Ok, so we're no different than inanimate objects, and we don't actually make choices. There's our "is", and you're saying we "ought" to carry on as if we are different than inanimate objects and do make choices because it's practical. So we could boil this whole conversation down to "Oh_Man believes in determinism and utilitarianism." Sound about right?

I did say before we are different to inanimate objects, just not fundamentally. You can't expect a ball to roll away if you ask it to.

I have been trying to show why determinism is the correct belief. And by correct belief I mean the belief that is in line with objective reality. It's not anything to do with me personally. That's the is.

The ought is I have just been putting forward my opinion I guess you could say. I'm not really sure if utilitarianism is the most optimal form of ethical behaviour like I'm sure that determinism is an accurate belief about reality.

The choices thing I don't know if you would class that under utilitarianism or even under ethics. Does all human behaviour fall under the category of ethics? My thoughts on choices circles back to the truth of determinism - actions have consequences.

Sorry if my last post was a bit terse, I wanted to pin down what we've been talking about. And I'm still enjoying the journey, even if we've arrived at some very usual and common ideas.

Regarding the difference between us and inanimate objects, I do understand what you're saying about reducing things to absurdity, but I think if we prefix that thought with "In respect to free will" we are no different than inanimate objects, the point is maybe more clear. You can't ask a ball to roll away, and you also can't expect a human to go supernova like a star if you ask it to. Without the utility of agency provided by free will, we are intentionally viewing these things as equivalent - they're just different kinds of forces, inputs, excitations, which cause different kinds of reactions, outputs, responses, etc. Of course, equivalency here just means you have to perform the same kind of analysis to understand the relationship between the specific inputs and outputs. "Talking" input has no effect on "ball roll" output, but "Talking" input does have an effect on "human action" output, but we can still understand that "Talking" and "Nuclear Reaction" are different classes of forces, and "rolling" "exploding" and "human does thing" are different classes of output. If you begin to group the inputs and outputs, you can still build a model of human behavior based on determinism and analyze the effects of varying the inputs just like any other system and begin to draw conclusions "if you want result X we need input Y" kind of thing.

Once you bring ethics into the mix, I think you need some mechanism by which to measure the "goodness" or "badness" of an action. Determinism itself doesn't yield any kind of measure of goodness - you can turn in part to a mix of determinism coupled with utilitarianism. You can then analyze "what is" in a situation, and determine the effect a particular course of action will have on the evolution of that situation, but you'd still be lacking the ability to say whether that course is "good" or "bad" unless you can choose some goal against which to measure the utility of the actions. We can pick "the survival of the human race" or something similar, then by analyzing the "human system" you can come up with utilitarian things that humans need, and call those things "good", and then begin to label things that go against those needs as "bad." Of course, with this system in mind, we might very well discover through analysis that the optimal ethical organization of human society is to turn ourselves into a bee hive, or that its best to evolve into crabs (carcinization!).

Herein lies my problem(s) - who gets to pick the goal? We also don't have any measure of whether the goal itself is "good" or "bad", from determinism and utilitarianism alone. We can turn elsewhere for ideas - biology or some other analysis of the natural world, maybe. It may be that there is no singular goal at all, but that every situation needs to be analyzed with its own specific goal or requirements. I think free will as a model gives us a different root from which to solve this issue - by assuming everyone has the agency of free will, we are free to self-designate some measures of goodness, and then statistically look at this world full of other free-will-agents and say things like "hey, what is good for me is probably good for others." We are free to update our measures of goodness as well, as we learn what others think. Measures of goodness are still rooted in the self essentially, but at least we all get a say this way?

I gave my thoughts on this earlier in this convo:

3. On ethics again. I have always leaned more towards consequentialism to deontology, but ethics for me is still a very much unsolved question. I suspect it actually just comes down to power. The persons or people who are in power will be able to exert their will and shape reality as they see fit, and everyone else will just have to try to conform or resist in the way they see fit, and that's how life has been and will be - an eternal power struggle. But thankfully, humans tend to be on equal footing with each other, so this pushes societies in certain ways. If you check out Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature, he shows, quite convincingly if I may say, that humanity has rapidly been getting less and less violent. It circles back to what I said in the chatbox, "beliefs that more accurately reflect reality are likely going to become dominant, because they give individuals/societies an advantage over individuals/societies who have less accurate beliefs. I suspect being 'typically moral' may be one of those advantageous type beliefs.

