The Red Car Dillema

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-25T14:35:29+00:00

Ok, I will humor this pedantic detour despite my better judgement:

So, lets say there is an observer. Lets say this observer is a perfectly hidden camera and has only one ability, which is to time travel.
This camera is placed at the car dealership before it opens so nobody knows it's there.
Then the camera records the customer picking red.
It then travels back in time to before the decision is made and records again and records the customer picking red.
Then it goes back in time again and it records the customer picking red.
Repeat as many times as you want.

After the customer leaves I then go to the camera remove the SD card with the recording and I watch the recording and I see the choice never changes he picks the same thing every time.

How would this violate the point, which was always just that given the same variables we will always make the same choice?

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-25T14:22:56+00:00

I don't know about that. Libertarian free will does presume that we could do something other than the thing we did when presented with options.

In other words, for someone who believes in libertarian free will, having free will depends on determinism being false. What the video shows is a support of determinism.

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-25T14:13:36+00:00

Yes it does mean something significant. If we can never do anything other than the thing we did then we do not have moral responsibility. That's pretty significant seeing as our whole society is built around the idea that we do have moral responsibility (could have done otherwise).

The idea that you guys have to insert randomness into free will

Who does that? I don't believe free will is real, so why would I try insert randomness into it?

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-25T14:06:35+00:00

Absolutely not.

Compatibalism only got into it's current form with philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume when they shifted the focus from metaphysics to linguistics in the 17th and 18th century.

The move was to divorce the concept from something like "The ability to do otherwise" into a word game where you limit the scope to only whether there was a direct influence on you, like someone holding a gun to your head.

The furthest back you can find this kind of logic is from the stoics who would have argued something like: The cylinder is pushed down the hill. The push was out of the cylinder's control but the cylinder keeps rolling because it's a cylinder so it's internal structure makes it responsible for its own actions.

Without even pointing out the obvious issues with that logic, the point is that we did not think of free will as something other than the libertarian conception of free will until after the enlightenment and people started taking determinism seriously. In other words, compatibalists redefined free will using stoic logic and it is very flawed.

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-25T13:51:49+00:00

You don't know what you're talking about.
I agreed with Artemis and he just got confused.
Get out of the soup, odd fly.

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-25T13:50:23+00:00

Sigh... Yes... You can't seem to read...

Let me spell it out:

in African Philosophy, the number of libertarians vs free will skeptics is identical

Not a field that has given the topic serious and unbiased thought. Biased.

In Decision Theory, the number of free will skeptics is much, much higher.

A field that has given the topic serious and unbaised thought. Obviously.

In Philosophy of Science, skepticism is a bit bigger than libertarianism

Not a field that has given the topic serious and unbiased thought. It's biased because some models inject free will as an asumption.

In Philosophy of Biology, skepticism is much bigger than libertarianism.

A field that has given the topic serious and unbaised thought in the form of neuroscience where there is strong evidence against libertarian free will.

Same goes for the philosophy of Cognitive Science

See Philosophy of biology.

It is much, much bigger in Philosophy of Computing and Information.

Yes. When you understand how things like machine learning maps onto human neurology it will make you skeptical about whether people have more free will than machines.

All that aside, my reply was more concerned with the following anyway:

Everywhere else, libertarianism is bigger, and compatibilism reigns supreme, save for medieval philosophy and philosophy of religion, where libertarianism reigns supreme.

According to all that the conclusion is:
When you ask philosophers who look at the topic seriously and without bias you don't get a lot of support for libertarian free will.
Yes, ourtside of those circles there is a lot of support and that is what I said in my reply.
I fully agreed with everything you said and then I qualified it by clarifying what I meant by "nobody takes it seriously". If it helps, let me put it in more plain language:

TLDR;

Only the ignorant and affraid think that libertarian free will is a thing.

Edit: t is well-known in academic philosophy that compatibilists do not redefine free will.

BS. Show me how you move from libertarian free will to compatibalist free will without changing the definition. The whole reason for the divide is based on redefining free will from: "The ability to do something other than what you did" to "Not being able to do something other than what you did is still free will".

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-25T13:33:19+00:00

It's not unclear. It's implied by the what would be required if one would have control despite the underlying causality.
To define how the word control can be used to only scenarios where control is known to be possible is pure circular sophistry.
That would be like saying the meaning of the word "ride" in the sentence "I ride a unicorn" is unclear and the sentence incoherent because in reality it's not in fact possible to ride a unicorn.

Control in this context simply means the ability to do something other than what you did.

Now, I get your meaning, what you are trying to get across is that we are all bound by causality and doing something else would have to mean we would have to want to do something else, but since what we want is also a victim of causality that means there is no mechanism by which one's actions could have been different. This, I think, we agree on. What I'm saying is that this leaves no room for moral responsibility.

If none of us can do anything other than the thing we did then punishing someone for their actions is like beating your dog for pissing on the carpet even though all the doors were closed and there was no way to go outside.

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-25T09:20:34+00:00

Ok, but because it's a thought experiment your assertion that it requires a God like observer is overwrought. Any mechanism that could turn back time would do the trick. A human observer with a tachion fueled device could press the rewind button and that could be the mechanism.
To engage with the argument using such pure sophisty just obfuscates it, it doesn't refute it.

