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Is there a skeptical/scientific argument against predeterminism?

I think it's a better reason to be a lot skeptical about the possibility of sending information back in time. What you've ended up with is a straightforward time travel paradox, in that with the information from the future, you would not do what that information said you would do(/had done).
Under determinism there would be no time travel paradoxes. You go back to kill your grandfather and you would just find that you were unable to do it.
Take away the time travel and there's no longer any "force of determinism" making you do something detrimental for no reason.
It wouldn't be for no reason, it would be for the reason that this is the only possible thing that can happen, given the prior state, which is the only reason anything happens under determinism.

There is no logical reason why determinism would not work given a large amount of information from the future.

But the deterministic force would be the same, whether or not you knew in advance the thing that was inevitably going to happen.
ETA: You can do your time-message thought experiment with a completely deterministic machine and have the same problem. The machine starts in state A, and is programmed to remain that way, unless there's a message from the future that says it's in state A in the future, in which case it's programmed to switch to state B. Now the message from the future comes that says it remained in state A. Would some force prevent the machine from switching to state B as it's designed to do in that situation? If so, it's not the removal of free will causing that, because it never had any in the first place.
Yes, under determinism something would go wrong with the machine so that it would not operate as programmed. That presents no more logical problem than the fact that if you programmed a robot to walk through a solid wall then it would just crash into the wall.

Remember I did not mention 'free will' or say that was the problem.

Again there is no logical problem involved in a deterministic system working with any amount of information from the future, just as you can have a deterministic sequence of numbers where the 4th term depends on the 8th term.



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GENERAL WARNING.
Some of you don't quite understand the problem. I will put it another way: It's not a question of whether indeterminism or determinism drives people to do bad things. Probably the proportion of evil will be the same or similar in both cases. The problem is that if we admit that certain behaviours are morally undesirable what is the ethical theory that can best explain why they are.

In my opinion, determinism cannot do that (Part 1 of my argument). We'll have to look elsewhere.

But if determinism were a scientifically true theory we would have a problem. Morality and science would be in contradiction. And we couldn't choose one or the other without costs.
There is an explanation that solves this contradiction: determinism is not true... neither false.
 
GENERAL WARNING.
Some of you don't quite understand the problem. I will put it another way: It's not a question of whether indeterminism or determinism drives people to do bad things. Probably the proportion of evil will be the same or similar in both cases. The problem is that if we admit that certain behaviours are morally undesirable what is the ethical theory that can best explain why they are.

In my opinion, determinism cannot do that (Part 1 of my argument). We'll have to look elsewhere.

But if determinism were a scientifically true theory we would have a problem. Morality and science would be in contradiction. And we couldn't choose one or the other without costs.
There is an explanation that solves this contradiction: determinism is not true... neither false.

Determinism and morality are not in conflict.

If they were in conflict that wouldn't tell us which is true.
 
Under determinism there would be no time travel paradoxes. You go back to kill your grandfather and you would just find that you were unable to do it.

Determinism does have problems with time travel.

Determinism doesn't just imply that you can predict the future from the past, but also that you can work the laws in the reverse and predict the past based on the future. Knowing the state of the universe at any point in time you can run the laws of physics either forward or backward and give the state at any other time.

So let's say we have a closed timelike curve. An electron enters said curve, travels forward through time, curves to travel backward for a bit, then returns back to it's starting point and continues on that same path.

Look at the state of the universe ten years later (as measured by some distant clock). That electron is no where to be found. Let's run the state backward. How do we get that electron back?

I may be missing something about closed timelike curves that causes them to give off radiation that would be absorbed elsewhere and thus carry information about them into the future of the rest of the universe, but otherwise this seems like a problem for determisim with respect to time travel. And I think it will be similar for any sort of time travel: when information from the future goes to the past it is lost from the future.
 
So basically, bla, bla, bla, playing the victim, bulverism, irrelevant handwaving, more polishing own statue.

Look, being deep and profound is kind of like being a lady. If you have to TELL people that you are, you probably aren't. Just support your case. Polishing your own statue about how the problems you think about are so hard and deep is not a substitute for actually having a coherent argument. If the problem is too hard for you, maybe let the ones who know what they're talking about handle it?



Yes, I gather that you don't actually know much about moral philosophy.

Otherwise you'd already know that the actual goal is figuring out what kind of things are best for society as a whole, and "blaming" even appears only in as much as one can say that certain actions are detrimental. Whether free will gets in the way of apportioning moral blame or not doesn't change the fact that you CAN say that something is good or detrimental to society. "Moral evil" is simply saying that something bad was called intentionally or by inaction by a human agent, so nothing changes if they were in fact the victims of determinism. At the end of the day, they still caused the outcome. But even if you dispense with the concept entirely, you can still say that an action was merely "bad", so you can still pass judgment on whether it should or shouldn't be done.

