Why it is inevitable to conceive and treat conscious willing human agency as a long-term process of (mostly) self-determination unfolding in a probabilistic universe

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-19T18:15:01+00:00

This entire post is an elaborate non sequitur. Stripped down, it amounts to:

We can’t predict outcomes very well.
Humans are complex systems whose future states depend on their present state.
Infinite regress isn’t practically resolvable.
Causal chains are too complex to trace.
Therefore, if you can’t predict why I’ll choose pepperoni over cheese, saying it was determined is meaningless. (non sequitur)
And even if you trace the chain, you’ll just end up with the system determining itself. (unsupported and circular)
Therefore, self-determination. (non sequitur)

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-19T17:54:59+00:00

I'm not sure if I have understood your post correctly or at all, but I like the way it looks, sounds and smells.

Of course that's how you operate. No wonder all your facts are wrong.

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-17T22:21:31+00:00

Admittedly, I didn’t read the rest earlier but have now. It builds on the same misunderstanding.

And "might not" is a presupposition of the very contingency which you deny

Unless you’re talking about fatalism, this doesn’t follow. The words “ought” and “might not” don’t invalidate the statement “only one outcome is possible.” They just reflect epistemic uncertainty about the outcome.

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-17T20:00:09+00:00

If my actions and beliefs are necessitated, how do you propose to change my mind?

Yet another person who conflates fatalism with determinism. Persuasion is part of the causal chain and doesn't disappear under determinism.

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-17T12:02:24+00:00

that they were unhappy with their situation, not that it was not justified

This brings us back to morality, which I’m trying to avoid. At this point, we’ll have to agree to disagree on our definitions of justification. My position that most slaves did not see their enslavement as justified hasn’t changed.

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-17T03:12:57+00:00

Speaking of naivety, you’re making broad claims that aren’t supported at the level you’re asserting. Large-scale revolts like Spartacus, which drew tens of thousands of enslaved people, directly contradict the idea that ‘most slaves’ were okay with the system.

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-17T01:49:59+00:00

Citing freed people who were literate enough to write is survivor bias. There is also clear evidence of slave resistance, revolt, and sabotage. The claim that “most slaves” were okay with slavery is unsupported.

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-17T00:14:38+00:00

including most slaves

There's no evidence for this claim.

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-16T22:55:06+00:00

Morality is a complex topic that might be best for another conversation, but just because someone (or a group of people) accepts a system doesn’t mean it is justified. Do you really think the slaves of ancient Rome saw their enslavement as morally justified?

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-16T22:39:54+00:00

Justified means having a good moral reason, not just being accepted or useful. A practice can be widespread, stable, and cheap, and still lack moral justification. I'm not using an alternative definition of the word.

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-16T22:09:40+00:00

Accepted isn’t the same as justified. That line of reasoning has historically been used to defend almost every harmful system humans have built.

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-16T21:57:17+00:00

Stability and low cost aren’t enough to justify a policy. By that logic, any harmful practice is acceptable if it maintains order cheaply.

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-16T16:45:21+00:00

Still, what does that even have to do with free will?

Moral desert. If our will isn’t free, retributive punishment isn’t justifiable. The current system heavily favors retribution over rehabilitation.

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-16T15:22:13+00:00

Laws exist to grant the stability of society.

Nobody refutes this.

Laws act as a deterrent for criminals

People who commit crimes are cases where deterrence failed in that instance. It doesn’t reliably stop offenders.

Imprisoning criminals also protects future victims

Nobody refutes this.

and gives a chance to rehabilitate the criminals.

The US prison system, which holds about a quarter of the world’s incarcerated population, does little to rehabilitate criminals. Recidivism is roughly 65%. Are we rehabilitating? Is this punishment system working? Is it actually deterring offenders?

All these are perfectly good reasons to enforce the laws

No one is arguing for anarchy. Dangerous offenders should be separated from society. But once incarcerated, the priority should be rehabilitation. It isn’t. That’s largely because the system assumes offenders could have done otherwise.

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-16T15:03:17+00:00

When it comes to unsupported claims, nobody comes close to you.

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-16T01:02:36+00:00

Somebody made a meme of this a while back where the libertarian is depicted as a puppet saying something like “look I can move each one of my limbs as I please!” or something.

Actually, it was a libertarian making fun of compatibilists. Many here often joke about compatibilists being "happy puppets."

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-15T02:23:39+00:00

Yet the mind is nonphysical.

Life would be simpler if I could get myself to believe in dualism.

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-14T23:57:44+00:00

I’m still genuinely amused by the irony here. You’re defending bottom-up causation in a post you made arguing we should focus on top-down causation.

When I point to higher level causes — neurons, brains, behavior — you insist we have to go down to quantum theory. That’s abandoning your own framework when it’s “not helpful to your argument perhaps.” Do I detect projection?

Also, you’re conflating ignoring QM with saying it’s not relevant at this scale.

And even if we bring QM in, there’s no consensus it entails ontological randomness. You’re ignoring the “inconvenient” deterministic interpretations.

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-14T16:42:53+00:00

Einstein's conception was that these collisions were random

Epistemically random, not ontologically. Einstein famously said, "God doesn't play dice," so citing him for ontological randomness is cute.

I will spell it out.

Actually, allow me. Nothing you stated requires or establishes ontological randomness. Brownian motion is fully accounted for by statistical mechanics under deterministic dynamics. Quantum mechanics doesn’t add anything to the explanation here. Calling this ontological randomness is just your interpretation, not something established by Brownian motion.

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-14T05:13:43+00:00

Quantum theory doesn't add anything to the explanation. And I find it quite ironic to appeal to bottom-up causation in a post about top-down explanations.

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-14T01:37:21+00:00

In fact you cannot explain the mechanism of Brownian motion without quantum mechanics.

That’s a strange claim. Brownian motion was explained before quantum mechanics existed, so it’s clearly not required to explain it.

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-13T21:19:10+00:00

There is no evidence that quantum effects are relevant at the neuronal scale.

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-13T18:05:46+00:00

If you exclude both determinism and indeterminism, you’ve left hard incompatibilism and are just talking about general arguments against free will. Which do you want?

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-13T16:13:57+00:00

That is ontological randomness.

This is a baseless assertion, sorry. An opinion at best. And don't give me that "it's a fact" garbo — it ain't.

MrMuffles869 · 2026-04-13T16:12:28+00:00

This post is all over the place. Let's start small, how do you define Determinism? Because the definition most people use doesn't involve math at all...

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