I don't think this is a pie-in-the-sky idea either. You can literally see it in action. America is the world superpower. Why? Because they have military superiority. They use their power to try and influence the world to what they want it to be, and the other countries either conform (maybe even conform is the wrong word if they in fact share the same ideals) and resist (either militarily or diplomatically). Everyone's striving against each other trying to influence each other that their morality is the best. And of course, this happens within countries as well not just between them. It happens within individuals and masses of individuals acting in concert with aligned values.

I think all attempts at objective morality are ultimately sophistry disguising a subjective morality. But I think if you look at things from a goal-orientated perspective you gain arrive at certain value judgments that make sense within that context. Ie. goal: i want to maximise human and animal wellbeing and minimise their discomfort. Okay, what actions do we take that work towards that goal? Well, arbitrary arson isn't in line with that goal, so you don't do it and you try to stop people that are doing it. But ultimately, the decision to pick that goal is what is subjective, even if, within the context of that goal, you can have objective moral truths.

So hopefully that explains my stance on objective and subjective morality and how you can still have objective moral goals (ought) even if you accept that the reality is morality is a man-made construct and thus can never be objective in the way that the periodic table of elements is objective (is).


This comes back to the importance of choices. If you want your fellow humans to behave in a way you believe is consistent with your morality, you have to try and influence them. Some people try to influence others with violence and suppression of free speech and all that, and others opt for a more peaceful approach. I think the violent approach is slowly losing the fight to the peaceful approach, as Stephen Pinker and others have showed that humanity as a whole is getting less and less violent as time progresses.

Whether this progression will continue to some utopia we can only hope. Of course, if you look at nature, you will see unfortunately violence is omnipresent. It's kill or be killed and survival of the fittest out there. Maybe we're just kidding ourselves that we can one day rise above that, but maybe not. Maybe there's hope.

EDIT: Of course, the ugly truth is our very survival day to day is built on a foundation of violence - consuming dead animals which no matter how humanely we kill - that is inflicting violence. Even if you are a vegan you still are eradicating biological lifeforms on the daily to maintain your own existence, even if the biological lifeforms are plants that have no pain receptors or consciousness. Does that still count as violence? If it does, then the only way to truly become non-violent would be to somehow engineer ourselves to be like plants consuming the energy of the sun or something! There's also that funny little thing how one could argue that Mars is a utopia compared to Earth because there's no violence - but that's because it's a lifeless hunk of rock! It would be quite shocking if one came to the conclusion that to end all violence we must end all life - the ultimate fighting fire with fire, one final expression of violence to end all violence!

I get what you are saying now. Yes, in the context of this discussion, we are identical to the ball. We are waves breaking on the shore. Our thoughts appear into our conscious field, we cannot choose which thoughts will appear before they do, and our actions no matter how carefully considered are merely inevitable expressions of the prior state of our brains. And even if we realise this and understand this, it doesn't change the fact that we have to make hundreds of choices every day for the rest of our lives.

Determinism is not new. But I think looking at it in the context of the illusion of self is novel. It certainly helped me understand it properly. I would say I learned about determinism sometime around 2009, and found it made perfect sense, but it didn't change the fact that I still felt like I was in charge of my own choices, so I thought there must just be something missing to the puzzle. It wasn't until in the last couple years I learned about the illusion of self that I then realised that was the missing piece to my understanding, and then determinism made perfect sense with my experience, and free will revealed itself as a nonsensical concept. Once I paid careful attention to my own conscious experience instead of just assuming I was in full control because that's what it seemed, I realised that thoughts just popped into my head. I couldn't choose which thought to pop into my head. I could make conscious choices, but I realised they were often arbitrary or imposed upon me externally or based on a prior state of my being. Then I realised it's not even possible to even conceive of a choice not outside of this. What even is a choice that is made somehow independent of cause and effect? It's nonsensical. It doesn't exist. Right? If you can think of one let's hear it.

Post has been edited 5 time(s), last time on Nov 14 2024, 5:33 pm by Oh_Man.

What if multiple causes will affect you differently? What will you choose then?

So let me begin by saying, on a practical level, I actually agree with a lot of what you've had to say up there Oh_Man, but I find the disagreeable bits the most interesting parts, so if it seems that I'm targeting them, just know its not out of contrariness.