It's an optimization problem. Apportioning moral blame is not how you solve one.

To use an analogy, you can say that it's detrimental to traffic to have a giant pothole in the middle of the road, even if you can't assign moral blame to the water freezing that caused it. Or that concerning the people, maybe they SHOULD build the roads more robust like they do in Germany, and SHOULDN'T save a few bucks on road construction if it impedes traffic every winter. Whether you can wag a finger at someone and call them evil for saving a few bucks at the expense of ruining the infrastructure, doesn't change what the solution to the actual problem is.

But more importantly, again, show which actual proponent of determinism actually proposed that the conclusion is to gas the retarded, or admit that it was your own strawman. Handwaving some more doesn't change the fact that you haven't actually met that burden of proof. It's that simple.



Only because you don't know what you're talking about, and seem to think that handwaving and spewing irrelevant nonsense is an acceptable substitute. Point in case about not knowing what you're talking about:



It's a medical term, silly. It has an actual definition in the DSM. Look up words if you don't know them. They mean stuff.



Yes, optimization problems with large numbers of variables are HARD. Arguments about how to resolve such frictions is why whole tomes get written on the topic. But it doesn't mean that if it's hard, it's somehow just as valid to just give up and claim some simplistic nonsense instead, like you've been doing.



You can start by not using equivocations to nonsense redefinitions of the words. Again, nobody except you really proposes to maximize "freedom" as in 'your actions are free of having any reasons', which is the only one that determinism gets in the way of.



Ok, then: where does Skinner propose to gas the retarded? Or generally, that the solution to some people being a bother is to eliminate them? Otherwise it was your own strawman all along.



You need to first support them, not ask that someone contradicts them. That's literal argument from ignorance fallacy.



So basically you just found an excuse for why you can STILL not address point 3? :p
You think that changing words fixes problems you don't know how to solve and probably don't understand.

To say "optimize" does not say anything about how moral conflicts of interest are resolved.
By saying "society as a whole" does not solve the problem that there are conflicts of moral interests that do not allow us to give a definition of good that fits all of them.
Etc. etc.
Your comment is totally empty. It consists in using other words what had already been refuted.

I think it's because you don't understand what I'm saying. For example. I did not say that Skinner defends the gas chambers, quite the opposite. Trying to avoid the undesirable consequences of his determinism, he ends up introducing concepts that are contrary to him. Like intentionality. Now do you understand? Try to understand my preceding comment. Perhaps then we can have a more sensible discussion.

By the way, since you know so much about ethics, I'd like to know which authors you're talking about when you say "moral philosophy says" and where you got the information about them. We could contrast our sources.
 
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If your moral system doesn't apply to ancient China, then it is flawed.

If a person in a vegetative state has rights, then it's by virtue of something other than his free will, which in his case doesn't exist. This shows that even without free will there is reason for moral consideration, and thus serves as a reductio ad absurdum for your argument.
Excuse me, but I am not discussing my moral system, but whether determinism is compatible with the contemporary moral systems of our society. I'm not trying to explain the morality of a Neandertahl man. If such a thing existed.

Rights are a part of morality. Duties and responsibilities are another part. It is this second part that I am discussing. You cannot hold a person in a vegetative state responsible for anything. You cannot expect a person in a vegetative state to justified.
The rights that person may have do not rest in his moral nature. So it's a case apart. But they would pose the same problem: can they be eliminated because they bother me? That is a moral problem.
 
I don't think I'm seeing answers to my questions.
I didn't ask how the concept of morally implies freedom.
I asked about how determinism implies "not too compassionate a morality".
And how/why free will implies differently.

And I don't see what you don't see. You don't answer my questions either. We are tied.

I have not mentioned any "compassion". I was speaking of equity and responsibility.
Are you suggesting that morality is not a question of equity but compassion?
 
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I would like to see if people here will say explicitly that people can be held morally responsible for things that were already inevitable before they were born

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It's the first part I'm interested in. I have shown that this conflict exists. If a man is like a machine you have no moral responsibilities to him. Is it not so?

Let me repeat the point again: whether man is like a machine or not, you can still say that certain behaviours are beneficial on the a whole, and others are detrimental.

I gave the example about potholes in a highway for a reason. The main reason they happen after every winter is that water gets into cracks, freezes, thus expands and pushes creating more cracks. The whole process is as deterministic as it gets. Water freezes into cracks because of rain, gravity and capillarity. It freezes at a fixed temperature. It expands a very deterministic amount. The maximum pressure it can generate in the process is determined by the physical properties of ice, including compressibility. Etc. Water has no free will whether to do that or not. Nobody would assign moral blame to water for freezing.

