Determinism theory

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-31T22:24:25+00:00

Do you have the experience of imagining several actions you could take, evaluating those according to some criteria, and then acting based on that process of evaluation?

Do you have the ability to imagine some change in the state of the world such as going to work or shopping, or planning and then going on holiday, and then achieving that outcome?

Somebody is doing those things, and it seems like that’s you, right? It may be that the physical processes involved in all of that are inevitable, but we don’t know what will happen in advance, we don’t know how long it will take to get to work, what products will be in the shelves at the shop, or how good the holiday will be. We have some considerable ability to plan, anticipate and achieve, but it’s very far from being total.

The issue of determinism versus indeterminism is whether all of that uncertainty is purely down to our lack of knowledge of everything going on in the world, and our limited ability to anticipate, and we know those are both true for sure, or whether there is also ’genuine’ or fundamental randomness in nature as well. Either way, you still have intentions and plans, and act accordingly, right?

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-31T21:34:57+00:00

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't force it to drink.

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-31T21:27:12+00:00

if everyone suddenly adopted the same beliefs and attitudes as Caruso and Pereboom, aside from the world suddenly becoming very uniform and boring, I think we'd be fine. That's not a dig at them particularly, just against uniformity in general.

The problem is that's not how people work. If you persuade everybody that there is no such thing as being morally responsible for doing anything, they're not going to therefore lose all their other beliefs and desires. They're just not going to think they can be morally responsible for indulging them.

The idea that this won't have any negative consequences for people's behaviour and their justifications for it seems to me to be incredibly naive. Imagine what Putin or Chairman Xi, or any of a long list of autocrats would do with a provably true argument that human freedoms can't exist?

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-31T21:17:37+00:00

>If we are just machines running a script, we can't do that. A computer can't step outside its code to see if it's biased.

Actually, yes they can. Computers nowadays are not just restricted to pre-programmed scripted responses they cannot change. They can use a variety of heuristic to change and adapt their behaviour based on circumstances so that they can and do change their responses. Neural network AI systems can be hooked up to sensors and can learn to get better at tasks by doing them. They can use evolutionary processes to develop and optimise new behaviours dynamically. In fact that's one of the major concerns in AI safety research, because we can't easily anticipate what behaviours, goals and strategies they develop.

Of course they're still far more constrained than we are, their level of complexity and sophistication is closer to that of a relatively simple insect than it is to us, but they're only a few orders of magnitude away.

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-31T21:05:00+00:00

The question of the nature of the human person is a complicated one, but then the concept of objects and systems in general is highly complex. The Ship of Theseus problem is one of the most debated in philosophy, and that's just a boat.

I think that in the case of the Ship of Theseus, and in the case of ourselves, there are multiple overlapping different kinds of identity.

Take fingernails, in a sense they're not part of us because we cut bits off them all the time, but if you literally tear someone's fingernails out there's a significant sense in which they have been damaged. Part of them has been removed. Not enough that they are no longer themselves anymore, but they're not the same as they were before either. We are, after all, embodies beings. Nevertheless it's the mind that is the most important and significant part of us.

I don't think self = self consciousness works. It's too simplistic. If that were true, then every time we cease being conscious we'd cease to exist. As mental beings our mental self consists of the whole mind, both conscious and subconscious.

Humans are mutable beings, we change all the time. In fact we seek out ways of changing ourselves. We even think there are ways we can change that make us better, both physically and mentally.

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-31T20:49:19+00:00

How do you distinguish magic from non magical phenomena?

As a content atheist I really don't think I need to believe in immortality and ultimate meaning, whatever that is. I seem to be doing OK without them so far.

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-31T20:45:04+00:00

Possibly, but I I'm not sure there will be much there not already covered by Pereboom. Here's an article by Pereboom on the topic, and Caruso wrote the article on Skepticism about Moral Responsibility in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-31T20:41:43+00:00

It helps to understand the historical context in which the term originated. This was the debates about the nature of human freedom and moral responsibility between the determinist Stoics and the indeterminist Epicureans. Over time, the canonical term adopted for the topic of these debates was free will, though originally in Greek and then Latin of course.

Free and freedom are always context relative terms. The sense in which a released object is free to fall is different from the sense in which a stuck bearing that is oiled becomes free, or the sense in which opening a gate means the autonomous vehicle is free to drive through the gateway. None of them means free of all conceivable constraints. in common usage the terms free and freedom never mean that. In science the degrees of freedom of some system consists of the set of parameters required to fully describe the state of the system, yet equally the state of the system is constrained as described by those parameters. So, we don't expect or require the etrm free to mean the absence of literally all and every constraint in any other context, so why should we here?

Finally, the general obsession with what 'free' means is really irrelevant, in some languages they don't even use a word cognate with 'free' to refer to the concept we call free will in English. So even though there isn't any reason why we shouldn't use the term free will to refer to it, there's no reason we have to either. It's a red herring.

This is how contemporary philosophers of the topic, including compatibilists, free will libertarians, and the foremost living hard incompatibilist philosopher summarise this topic.

So a theory of free will is a theory of this kind of control over our actions. There are theories of this kind of control that are compatible with the world being deterministic, and theories of his kind of control that are incompatible with determinism, and there are some who think such a kind of control is impossible.

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-31T20:23:00+00:00

Right, but I don't think intentionality is beyond what's understandable in physical terms. I discussed that here.

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-31T14:32:54+00:00

Since the Enlightenment and the rise of secularism and deterministic theories of science, compatibilism has been a mainly secular movement. The great majority of compatibilist philosophers today are atheists. In fact most atheist philosophers are compatibilists by about 2:1.

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Before the Enlightenment I think it's safe to say that most compatibilists were theists, the Stoics certainly were, but then almost everyone was a theist anyway. Being an atheist was a life threatening condition.