I can certainly see the possibility that there is no 'ultimate' or 'transcendental' or 'idempotent' morality (I use these terms specifically - 'objective' morality means morality with respect to some objective, which is the same thing to me a morality being 'subject' to that objective, which brings us back to that whole 'who picks the goal' bit), and it could be the case like with everything else, our experiences as humans are just so similar to each other that we confuse the repetition of learning for some transcendental property of the universe. I also think its a bit of a stretch to claim that there definitely isn't some kind of morality inherent in any interaction among living beings. It might not be 'God given' (which is a cheat anyway right, if there is God, anything can be true), but I would settle for something that is at least universally consistent.

The motivation for me to discover some free will, or some kind of transcendental morality, is largely tied to this idea, that right and wrong is not completely dependent on how much power you have. Otherwise, why not just agree that 'might makes right' and let things play out however they will? Perhaps a bit of a fatalistic viewpoint for you, but if you want to have any say in that kind of world, you have to seek power and ensure your dominion over others. Not exactly the bright future I'm looking for.
Perhaps fatalistic again, but I am not sure we can rely on this. We happen to live in a current world in which Western ideas of the use of power are mostly tied to military and economic power, but there's nothing that says this will always be true.
And this is also true. From cheap clothing to food to actual violence, I think Starship Troopers put it best - "Violence is the ultimate authority from which all other authority derives." (though I'm sure that quote is derived from some older source)




I don't think this is a nonsensical concept, though I will agree that it is a difficult one. A lot of my point in this conversation though is that we are making a big assumption - that the world is deterministic, or it is not, and then examining the consequences of that assumption and how it matches or does not match with what we observe in the world. In mathematics, there is literally an axiom called "the axiom of choice" because without it you can't prove some very basic and obvious properties about sets. Fundamentally, the axiom is that "choice is a thing" aka given some number of sets, some mystic and transcendental thing can arbitrarily choose some items from those sets. This axiom addresses the same question - how can a choice be made without some kind of rule or cause upon which the choice is based? The consequences range from some basic things to some paradoxical things. This idea also invokes questions like "How did the universe start?" If everything is based on cause and effect, what was the cause that caused the first instant of existence? Surely that was non-causal. Another idea - are quantum fluctuations independent of cause and effect? Apparently matter and antimatter is constantly popping in and out of the universe like, everywhere all the time, for no good reason. So far these ideas are offered just to say this is not a nonsense concept. It's interesting, and dare I say important. Unfortunately, I don't think I can give you an example of a choice that is made without cause and effect, without first assuming whether the universe is completely deterministic or not. If we assume the universe is not deterministic then trivially any choice could be an example for you. Unfortunately I also don't know of a test we can impose on a choice to measure its independence from causality, and I don't even know if that would be a binary thing - for example, if the outcome of a choice goes contrary to what you would expect given the circumstances, does that make it "less causal" but still "partially causal" if it is still influenced by its environment?

I do believe in might makes right but that's in context of relativism, an important point that I think people miss, and therefore think the whole notion is nonsensical when it very much isn't. If a dictator takes over and makes commandments that everyone stabbing out one of their eyes is a moral necessity that is might makes right but only in the relativistic framework of his own grip on power and how much he can coerce or convince people into thinking it's right. It's not suddenly objectively right, and there would be other humans who disagree and say it's wrong, but unless they have the power to overthrow him that's what the moral landscape will be in the culture.

And we see this time and time again throughout civilisation, across cultures, within cultures, between individuals, a constant striving to impose their relative morals on as many people as possible. Even Sam Harris' moral arguments that I'm all for, the utilitarian-type arguments, they're just a group of humans trying to convince another group of humans to believe in their moral relativism over the other.

Where you get objectivism from is when you start applying these moral relatives to the actual objective laws of reality, which are immutable. Okay, is it a good idea for us to all take out one of our eyes in terms of the objective question of does this make our vision better or worse? Objectively, it makes worse!

So hopefully I have convinced you there that moral relativism isn't just a simple "throw your hands up in the air - anything goes". You can still very much be working within objective frameworks.

And of course, I argue that all attempts of people claiming their particular brand of moral relativism is in fact objective (divine command theory to name one example) are all lying/confused/misinformed. They're just relativists who think they're not.

AXIOM OF CHOICE
Simply, this is equivocation fallacy. The use of the word 'choice' in the realm of abstract mathematics is different to the use of the word 'choice' in the realm of free will philosophy.


This is the big question isn't it. I don't know the answer. But we can't assume it was surely non-causal. It could be infinitely stretching back or in a circle. Or something else we can't even conceive of.

EDIT: This big question about 'why is there something rather than nothing" I have been thinking about it in terms of chicken and the egg, to try and encourage out of the box thinking. Look at the two questions, they both are framed in a dichotomy. Which came first the chicken or the egg. But now we know thanks to the theory of evolution that this was a FALSE dichotomy. The question as framed makes you think it has to be one or the other, but the real truth turned out to be FAR more sophisticated and nuanced.