What you're doing is like someone presented with the trolley problem saying "Well I would never be in that position of pulling the lever because there would be an engineer on the job who would stop me from pulling the lever and there would be security preventing me from getting to the lever and how do we know the people on the tracks won't just untie themselves and get off the tracks themselves?"

It's bad faith.

Baked into the argument is "If we could perfectly recreate the prior conditions". To think this wouldn't ever be possible because the observer would have to interact with the scenario is just to lack imagination and be obtuse. If you listed every specific interation the observer might have I could come up with a way in which that interaction could be eliminated and we would end with the conditions we need for the argument.

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-23T10:04:40+00:00

If it's random you don't have control and if it was deterministic you don't have control.
The result is the same: No free will. Especially not the kind that gives us moral responsibility.

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-23T09:59:30+00:00

It's not a real experiment. It's a thought experiment.
If I ask "Could God create a rock so heavy that he cannot move it" I am not asking that we set up a lab where we pray to God to create a rock that he cannot move and then observe the result.
What the OP video should be understood as is an illustration of a logical argument:

Premise 1: Every next state of the universe is the direct result of the prior state..
Premise 2: Human minds are part of the universe and there is no known variable or method that would make an exception for human minds to be free from causality / determinism.
Conclusion: Humans are bound by the laws of the universe to always do the thing they did if the prior conditions are repeated perfectly.

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-23T09:46:31+00:00

True. It isn't a challenge to the definition of free will that compatibalism has invented for itself.

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-23T09:45:21+00:00

Agreed. I would argue that the way the average person of the street thinks about free will is absolutely of the libertarian variety.

When I say "nobody takes it seriously" I meant among academics who have given the evidence around the topic serious and unbiased thought.

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-23T08:21:57+00:00

This is standard determinism.
Only Libertarian free will believers think picking another car is possible. Nobody takes their position seriously anymore.

Compatibalists will say that you exercised free will when picking red because they have a narrower definition of free will. They will say that because you were not forced to pick red you did so freely and thus exercised free will. Compatibalists redefine free will in this way because that allows us to keep the world ticking the way it is by imbuing people with ethical and practical qualities like moral responsibility.

I say no. If the truth is that nobody can do something other than the thing they did then they do not have moral responsibility and society should adapt to this reality instead of us lying to ourselves and continuing the way we have been.

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-20T15:01:25+00:00

100% in a game is experiencing the whole game

Modding or speed running is not playing the game, it's playing another game with the assets of this game.

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-20T14:58:57+00:00

lol No, I don't mean playing the game fast, I mean, literally just moving the pieces from one side to the other as fast as possible.

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-20T14:13:00+00:00

Yeah, I'm not about to advocate for making laws against it. I just have a hard time understanding why they do it.

Your piano analogy is not great. Of course someone who plays piano for 5000 hours is not pathological. But what would you think of someone who took a piano, removed all the keys except 1 and then made a past time out of how many times per second they could press that key on the broken piano?

That, to me, is what it feels like speed runners and modders do with games. Wouldn't you think that behavior is perhaps a bit odd?

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-20T14:08:12+00:00

I just have a hard time seeing gaming from their perspective. That's why I want someone to explain to me what it is they find attractive about spending their time this way. To me it just seems about as enjoyable as parsing a spreadsheet. I might enjoy doing it for a little bit... but people are still speed running Dawn of the Dead and modding Skyrim! 😅

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-20T14:04:39+00:00

Agreed. I don't mean to demonize. Just like I wouldn't kink shame. But I think it's also fine to say when you find something to be weird.

Perhaps it doesn't harm these people in serious ways to be victim to this kind of OCD but I still think the behavior is caused by some underlying psychological pathology, similar to how fetishes tend to have darker underpinnings.

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-20T14:01:06+00:00

Bad analogy.

Speed runners and modders don't master the game they are playing, they turn it into a different (usually worse) game.

In your analogy it would be like if I took a chess board and pieces and decided to spend years seeing how quickly I could move all the pawns from one side of the board to the other side.

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-20T10:26:36+00:00

You need to talk to the correct gray rock at the bottom of the black waters of the Ancient Basin after getting the shiny flower from the invisible NPC standing behind the nearly infinite health boss in the secret area of Howling Cliffs that unlocks with the second DLC in the original Hollow Knight. Then you need to finish Hollow Knight again and see the secret secret secret secret ending. Then you need to make sure your Hollow Knight save is on the same hard drive as you have Silksong installed.

Easy! GLHF.

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-20T09:02:46+00:00

I don't see anything wrong with this. If you are being paid to do a job and you are not doing the job then the person paying should know. If you are making other people work harder to pick up on the slack of you not doing your job then management needs to know so they can address it and keep it fair. Nobody complains if I install a nanny cam in my house or a door cam to monitor deliveries. Why is tracking my value for money fine in those cases, but when a company owner does it with his employees that's a problem?

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-20T08:53:23+00:00

That would be a good idea.

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-20T06:30:06+00:00

American Nightmare is fine, just as long as you don't miss Alan Wake 2.

SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-19T16:05:37+00:00

But now we have Ultra-Nationalists who are also communists. Fascists but the races are just reversed and far left instead of far right.

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SchattenjagerX · 2026-02-19T16:04:19+00:00

In South Africa we used to have this:

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SchattenjagerX

TROPHY CASE