So your refusal to face the reality of determinism is based on the terror that it would invoke in you if you did. As I suspected!Immanuel Can wrote:Terror? No, none of that. I'm "terrified" of only real things, and don't happen to regard Determinism as real.Dave Mangnall wrote:As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I think, I’ve never understood the terror of determinism. Why do you imagine it would be so overwhelming and stultifying? I guess I have a bit of an idea.
I would say Determinism is just impossible to live...and that is stultifying, meaning that it renders stupid a lot of normal human behaviour. For example, what's the use of planning a future if the future is whatever the future is? What's the point of talking about someone "loving" you when they could not have done other than they did? How do you rationalize locking up a criminal if he literally could not help doing what he was predestined to do? And so on.
Normal human choice-making actually turns out to be sham performance. The limitedness of human perspective makes us imagine we are making choices when all we are really doing is either dancing to our DNA or helplessly playing out the hand of cards that was dealt us at the Big Bang (or actually, before).
But is this "terrifying"? Heck no. I remain unafraid of fairy curses, of unicorn impalement, of leprechaun bites, of astrological projections and of Determinism...and one might say it's for the same reason. But I'll grant you this: that Determinism has this going for it; unlike those other things, at least a plausible explanation.
However, it's still really hard to muster the means to be afraid of something one thinks simply isn't so.
Your repressed terror is based on the mistaken perceptions that life would be rendered stupid, that love would be rendered worthless, that criminals would roam free and doubtless much more besides. I can see you have much to fear!
To pick up your detailed points and explain how determinism works.................
1. Your planning for the future is caused. The planning, an effect in itself, then feeds into the Causal Nexus as a cause in bringing about the planned future. The planned future is what it is, because the planning is what it is, because everything that happened before the planning is what it is. Your question has a resonance of the famously daft fatalist’s “Lazy Argument”. “What’s the point in going to the Doctor when you’re sick? You’re either going to die or you’re not.”
2. Why should love be any the less valuable to you just because people can’t help loving you? This is your old oft-repeated error coming out. You seem to believe that if something’s caused then it’s unreal. But there’s enough causation in the world, even within your free will model, for you to know that that isn’t so.
3. One purpose of incarcerating the criminal is to protect the public, and the public still needs to be protected even if the criminal’s will is not free. With some criminals, it actually is believed that they can’t help themselves, but they get locked up anyway, perhaps in secure mental institutions. It could be that it is determined that incarceration and appropriate treatment prevent subsequent re-offending. What the logic of determinism really does rule out is the rationality of wanting the criminal to suffer, because he’s so evil.
4. Your comments about normal human choice making are typical of the inconsistency brought about by your outside-looking-in thinking. Your use of words and phrases such “limitedness”, “all we are really doing” and “helplessly” only make any sense within the context of a free will that has been cruelly stolen from us. But with determinism there never was any free will, only the illusion of it. I follow my personal Script, and the Script defines who I am in the same way, I guess, that in your model your exertion of your free will defines who you are. There’s no associated sense of limitedness, or belittlement, or helplessness. Why should there be?