So I like to postulate that perhaps these other questions "why is there something rather than nothing" "how did the universe begin" could perhaps equally be misleading questions that are railroading our thinking into incorrect lines of inquiry when the true question is far more nuanced and sophisticated.


I have been using ChatGPT to help wrap my head around quantum mechanics. And I've been beginning to lean towards a position of 'superdeterminism'. That is, there is APPARENT randomness, but the truth will probably be that these all have causes we just have not yet been able to observe.

This would therefore mean that randomness doesn't exist. Possiblity does not exist. We as thinking beings can speculate on potential possible outcomes, but the fact remains that everything is happening inevitably from a series of cause and effects with the outcomes all locked in from the moment of Big Bang. Crazy stuff.

Sorry for the delay in reply, life comes at you fast.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 25 2025, 3:56 am by Oh_Man.

Maybe this sounds dumb but re-reading comments here... I agree with myself. :l

How is free will possible without positing "there exists a 'self' which exists outside of the observable universe?"


Also, to add another dynamic to this thread:

Have LLMs changed anyone's ideas about free will / concepts of the self / determinism?

And before you dismiss this out of hand with a "LLMs are just fancy autocomplete's etc. etc," if not the current state of LLM, what about the perceived trajectory of them? What I mean is: imagine a perfect "ai"; at its core it's running the same types of stochastic gradient descent algorithms (my understanding of how LLMS work) etc on some abstract space, outputting results indistinguishable from human output. Technically its output is determined by the 'coinflips' which go on in its algorithm, and those 'coinflips' are determined by ultimately some random number generator, so it's not really capable of 'free will;' but in the end, what's the difference between that and us? It seems it is as in control of its actions as much as we are.

I think the problem with free will is there's a lot of confusion around definitions, and it will muddy the waters of any debate.

But of course, determinists are arguing that essentially free will does not exist, so of course the definitions won't make sense, how can you define something that doesn't exist. Like, we can define a dragon. It doesn't exist, but we can all agree to say it has certain traits (breaths fire, flying lizard), but of course, then there are many variations of dragons that also defy that definition. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is when you're talking about non-existent things, the definitions are inevitably going to get very fuzzy.

But when defining things in the real world like... an oxygen atom, well, you see a lot less disagreement on definition.

That's why I think it's important to split any arguments about free will into two subquestions.

1. Is determinism true or false?

2. If it's true, what do we do about it? As in, what adjustments should we be making to our individual lives and society as a whole.

Then people get confused with fatalism, they say how can you decide anything if you don't have free will? And what determinists are saying is we are deciding just like we always have decided, but now we understand we're all inevitably deciding on the things we would already inevitably decide. If someone inevitably changed our mind, they changed it; if they inevitably didn't they didn't. We are making choices and decisions, they can be the biggest choices of our lives, we can be presidents deciding the fates of millions, or we can be deciding what we had for lunch - but all this is unfolding inevitably.

We're all just puppets on strings, but determinists are just the ones who can see the strings. Others try to deny it.

Then you bring in compatiblists and incompatibilists and his is now bringing morality into the discussion, it's muddying waters further because it's bringing in another sphere of discussion into it. Compatiblists try to claim it's still possible, in a determinist world, to 'live as if we have free will and moral agency and responsibility' whereas incompatibilists deny that it's possible. They also don't care if it's determinism by prior causes or determinism + randomness.

It's an important question because I think if ties directly into not only moral questions but also just simply value questions like what even are we doing or should we be doing with our lives now that we know it's all just inevitable. Are we just like the LLMs, reacting to external input, which goes through an internal process (itself designed by a prior process) and then outputting what we are inevitably going to output.

I know we all have an experience of free will, but if you analyse your own thoughts closely with mindfulness meditation you will see this experience of free will is just like a mirage, it's not really there. Your thoughts are just coming and going in your head. The only thing close to feeling like free will is when you have thoughts like "don't think about pink elephants" you're at least trying to guide your own thoughts, but that is itself also just a thought that popped into your head. You could have just as easily thought DO think about pink elephants.

If you accept that we are the product of our own prior experiences and genetics, and that there's NOTHING else (no mythical 'soul'), you have to accept we are just puppets.

