"And then it chooses between them. It is also entirely determined."

These two sentences contradict each other. I'm going to just drop this part of the discussion and recommend Peter van Inwagen's book "an Essay on Free Will".

"How are there not options in a deterministic universe? Deep Blue chooses, yet everything is determined. What is the issue?"

Circular reasoning. If Deep Blue is choosing, then there have to be options, and there have to be options because Deep Blue is choosing.

"Of course. You are determined to eat the apple But you still had the option between apple and pear."

Not in a deterministic universe. How are there any options in a deterministic universe?

AND, even if there are options, how are you navigating between those options, as making a choice requires, in a deterministic universe?

Your point doesn't work on two levels.

I'm going to try and simplify my argument a little.
Here's the argument:
1. The ability to make choices is a necessary condition for the evaluation of evidence.
2. Evaluating evidence is a necessary condition for science.
3. Without the ability to make choices, evaluation of evidence is impossible.
4. If evaluation of evidence is impossible, science is impossible.
5. The universe is deterministic.
6. Therefore, the ability to make choices is impossible.
7. Therefore, science is impossible.

We're getting bogged down in semantics, but I'll address this: "There is an apple and a pear. Two choices. I choose the apple. The determinist says: the choice was not one freely made."

In order for there to be choices, there have to be options. In a deterministic universe, there are no options. Everything's already been set. You are determined to eat whatever. It appears you have a choice, but if you end up with the apple, in a deterministic universe, you were always going to eat that apple. The pear was never an option. No options, no choice.

"Ok, but your OP doesn't talk about choices 'feely made'. It says merely that science requires that choices be made."

No, I said science requires the evaluation of evidence, and the evaluation of evidence requires the ability to freely make choices about things like "is this a good or bad piece of evidence?". So, if you can't freely make choices, then you can't evaluate evidence, and if you can't evaluate evidence, you can't do science.

What part of that chain do you take issue with?

"The determinst simply has to reply that of course choices are made all the time - only that those choices are not freely made."

I have no problem with that. My question to the determinist is: if there's no free will, how are we able to do science? If science IS impossible without free will, and we're DOING science, then we have free will (or, more narrowly, we are freely making choices).

""3. Without free will there is no ability to make choices."

Is false.""

You can make choices without free will? How does that work? You can be determined to do an action, as we would be in a deterministic universe, but that is not the same as choosing. Choosing requires there to be at least two options. How are there any options if everything is already determined?

My point is an epistemological one: I'm not claiming good science isn't going on. I'm saying, how do we know that what we're doing is good science or not?

You could argue that, if we're compelled to make choices, evolution would have weeded out those of us who made bad choices, and that works for things like "should I pick those berries or not?". It doesn't seem to work so well for more esoteric stuff, like "Is Mercury's eccentric orbit strong evidence for relativity, or, since it was known before Einstein developed his theory, is it an example of ad hoc reasoning?" That also requires a choice, and I don't think evolutionary pressures can explain how we would get that one right, if we were simply compelled to believe what we believe.

"But surely free will isn't merely the ability to 'make choices'. It surely turns instead on the nature of choice made: is the choice itself freely chosen, or itself 'determined'."

If we have free will, then our choices are being freely made. That is a necessary condition for free will. If your choices aren't being freely made, then you obviously don't have free will.

If so, the fact that science requires 'choices' to be made says nothing about the necessity of free will to underpin science. What matters is how 'choices' are to be understood, not weather or not they occur in the practice of science. The equation of free will with choice seems to be a mistake.

If science involves the evaluation of evidence, which it does, then choices are occurring in science. For example, in order for Pasteur's flask experiment to confirm germ theory, one must first decide whether Pasteur's experiment was good evidence or not. I see no way around this.

Suppose someone tells you your house is on fire. Let's call that evidence (A). Now you have to update your belief in the hypothesis "my house isn't on fire". How can you do that if you can't even choose whether to believe the person is reliable or not? Is lying or not? Is in a position to know about your house or not? Those are all choices you have to make before you can even begin to assess (A)'s impact on the hypothesis.

"IOW if one's evaluations are utterly determined they may not be based on what we think they are based on. We would also be compelled to think we are rational, though not necessarily at all because we are rational and because of what we think is evidence of it."

Yes.

How can you evaluate evidence if you can't freely determine whether it's good evidence or not? If you're simply compelled into believing a particular piece of evidence supports a hypothesis, you don't know if it actually does support the hypothesis. You just have to hope that what you were compelled to believe is right, but how would you ever know?

