RogerSH wrote: ↑Tue Jul 27, 2021 7:17 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Jul 24, 2021 1:58 pm
RogerSH wrote: ↑Sat Jul 24, 2021 9:15 am
but only if the will is something apart from prior physical or ideal forces, which is just an assumption, and a very debatable one.
No, that's backwards. Determinism has to hold that the will is strictly a product of prior forces. A belief in free will allows that its not. So there's no "debate" allowed by the Determinist side: it's all or nothing, for them.
Can you accept computer data in the causal chain? Or software?
The Determinist (who is not me, of course) can accept computer data and software, but only because they are products of human engineering, and only because human engineering is itself also a product of prior forces.
Well, I'm a physicalist, and according to physics the multiverse is deterministic but any universe "strand" isn't.
The first thing we need to know about the Multiverse Hypothesis is that it's a "hypothesis," an imaginary model, not an empirical reality, of course. Worse still, if we understand the word "universe," then we also realize that if anything empirical were ever found to support the idea, it would, by definition be part of
this "universe," not of some other one or a complex of them called the "Multiverse." So it's not only unscientific, but doomed to stay so.
The second thing is this: that an actual Physicalist cannot, by definition, accept any
non-physical explanations of causality
in any universe. If he does, he immediately ceases to be a Physicalist.
...that doesn't prevent there being very many processes that are deterministic.
Determinism is not merely the rather banal observation that
some or even
most things are physical. A person can believe in free will and not have a problem with that. Determinism means that there are NO non-physical causes in causal chain, and certainly none that initiate, or that can serve as a first-level explanation for any phenomenon or action.
In other words, Determinists believe that people don't
make choices. Choices are made
for people by prior forces, even if we are unaware of that.
And what I am arguing is that free will would be compatible with complete determinism,
Hmmm...it would not. Sorry, but the truth is that the two are mutually exclusive. Determinism is a denial of the very possibility of free will.
How can we explain the capabilities of the computer?
Computers are the products of human intelligence. So they represent no problem for free will. There's no actual analogy between computer and human. There are some figures of speech humans use to describe things computers do AS IF they were human functions (like "solving," "remembering," "assessing," and so on), but the truth is that computers do not
understand the functions they perform. They are not capable of
understanding anything.