This makes my mind drift to cosmic thoughts. I wonder what is the point of anything. Are we all just going through the motions? When you push the clock far enough into the future, it seems like nothing else matters, even for the greatest men of this earth who have left tremendous legacies like Isaac Newton or Leonardo da Vinci. One day, this planet will be consumed by the star. Even if we manage to escape our planet and become a galactic empire, one day Heat Death of the Universe will consume everything, every achievement will be unmade.

So if that's the case, it seems like maybe one shouldn't focus too much on the future, but just cherish the present and your own life. But then there's also this to consider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longtermism

Thoughts are random, not predetermined. But you do have some control over which thoughts enter your mind.

As a simple example if you feel anger you can decide to act on it, ignore/swallow it or actively try to calm yourself. This won't control what thoughs you have in the present, but you can condition yourself to lean towards a certain personality. You can do it consciously or "let it happen" aka grow up/develop a personality.

The scientific explanation is that you form neural pathways which will favor certain ways of thinking. My understanding is that the source is quantum noise and your neural network steers it into something specific, much like an ai generates images.

Yes I agree, that's the point I was making initially.


I also agree with that line of thinking; it's as far as I can tell inarguable. I remember having similar thoughts like 10ish years ago.


Now time for my opinions:

1. I think that if you do take this view (which boils down in the end to there being nothing else beyond / outside of our observable universe), this type* of thinking is the only thing you can really cling to without falling into depression.

2. When I say "type*" of thinking, I mean to include exactly that idea of longterminism. Just that on a cosmic scale, on the order of the age of the universe, 100 years vs 10000000 years are both insignificant. So longterminism is just moving the goalpost, but it's basically the same thing.

3. ('hot' take people won't like:) Finding a way to convince yourself to hold to these positive views of "enjoy yourself / make the world a better place / make it better and more advanced even on long time scales, etc." is just a form of denial. It's willfully choosing to stop thinking about the cold 'reality' of this worldview that nothing matters, or a way of circumventing that line of thinking. The conclusion at the bottom is sheer hopelessness and futility, and if you really hold to this then the only way to continue to function as a human being is to truncate your thoughts. These ideas to give yourself worth and motivation to do pretty much anything do not in any way address the hopelessness and futility; they just give you outlets to avoid thinking about it.

They cannot be random. You will never think "who will win, Superman or Batman?" if you have never heard of Superman or Batman before in your life. "What should I drink, a milkshake or a cola?" is not a thought a Bronze Age person would ever think.

What you are missing here is determinists are saying that these thoughts too are pre-determined. You were always going to decide to act on your anger. And this isn't just a baseless hypothesis by determinists either. This has been proven in experiment (linked earlier in this convo) where they were able to predict the choice the person was going to make before they had consciously made it.


I think avoiding depression is just accepting your own impermanence. Accept that things end. The book you are reading will end, that doesn't mean it wasn't worth reading. Your life will end. All life will end. The religious 'afterlife' thinking is a complete denial of this fact, an illusory hope that the story will never end.

Longtermism I think shouldn't be dismissed completely. It's all tangled up in ethics and golden-rule type morals. If you have enjoyed your own impermanent life, then perhaps it is a moral duty to ensure that future generations will get to enjoy what you had, rather than burning it all down in your own life and leaving things worse off for future generations.


You know, I actually agree with you here, incredible. But I look at theists as doing the same thing. Whereas atheists accept reality and perhaps try to foolishly impose positive values and aspirations on a cold and indifferent universe, theists deny that reality is cold and indifferent. It's like we're both doing the same thing but from different angles.

But I still argue if you can accept the fact that everything ends, including your own life, that doesn't change the fact that right here right now you still have a life, you can still live it and enjoy it. Does it really matter if it ends? Isn't it the journey, not the destination?

______________________________________

I want to change tactics now that I've said my piece there. Zoan, I want to question if you have really thought your worldview through. How does a god change anything in this debate? Seriously. I'll just accept the position for the sake of this discussion for now. Then we are all just playthings to this all powerful being. What is the point of your existence? How does this give you any more meaning than the cold and indifferent universe? One day you die, you are judged, and then you spend eternity doing what exactly? Every book will be read. Every game will be played. Every hobby will be mastered. Every social experience with another person will be had. Every scientific discovery is worthless because presumably you have access to an omniscient database of a being, or it just straight up doesn't matter in the 'afterlife' the physical laws may be all different or maybe the concept of physical laws doesn't even matter anymore. It's just one giant question mark.

Eternity is a long time. There are fates worse than death.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 30 2025, 12:26 pm by Oh_Man.