"You are acting as though the lack of free will means no action can take place."

No. In a deterministic universe, action still takes place.

Minimally, to say that an agent has free will is to say that the agent has the capacity to choose his or her course of action.
https://www.iep.utm.edu/freewill/

Here's the argument:
1. The ability to make choices is a necessary condition for the evaluation of evidence.
2. Evaluating evidence is a necessary condition for science.
3. Without free will there is no ability to make choices.
4. Without the ability to make choices, evaluation of evidence is impossible.
5. If evaluation of evidence is impossible, science is impossible.
6. There is no free will.
7. Therefore, science is impossible.

What about calling in bomb threats to schools? Should that be legal?

Government. Should there be laws regulating what adults can say to kids, or does anything go?

Should adults be allowed to say anything they want to children?

Do you think death threats/threats of physical violence/extortion should be legal?

Suppose we developed a machine that zaps your qualia away. You'll still function the same but just without any conscious experience.

Would eliminative materialists actually use such a machine? Even if you paid them a lot of money? Or would they view it, as I do, as the equivalent of death? I think, when push comes to shove, you'd have to drag them to it, kicking an screaming.

"I think the interesting question is: why is this taken seriously? Why is it considered a philosophical argument?"

I think things like "consciousness is an illusion/consciousness doesn't exist" are taken seriously because people are emotionally invested in a materialistic model of reality and don't want to give it up.

Also, if materialism isn't true, then some type of dualism or idealism is true, and that has very profound implications. Maybe people don't want to go there.

"Ask yourself this question - what does eliminative materialism eliminate? Unless you want to beat around the bush, the answer is one word: mind. The word ‘mind’ doesn’t correspond to anything real: what we take to be ‘mind’ is simply the snap, crackle and pop of billions of neural connections programmed by Darwinian algorithms for the sole purpose of propagation of the genome. That’s all there is to it."


That is one of the absurdities I was talking about. Denying the existence/reality of minds or conscious experience is a losing move from the start. There are very few things I can be completely sure about, but here are two: I'm not mindless, and I have conscious experience. I can't be mistaken about that.

I've met materialists who have insisted they were p-zombies. That's how crazy it can get.

Materialism's inability to explain how consciousness can arise from matter is catastrophic, imo. Every materialist explanation for consciousness I've seen has either been absurd or eventually leads to an absurdity.

"It’s not illegal to yell fire in a crowded theatre. The principle in current first amendment theory is “immanent lawless action”."

I notice you ignored my point about death threats being illegal. If words don't trigger anything, why do we outlaw certain kinds of speech?

What do you think would happen if Trump tweeted "We're now at war with N. Korea"? You don't think that would trigger anything? Of course it would.

Ah, but suppose there is something unique to our little sector of the galaxy which makes it the only habitable place for advanced life. In that case, two alien civs bumping into each other wouldn't seem so remote. Is this little patch of the Milky Way we're in that special?

If you can't determine if the other person even exists, it's going to be hard to determine whether they're being honest or not.

"Words trigger nothing, because they do not have the capacity to move matter. That’s sorcery."

If words don't trigger anything, why is it illegal to make death threats? Or yell "fire" in a theater?

Try again.

I do love me some Bayes. Not everyone is a Bayesian, though, so maybe that's where DingoJones is coming from.

Words are simply verbalized thoughts. Thought precedes action. The wrong words (thoughts) can trigger the wrong actions. In the case of peons like us, it doesn't matter. In the case of the President, who has command over our nuclear arsenal, words become extremely, extremely important.

I can't emphasize enough how irresponsible it is for the leader of a nuclear power to be careless with his words. It should scare the hell out of you.

"People tend to overestimate the power of words is my only point. The idea that the pen is mightier than the sword is a common superstition."

The President is the most powerful person in the world, with the ability to end humanity. Three of our geo-political foes are also nuclear powers.

The wrong words can end the human race. That's not hyperbole. We came awfully close in 1962. Kennedy and Khrushchev went right to the brink. If Khrushchev hadn't written that Oct 26 letter, who knows what could have happened.

I don't understand the point you're trying to make.

"You dont. Thats part of my point. He could be cheating, and the probability might not kick in at all."

Probability always kicks in, that's why I linked to an article about subjective probability. Before I play any card game, I'm going to assign a subjective probability to the hypothesis: "the dealer isn't cheating".

"The policies pertain to illegal immigrants only."

