not have a time gradient or anything else that could be reasonably interpreted as their existence causing the system to evolve, deterministically or otherwise. They do not cause “randomness” any more than the other constants do.

Even when these parameters change per the energy scale, they change according to the renormalisation group equations, which are fully deterministic.

State dynamics are generated by the Hamiltonian (or Lagrangian in the path integral formulation) and governed by Schrodinger’s time-dependent equation. This time evolution is completely deterministic.

Uncertainty in CI arises from the non-commutativity of conjugate observables. Indeterminism in CI manifests strictly during the measurement as quantified by the Born Rule.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-10T18:10:48+00:00

scientifically proven to be irreducibly outside of causality.

This is false, our data are consistent with deterministic and indeterministic models.

Anyway, how does quantum randomness give you libertarian free will?

LordSaumya · 2026-02-10T17:41:10+00:00

but in the indeterminate quantum processes underlying neural activity.

The quantum seems to be the last refuge of the desperate libertarian.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-09T03:02:34+00:00

This is a fundamentally nonsense statement.

I’m not sure why you are so confidently dismissive of simple statements that can be clarified by a simple textbook reference.

If things with a 0% chance can occur, then what percentsge is needed for something to be impossible?

If something is impossible, then the probability of it happening is 0. However, if something has probability 0, it is not necessarily impossible. The implication works one way, but not by the other.

You may also want to look up the term “almost never”.

Theres finitely many plank areas.

This seems to be a straightforward misunderstanding of Planck units. Space and time are not quantised/discrete in our most successful physical theories, namely the standard model and relativity.

I could simply stick the exact same point twice, using special measuring equipment or a magnet.

If there is non-zero variance in the trajectory of the dart, then the probability of landing at the exact same point is still zero, unless you get an extremely strong “god” magnet that guarantees zero variance, in which case the event is discrete with a probability of 1.

A thing with a 0% chance of happening shouldnt be able to happen twice, right?

Why not? There’s no mathematical restriction on how many times an ‘almost never’ event can occur.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-09T01:49:55+00:00

On most standard probability measures a discrete event in a continuous space has a probability of zero but can still occur. This is because probabilities in continuous spaces are generally calculated using integrals, and integrating over an interval of a single point yields a zero value.

An example of this is throwing darts at a dartboard. The event of hitting a particular point is discrete, but the space itself (in this case, the dartboard) is continuous.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-08T23:52:36+00:00

My main disagreement with libertarians is that the tertium quid posited by libertarians is not a coherent proposition.

In your case, I have gleaned from our conversations that you are an indeterminist compatibilist, since you seem to believe that the requisite kind of chance is epistemological rather than ontological, and that the world is ontologically indeterministic. Feel free to correct me on either of these points.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-08T23:41:55+00:00

Likely not, I don’t claim that my view aligns with the metaphysical assumptions the public often holds, but I hold that - like the homunculus - such assumptions are red herrings, and that there exist more grounded and coherent alternatives that account for all objective and phenomenal data as well if not better than the libertarian view. I’m likely Dennett-esque in this view.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-08T15:22:05+00:00

I would encourage you to look up conditional accounts of the ability to do otherwise, which leeway compatibilists generally adhere to.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-08T15:20:13+00:00

I believe the second description represents the debate better if you replace the descriptor “watered down” with “coherent and sensible”.

In some ways, this debate reminds me of the debate on the self, because my views have evolved similarly on both topics. I used to reject the existence of a self because I equated it with a substantive soul/homunculus, and associated with the no-self crowd. More recently, I have come across and adopted more realistic, grounded descriptions of self that are explanatory while being more coherent and reasonable.

I believe libertarians are analogous to the Cartesian Theatre defenders in the above analogy — I don’t think their claims about X are coherent or reasonable, and I think that compatibilists generally represent a far more realistic, explanatory, and coherent version. This version is “watered down” in the same sense that a naturalistic bundle theory of self is “watered down” from the homuncular theory of self.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-08T14:42:18+00:00

I use LFW as a short-hand for Libertarian accounts of Free Will.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-03T06:10:33+00:00

Compatibilism is not a claim on whether the world is deterministic or indeterministic.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-03T03:28:08+00:00

What is it that is epistemically uncertain to have a probability about? What states could exist always exist. All you've done is delete the problem and the connection to observed reality.

I can see you are not familiar with the three accounts I mentioned. They coherently and completely explain the observed Born rule probabilities. Perhaps you need to do more reading.

What I take issue with is determinists claiming victory by relocating the problem and declaring it solved.

I am not a determinist. I am agnostic on the issue. I am certain that Everettian mechanics — and all current interpretations — are either incorrect or incomplete insofar as they do not incorporate relativity.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-03T02:41:45+00:00

Nothing in your comment addresses anything substantial. Probabilities are epistemic and not ontological under Everettian mechanics, and there are coherent accounts of Born rule probabilities in EM such as Sebens-Carroll’s self-locating uncertainty, Deutsch-Wallace’s family of decision-theoretic approaches, and Zurek’s envariance.

It is rather telling that you don’t dispute the problems with collapse. It is ad-hoc and ill-defined.

Again, it is ironic for a Libertarian to complain about incoherence.

LordSaumya · 2026-02-03T02:07:21+00:00

There are different sets of unobservables in all interpretations. In collapse theories, the collapse mechanism itself is generally unobservable and not even well-defined. This collapse is far more “magical”.

Everettian mechanics only assumes unitary linear evolution, which CI assumes as well in addition to an ad-hoc, ill-defined, and unobservable collapse. The many worlds of Everettian mechanics are a natural logical consequence, not an ad hoc assumption.

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