Yes, I understand your reasoning; they are like the same thing.

I think the difference lies in: if the literal reality is that there is a God, (as in, God's existence isn't dependent in any way on our belief in that God - God's existence isn't just a thought or held belief), then, there is literal purpose, rather than no purpose. (Of course, depending on the God which hypothetically is real - one could also consider frameworks where there is a God, but still no purpose for us, etc.)

In the framework where there is nothing beyond the observable physical universe, which is bound to die in heat death etc, then: one belief over the other has no weight upon which to rest, if that makes sense - like, nothing matters, even what you believe or what I believe, and while one can sort of intuit (for some reason) that living well is better than just keeling over and dying for no reason, there is literally no argument for not doing so; and if one person "floats their boat" via religion while another finds reason to carry on just by "sheer willpower (?)" then, well, whoop-de-doo - our atoms are going to be scattered apart in billions of years from now either way, and whether we do one thing or another will influence that scattering in such insignificant ways that like... who cares. But whatever, I think you get it.


If you decide to posit ANY type of God or "thing outside our universe," then you could concoct an infinite number of ways in which living in eternity would be great, and not fall into any of those pitfalls. I think you're considering an eternity with some limits; like, yes - if in eternity we are pretty much the same as we are now but just literally never die, and, if there are only a finite number of things which can happen, or an infinite with only small variations from the stuff already experienced in the past - then yes, of course that would eventually turn into repetitive hell.

But, you could easily posit some other things - like, there are forever an infinite number of literal new things to experience, for eternity. Idk.

However: if you decide to just randomly posit whatever sounds good to you (like in Islam they say you get like 50 virgins to sleep with forever or something like that) - it becomes blatantly just wishful thinking. There has to be some basis for your beliefs about this stuff.

So anyway: to describe further, in specifics, why the Christian beliefs about eternal life don't fall into the issues you describe, would require going into more specifics about Christianity and the belief about humans as a whole in the Christian framework, and then basically just jumping into Christian theology. But from your point of view, which is against all religion at the outset, this would seem a little niche, right?

Edit: Also I want to point out something a little funny: While the potential for free will relies necessarily on something existing beyond/outside the scope of our universe (e.g. God), and while I do believe in God - the existense of God does NOT necessarily imply that we must also have free will, and in fact I don't actually believe we have free will (in a certain sense), so I'm kind of back in to the belief of not having free will one would have if there was no God in the first place, albeit I arrive there from a totally different angle.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 30 2025, 8:10 pm by Zoan.

As you have simply made a statement, but made no argument and provided no exploration of this point, all I can do in response is make an equal or hopefully greater appeal to authority - as a credentialed mathematician and an amateur free will philosopher myself, this statement is wrong. The fundamental problem of the axiom of choice is the same fundamental problem of free will choice we have been dealing with in this conversation. It's an interesting axiom, and the acceptance of it was at one time (perhaps still is occasionally) very controversial, quite parallel to the controversy we've been exploring with respect to free will in this forum.


Maybe I can illustrate with a game - here are the rules:

- I have some sets
- I ask you to make a choice - pick some element of the my sets
- However, I will never tell you anything about my sets or what is in my sets

Which element do you pick, from which set? Can you even pick an element? Aka, can you make a choice at all?

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Oct 6 2025, 11:55 pm by Vrael.

The game you propose actually illustrates the distinction I was making. In your example, no choice is possible because there is no information, structure, or reason to select any element. You have created a situation of pure arbitrariness.

In contrast, free will in philosophy is never studied in a vacuum; choices are always understood as arising from beliefs, desires, and reasons. So while the axiom of choice in set theory asserts that a selection exists even when no rule is specified, philosophical free will does not require or posit that humans choose from an utterly structureless void. The two choices are operating in completely different domains: one formal and abstract, the other causal and value-driven.

Equating them is equivocation, not a deep analogy. One is a mathematical convenience; the other is about agency in reasoned action.

Even if I grant the existence of a god, it doens't follow that we automatically inherit or comprehend that purpose. A deity might exist, yet leave you morally and existentially autonomous (aka anyone who isn't claiming to be literally hearing god speak to them) in which case 'literal purpose' claim collapses into a semantic trick.

Trying to break that down to simpler:

1. God exists, therefore life has literal purpose.
2. Problem: Even if a god exists, there's no gaurantee that we know, understand or participate in this 'divine purpose'. The word 'purpose' here just becomes a word you're applying to reality, not an objective feature you can verify or interact with. You're still stuck in nihilist hell.
3. In contrast, wes can create and experience meaningful purpose through decisions, projects, and relationships, independent of whether a god exists. No god needed!