Are you sure? Were any asylum-seekers' kids taken from them?

The same policies that they refused to criticize under the last president. Some pictures of “children in cages” came from 2014, but they no less turned up in articles criticizing Trump.

Obama separated immigrant children from adults if it was suspected the child was in danger. It was not a blanket policy.

Trump/Sessions/Miller (whoever was the brainchild) separated kids as a deterrent to other would-be immigrants. They came right out and said so. The policy was so abhorrent to Americans, they had to stop doing it.

All his critics have are word policing and word politics. “Trump said...” begins every criticism. This is just political correctness in its death throes.

Nonsense. Words are extremely important. Presidents can start wars and tank economies with words.

So, you have a 1 in 3 chance to be right.

How do I know the dealer's not cheating?

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/probability-interpret/#SubPro

No, I don’t think going by a strictly probability based method is the BEST strategy. Its A strategy, but it will always better to make a data based decision. These aliens would be much better off if they kept looking after finding a nearby habited planet, to make sure they don’t have to worry about bigger badder aliens interfering.
And what other data would be helpful? Whats the first planet like? Worth conquering? Is trade a better option if there is a resource they need?
The wisest approach is never just a probability calculation.

Everything's a probability calculation. You can never have complete certainty about the external world. That's why poker is so fun.

I don't have any opinion one way or the other, but you might want to check this alternative approach: Dark Forest Theory

Yeah, that was a great series. It's not very likely, though. If the galaxy was full of hyper-paranoid aliens, they wouldn't need to wait for the coordinates of planets to be broadcast to destroy them. For the past 500+ million years, any nearby aliens with a fairly large telescope would have concluded it's highly probable there's life here, and, if the aliens are paranoid, they would have taken us out early on.

Also, we have the same problem I presented in the OP: if you're going around destroying everything in sight, you're taking a huge chance. Anyone more powerful than you observing that kind of aggressive behavior is going to be extremely concerned about it.

In that series, the best strategy for the humans and Trisolarians was cooperation. ***Spoiler*** The strategy of extreme paranoia that both sides adopted didn't work out well for them in the end.

"We should have stayed in caves? I don't follow your point. I've got 200,000 years of human progress on the side of my argument. You've got 200 years of failed doom and gloom predictions going back to Malthus and spectacularly exemplified by Erlich."

There is, of course, a middle ground between "staying in caves" and "massively polluting the world", and that would be "living responsibly". You really think we should be trashing our only home this much? Is that smart? Do you believe the Earth is warming and humans are the primary culprit? You do, right?

All of Erlich's predictions were wrong. He lost all his resource price bets. I'd say the same will happen in the future. Human ingenuity will defeat doom and gloom as it has for thousands of years.

It requires monumental stupidity for a species to paint itself into such a corner that it depends on some future technology that might never materialize to stave off an existential threat.

That's what we're going to end up doing, though. I don't have much hope for us.

This doesn't make any sense to me.

When two alien civs discover each other, each will have to deal with the following disjunctive proposition: "Either there are only two advanced races in the galaxy who happen to find themselves right next to each other OR there are more than two advanced races in the galaxy". They can't both be true, and since the probability "two advanced races in the galaxy happen to find themselves right next to each other" is exceedingly unlikely, the disjunct is therefore exceedingly likely: "there are more than two advanced races in the galaxy".

If you postulate there are THREE advanced species in the galaxy, you run into the same problem: it's exceedingly unlikely that two of the three only advanced races are right next to each other. The same is true if you postulate there are FOUR advanced species in the galaxy. What are the odds that two of the four would be right next to each other? And so on...Eventually, you'll conclude there are a lot of advanced species in the galaxy, and you just met your neighbor and it's almost a given there are more neighbors.

It is possible, of course, that the only two advanced species in the galaxy are right next to each other. It's also possible to win the lottery. It's almost certainly not going to happen, though.

I don't think so. They seem more like fantasy to me.

It's fantastical that advanced aliens would be concerned with self preservation, would be curious about what's around them, and would send out probes? You think those are fantastical assumptions? Really? I think they're rock solid. Aliens are going to be under the same evolutionary pressures everyone else is, and if you have clawed your way to the top of the food chain, it was a long hard slog. In their history, they would have had to fend off competitors and predators and they would be well aware of the dangers an unknown alien race poses.

Remember, all this is happening with the background knowledge that biospheres are fragile, planets are sitting ducks, and accelerating course-correcting projectiles to ram into planets at high speeds is not that hard.