And the same applies to every bit of asphalt, concrete and rubble that go into making that road. Whether this bit of gravel let itself be pushed away from that other bit by the freezing water, and whether the asphalt holding them together allowed it, is purely a mechanical and material properties problem. None of the elements involved had any free will in it.

Yet that doesn't make anyone do the idiocy you proclaim here as inevitable if things are deterministic: just give up on designing a better road just because they can't blame someone.

The same applies to designing a better society, silly. That's all I'm saying.


And none of your silly excuses hold any water, especially since they are the SAME regardless of whether things are deterministic or not.

Yes, there are conflicts of interest, and yes things can't be solved to a PERFECT state. That's why we went at figuring out even just the legal system for at least the last 5000 years straight, and are still at perfecting it. Yes, it's a hard problem. But guess what? It's still hard regardless of whether things are deterministic or not. And nobody sane is giving up on the problem entirely just because it's hard.

You accused ME of wanting simple answers. But actually in the whole thread YOU are the only one proposing to go by just the over-simplistic notion that only one thing matters, and to just give up on solving the problem at all, if things are too hard.

In fact, what YOU do is the standard idiocy that you see done by dysfunctional self-proclaimed perfectionists on really any other domain. They invariably decide to just proclaim one variable as the only one that matters, and solve that over-simplification instead of the real optimization problem. Whether it's about society, or whether ONE decision in IT (e.g., run Linux) is all that's needed to solve everything that matters -- because they just proclaimed everything else not to matter -- that's the kind of crap solution you get from that kind of twit. And they'll think it's the PERFECT solution, or indeed the only one, because look, it maximizes one thing, but that's just them being unqualified to solve the real problem so they'll solve the wrong one instead.
 
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I would like to see if people here will say explicitly that people can be held morally responsible for things that were already inevitable before they were born

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I think so, yes, and I think Myriad has done a good job of explaining why.
 
Excuse me, but I am not discussing my moral system, but whether determinism is compatible with the contemporary moral systems of our society. I'm not trying to explain the morality of a Neandertahl man. If such a thing existed.
The morality of modern society is applicable to ancient China. If it were not it would be no morality at all.

The ancient Chinese weren't Neanderthals, by the way.

Rights are a part of morality. Duties and responsibilities are another part. It is this second part that I am discussing. You cannot hold a person in a vegetative state responsible for anything. You cannot expect a person in a vegetative state to justified.

So, your argument doesn't state that those without free will don't deserve moral consideration?
 
Determinism does have problems with time travel.



Determinism doesn't just imply that you can predict the future from the past, but also that you can work the laws in the reverse and predict the past based on the future..

The concept of determinism doesn't imply reversibility. You can have a deterministic non-reversible system.

Determinism doesn't even imply that the future can be predicted from the past.

All the concept of determinism means is that there is only one possible next state.

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The concept of determinism doesn't imply reversibility. You can have a deterministic non-reversible system.

Determinism doesn't even imply that the future can be predicted from the past.

All the concept of determinism means is that there is only one possible next state.

Fair enough.

In our universe the laws of physics are actually time reversible. As such if the universe is deterministic in the sense that any present state has one and only one possible future state then it's also the case that any present state also has one and only one possible past state.
 
I think so, yes, and I think Myriad has done a good job of explaining why.
I will have to try re-reading, because I am not getting it. You could say that a person was responsible, in the sense that you would say a loose bolt was responsible for an engine failure.

But I can't see how you could hold someone morally responsible for something that was already inevitable before there was life on Earth.

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I will have to try re-reading, because I am not getting it. You could say that a person was responsible, in the sense that you would say a loose bolt was responsible for an engine failure.

But I can't see how you could hold someone morally responsible for something that was already inevitable before there was life on Earth.

I can hold a person responsible for their actions in the same way that I can hold my computer is responsible for beating me in chess.
 
Under determinism there would be no time travel paradoxes. You go back to kill your grandfather and you would just find that you were unable to do it.


No, determinism allows for and requires physical cause and effect. "Just finding that you were unable" is an effect without a physical cause.

Under your particular fictional interpretation of how time travel would work, you say there would be no paradoxes. But (1) that's still just fiction because as far as we know time travel is not possible, and (2) being unable to act (or the machine malfunctioning) for no physical reason is just as much a contradiction of your premises (that determinism is in effect) as killing your grandfather would be.
 
I can hold a person responsible for their actions in the same way that I can hold my computer is responsible for beating me in chess.
Which is pretty much the same way that a loose bolt can be said to be responsible for an engine failing.
 

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