Saying god gives literal purpose is like saying 'the universe is blue', but then never showing any way to detect the blueness. It sounds profound but has no operative content.

From the atheist point of view, meaning and value are arising from us - conscious human beings - our goals, relationships and reasoning. Cosmic indifference does not negate this. It just means purpose is emergent, not assigned.

Just because the question of our OBJECTIVE purpose might be unknown or even unknowable, doesn't change the fact that our SUBJECTIVE purpose is undeniable. Even if the universe is indifferent, our experiences aren't.


Problem with this "imagine a god who makes eternity endlessly enjoyable" is you are doing exactly what you are saying about the Islam 50 virgins thing - literally wishful thinking. Pure speculation, not grounded in evidence, theology or reason.

Avoiding repetition doesn't solve the underlying issue. Even if there are infinite experiences, that doesn't gaurantee meaning, agency or personal growth. Your life's signifiance is still measured against an infinite backdrop. Everything you value would beecome negligible of trivial if it lasts forever.

You also have to consider the anthropocentric bias. Human cognition evolved for FINITE lifespans. Infinite duration may be incoherent to us. I kind of notice this in my own life. With our vast lifespans now, there's this depressing realisation I have that so much of my own life is literally lost to the failings of my own memory. In heaven-land god would need to completely change your consciousness to even be able to properly 'live' in infinity.


That's fair, but that is exactly my point: once god is introduced, none of the core problems are resolved. They're just outsourced to a higher level.

"Free will relies necessarily on something existing beyond/outside the scope of our universe". This is begging the question fallacy though. You're assuming nothing within the natural universe could support free will (exactly my position) = therefore god. I would simply say, no divine agency needed at all. There is no free will.

Let me put some of this back in context by re-introducing our local chain of causality:
We are following the line of reasoning inspired by your previous question:
Which was ultimately a result of our exploration of refining what the 'self' means, and whether or not it is capable of producing 'decisions' independently of the 'external factors' or put another way, are things deterministic?

The game I created above is just food for thought. The bit with the axiom of choice represents a facet of the same reduction - can you make a decision in the absence of external factors? Knowing absolutely nothing about some set(s) of item(s), can one still be selected? We may not be able to study things like free will in a vacuum, but I think you must be forced to agree that philosophers have always attempted to reduce things down to their most fundamental aspects, to get to 'the heart of the matter' sort of thing. I may not be doing it as eloquently, but I am attempting to reduce the situation to the same fundamental aspect here. I'd also like to point out that I am not asserting the axiom is true - just that it is useful to consider both if its true and if its false. In fact that's why its called an axiom in the first place, because no one has yet proven it to be true (or false). You have to assume it one way or the other to get anywhere with it. So if you were able to prove it false, that would probably show very strong support for determinism.

At this point in the conversation, it would be remiss of me not to address the burden of proof of one of your questions in there - you have asked me to provide an example of a choice which is made without respect to cause and effect, and as I know of no proof for or against determinism itself honestly I don't think I can without assuming the answer we are trying to prove (or disprove). If choices are not deterministic, it seems trivial to point one out. If all choices are deterministic, obviously it is then impossible. On the same topic of proof though, I haven't yet encountered anything in our topic here that proves determinism to be true. And I mean stringently - I have no problem conceding that some things are deterministic, push a block off a table and gravity will make it fall. What would interest me most is some proof of exclusive determinism, or showing that non-deterministic things cannot exist alongside deterministic things.

Transitioning to a different line of thought - earlier in the thread, you mentioned something along the lines of learning about determinism, and then living your life and seeing quite a bit of evidence to support the hypothesis that things are in fact deterministic. Seems like a reasonable way to go about things, though one thing I have to add to the pile of questions, is how to address sufficiently complex causal chains. Much like how gravity can be irrelevant on certain physical scales, is there a point where a causal chain becomes irrelevant? If caveman Grodd killed caveman Thodd ten thousand years ago, does that really have any bearing on my choice of what color hat I wear today? Maybe we can link some aspects of the situation to it, like I wouldn't exist if that hadn't happened, or we might have different choices of hats if Thodd had killed Grodd instead, but it seems entirely irrelevant to include that part of the causal chain into the 'external factors' influencing that decision. If it's possible for parts of a causal chain to be irrelevant to a decision, why not allow for decisions which are not based on causal chains at all? This is really a lead-in to a more utilitarian question (which says nothing about how true or false determinism and free will are of course), but how is determinism useful, if it is more accurate/efficient/pragmatic to model the world with a non-deterministic approach? I suppose I've essentially asked this already in the thread, but maybe not with the same background thoughts, so weeeeeee

What I've been trying to explain to you when you brought up axiom of choice into this debate is you are making a massive category error.