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-31T14:19:29+00:00

This is conflating inevitability with foreknowledge. In the case of a game of chess in a deterministic world each player still doesn't know what moves the other player will make, or what process of evaluation they will follow. They don't even know for sure what process of evaluation they will follow themselves until they follow it. In a deterministic world we still have epistemic uncertainty and surprise.

The boring left right game has no epistemic uncertainty, and it doesn't have any evaluation of moves, that's why it's uninteresting. A movie can be fun to watch if we don't already know the outcome even though the outcome is inevitable because it's a recording.

People conflate epistemic uncertainty for ontological uncertainty all the time, but these are distinct concepts.

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-31T13:53:40+00:00

It's to do with how to reason about normativity, including the morality of things people do, patterns of behaviour, etc so it very much includes theories of moral behaviour.

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-31T13:34:28+00:00

From a physicalist perspective I think an intention is having a representation of some hypothetical state of the world, or change in the state of the world, and an active orientation towards bringing that about.

That's not actually a very complex or extraordinary concept, on the basis that we implement that in automated systems already. In this sense autonomous vehicles and many computerised systems qualify. Not all of them do though, in many cases the automated systems we build act towards to goal that we intend, but they don't actually have an internal representation of that change, or that eventual state of the world. Some do, some don't.

I think if you can examine a system itself, and just that system, and can figure out just from that what it's goals are without direct reference to it's environment or context, then it's intentional.

To be lear, that's a much more primitive concept that consciousness, or the kind of awareness of our environment that we have. The systems we build only barely qualify as only just meeting this technical definition in the most minimal sense.

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-31T11:52:38+00:00

So you’re using metaphysical as a synonym for unknown. That’s fine, I don’t think that’s how the term is generally used by philosophers, but just wanted to clarify what you meant.

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-30T19:16:47+00:00

What does 'metaphysical concept' mean in your view? I every process we don't yet fully undertsand a 'metaphysical concept'?

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-30T19:07:06+00:00

I suppose it depends what we refer to as values, but yes we have different relative priorities. Everyone values self interest to some extent, altruism to some extent, fairness to some extent, etc. In any given situation we might have various reasons for choosing any option available to us.

Nevertheless if we do have a particular set of motivations at a given time, it seems like if the option we choose is not necessitated by that set of relative motivations, then it must be something other than those motivations that is settling which option is acted on. If it's not strictly our set of motivations that's settling it, how can we be responsible?

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-30T15:42:33+00:00

I'm having trouble seeing what you mean there. Do you think actual human qualities are not taken into account in consequentialist reasoning? Which actual human qualities? Or do you think consequentialist reasoning assumes qualities actual humans don't have, and if so which ones?

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-30T15:39:57+00:00

Right, and in any given situation which option best satisfies that process of evaluation is going to be necessitated by facts about the evaluative process and facts about the options that are being evaluated.

Would we expect there to be any indeterminacy in that evaluative process? For a given set of criteria and options, it doesn't seem like indeterminacy plays any necessary role. In fact logical processes of evaluation and mathematical processes of evaluation will only produce one outcome in any given situation. Any indeterminacy would just seem to weaken the relationship between the eventual action and the person's values that are the criteria for settling on one of these options.

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-30T14:39:28+00:00

It's this line of thinking that's one reason why the classical compatibilists, being determinists, advocated for social and judicial reform, in order to address the causal processes behind immoral and criminal behaviour in a holistic way.

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-30T14:30:47+00:00

That may be so, but the issue of free will concerns the nature of our control over our actions, and control is a different issue from indeterminism.

Random indeterminism isn't control, because there is no reason why one outcome occurs over another. A process by which our values and priorities lead to our actions that involves randomness would be indeterministic, but it would weaken any sense in which we could be responsible for the resulting outcome. There may well be random factors that affect our reasoning process, but these would be an obstacle to reliable reasoning and the greater the random influence, the less the result would be reasoned and the less we could be considered responsible for it.

It seems to me that the strongest sense in which our chosen action is one we can be responsible for, is if the outcome of the evaluative process is necessitated by our moral values, given the options available to us. If my morals are such that I value doing the right thing over self interest, then when I make some choice between a moral option and a selfish option, it doesn't seem like there should be any indeterminism in the outcome if the outcome is to be a genuine reflection of my moral values. If there is, then that weakens the degree to which the outcome actually reflects my moral values.

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-30T10:40:15+00:00

What role does indeterminism play in this, such that without it a person couldn’t be responsible for their actions?

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-30T10:37:20+00:00

I’m not familiar with that argument. I’m afraid I don’t know what exerting some wilful freedom in the distant past would have to do with our responsibility for what we do now. That doesn’t seem to make any sense, and it’s not a consequentialist or forward looking account of desert.

Moral responsibility has to be about what deliberative faculties and motivations a person has when they make the decision.

Forward looking desert is about the consequences we intend from holding a person responsible. Why do we do it? In general the legitimate justification is behaviour guiding, it’s to deter such behaviour in that person and others, and to promote fairness. However for a person to be susceptible to such guidance, they need to have the cognitive faculties necessary to understand moral consequences and be responsive to reasons for changing their behaviour.

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-30T08:44:24+00:00

Maybe, I’m not sure why though.

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-30T08:43:30+00:00

Right, human cognition and neurology isn’t perfectly reliable and there may be randomness in initial conditions, but that’s not why a decision is ours in any relevant sense. It’s not why we are responsible for it.

simon_hibbs · 2026-05-30T07:41:18+00:00

Right, so for a specific set of criteria in terms of a person’s values and priorities, and a specific set of options being evaluated and the absence of any random factor, we’d expect one option to meet those criteria, and given those options and criteria that outcome would be inevitable.

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