Forums → WEPR → determined actions?

Do you, the reader, believe that our actions are determined? Do you disagree with this notion, or do you think something different? why is it that you think this?

also, here is a link on determinism

I've said this in other threads before, but if we knew -everything- about the universe, we could predict everything. Things do not happen without reason. Organisms do not react in unpredictable ways. Unless you could prove there is an element of sheer randomness on the smallest level (I'm not sure how quantum mechanics would apply to brain neurons), then things follow this natural cause and effect. We, as complicated organisms, have the illusion of free will because the behind the scenes mechanisms are far too complicated for us to turn into formulas like math - here's the input, here's the outcome, except with a trillion variables of which most are unknown or seemingly irrelevant.

so therefore any actions that we perform are out of our control and therefore not of our fault.

Since we're on the topic of free will, I recently had a discussion on the topic with my mom (an overly-religious JW) who believes that people have entirely free will. The discussion focused on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19, particularly on 19:15-16
"15 With the coming of dawn, the angels urged Lot, saying, âHurry! Take your wife and your two daughters who are here, or you will be swept away when the city is punished.â 16 When he hesitated, the men grasped his hand and the hands of his wife and of his two daughters and led them safely out of the city, for the Lord was merciful to them."-NIV
This seemed to be a violation of their free will to remain in the city. Her primary argument was emotional, that this was an act of love and kindness and it was a good thing ("Wouldn't you want to be pulled out, too?&quot, even if it violated their free will. And I pointed out that it was unnecessary, as there were plenty of ways that he and his family could've been saved without leaving and without infringing on their free will, such as how the 3 men in Daniel 3 were saved in the furnace. Cornered, she stated that maybe it was easier for God to protect them by taking them out of there. Main problems with that: God supposedly has unlimited power, so ease is not a factor for Him because any expenditure of effort is absolutely nothing; the easiest course of action would be to never expend energy at all, never creating anything in the first place. With no further outs, the discussion was over.

It looks like it determined I would find it. (Blade will get what I mean)

Here is a video where he argues for an ethical framework looking at it from the point of view of hard determinism. The basic rundown is that he argues that we are essential self reflective robots. It's within this ability to self reflect that we can construct an ethical framework even if there was no such thing as free will.

Basically in the same way we can look at how our computer works and can determine when it's not operating the way it should we can also do the same with us. From that we can go about trying to fix or prevent those of us not operating in the manner we should.
Christopher diCarlo: The future of ethics: Exorcising the ghost in the machine (Eschaton 2012)

I remember coming across a study which showed that when making a decision our subconscious reacted before we were even aware that we had made the choice. This study supported a deterministic function of our decision making. Now I do also remember a later study that would seem to counter this argument to determinism that was derived from this study. Unfortunately I can't remember the specifics or find either study right now.

I did find this video which does glosses over that study while talking about deterministic morality. In it he starts off with putting forth two scenarios. One we have a guy who gets pushed off a cliff by the wind. Now he had no control over being pushed it was an entirely based on natural forces. In this the man ends up falling on a guy and killing the guy at the bottom of the cliff.
Now the second scenario has a man who contentiously decides to jump off the cliff with the intent to land on and kill the person at the bottom.

Now from this we would punish the second person but we wouldn't the first. Why is that? If we are looking at it from a deterministic perspective both were simply acting on the natural processes and ultimately would go off the cliff and kill the guy at the bottom. So why would we punish one and not the other?

Now I think that's where the argument made in the first video can be applied. In the first scenario we can look at the situation and fix the problem from happening again by maybe putting up railing. This would prevent the first man from going over the cliff. This wouldn't work with the second man, because the natural processes that lead to the man going over the cliff were different. In the second man we would have to do something with the man himself to prevent him from going over the cliff.

Anyway here is the second video. The video does touch on soft determinism but also get's into viewing morality under hard determinism, talking about how we can measure actions based on our measure of control. Such as a person with a malfunctioning brain will lack the same control as someone with a brain working correctly. Very much like what was said in the first video, just stated in a different way.
How to Dissolve the Problem of Free Will and Determinism

Both videos together are about an hour and thirty minutes, so I hope I was able to put forth enough for discussion without having to watch the videos if you decide not to (or perhaps that the ultimate deterministic state brings you to not watch the videos.)

Personally, I believe in what I like to call probabilistic determinism. Don't know if there is an 'official' term for that.

What do I mean by this? Let's look at an example, the nervous system. Signals are fired not on a 0/1 principle, but according to increasing probability. An individual nerve cell will only fire a signal if a specific threshold has been reached. And the signal will only efficiently be transmitted if most nerve cells in a nerve fire the signal. There is always the possibility of one not firing.

I believe there is something similar on the smallest physical scale, some kind of stochastic events. It all looks very deterministic on our scale, and if we knew every information of every tiny bit of matter in our universe, we could predict tomorrow with 99.9999999......% probability. Further into the future, this prediction accuracy would decrease as stochastic events accumulate.

Personally, I believe in what I like to call probabilistic determinism.

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle..doesn't this play a role in the idea of "measuring the universe" and whatnot?

Oh yeah - that's a really good point! It seems like the information we get would necessarily be limited such that meaningful predictions (at least in the relevant sense) would be ruled out.

Well that kinda takes the fun out of surprises.

Well that kinda takes the fun out of surprises.

determined actions is a interesting philophiscal (don't mind my bad spelling and inexperience) thought since we don't know everything we wouldn't know as HahiHa said and still it might or might not be true for there are millions of different possibilities for each action small or big leading to many more oh crap what i'm talking about is a different thought the many universes thought which is very interesting.

Luckily we are not omniscient, and even if the world would be 100% deterministic, we wouldn't notice. The surprise spoil would be on a purely theoretical level :P