Category error:
"A category mistake (or category error, categorical mistake, or mistake of category) is a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category,[1] or, alternatively, a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property. An example is a person learning that the game of cricket involves team spirit, and after being given a demonstration of each player's role, asking which player performs the "team spirit".[2]"

The Axiom of Choice in ZFC set theory is about the static existence of a mathematical object (a choice function). It is not an event occurring in time, nor does it involve a cognitive agent. It operates entirely outside of physical causality. Equating the existence of an abstract mathematical function to a human being making a physical + temporal decision is mixing two completely different definitions of the word 'choice'.

I don't think you can really dispute that? We just need to put it to bed and continue the free will discussion in another direction.

That's not right. Definition: An axiom is a foundational statement, rule, or principle accepted as true without needing proof. It serves as a starting point for further reasoning, logic, and math. An axiom isn't used as a hypothesis waiting to be proven true or false. It's a foundational premise or rule of a system. Analogy: You dont "prove" the rules of chess - you just both agree to them so you can start playing the game. The funniest part to what youv'e said is that with regards to axiom of choice specifically, it has been proven independent of the standard axioms of set theory!! It's literally mathematically impossible to prove it true or false within that system!

I'm not asking you to prove our universe is not deterministic. I'm asking you to describe what an uncaused choice would even look like. If it's so trivial to point one out then point one out, please! And we will analyse

Ok, so there's two questions here and I'll try to tackle both:

Proof of Exclusive Determinism:
No, I cannot give this to you, because it's kind of like proving a negative / god of the gaps. No matter how many things I show you are determined, you can always argue back to me maybe there's some other area humanity hasn't seen, something beyond our current knowledge/observation/universe that is not determined. I would literally need to be omniscient to satisfactorily tell you no.

But what I CAN tell you, which I hope you will find persuasive, is MULTIPLE times in human history, EVERY time we have thought something was not-deterministic - surprise! it was deterministic. Weather, disease, planetry orbits... every time it just turned out we didn't have the tools to measure the underlying cause yet. And even human brain every year every new study we are finding more and more behaviours that can be tracked directly to specific areas of the brain and measured and even moddified imperically. If you apply Occams Razor here man, you will surely come to same conclusion I have - we are determined!!

Proof That Non-Deterministic Things Cannot Exist Alongside Deterministic Things
Honestly, no, I cannot prove superdeterminism. It's mathematically sound, and backed by some prominent heavy hitters in physics (yea yea argument from authority) but it's currently untestable and unfalsifiable. It just is my gut feeling atm that this is the theory that's gonna turn out to be the right one, based on my above reasoning. Can I show they cannot coexist? No. Not until we have a Theory of Everything. Right now mainstream science is literally carrying on like they do coexist. Macroscopic world (apples falling planets orbiting) is treated as deterministic, and microscopic world (quarks photons) is being treated as probablistic/non-deterministic.

But I want to try and pre-empt you on this because I suspect your brain is thinking something like this.

If I get Oh_Man to concede it's at least possible for non-determinism to exist, then I can get him to concede that we can get free will via a non-deterministic thing, a soul. And my pre-emptive reply to this that you may or may not be asking is:

1. Even if I grant superdeterminism may be proven to be false and we absolutely have non-determined quantum randomness - how do you get free will from randomness?
2. A non-deterministic 'soul' that is not random, but purposeful, is not a solution to the free will problem. it faces the exact same dilemmas as the physical brain. Does the soul make choices based on its characters, desires, beliefs? If yes, then its choices are DETERMINED by its spiritual nature. If a 'good' soul chooses not to steal because of its inherent goodness and beliefs, that is simply cause and effect. We are riiiight back round to where we started. All you've done is swap out neurons with ectoplasm. If no, then the soul is making a choice entirely uncaused by its own nature or reasons - then it's acting randomly. Randomness is not free will as we probably both agree on.

Hmm, I'm not sure entirely what you're driving at. But you can't get from irrelevance to uncaused - that's a non sequitur. If someone throws a pebble into the ocean in Japan, yes, that ripple is "irrelevant" to the surfer in California. But that doesn't mean the wave he's riding is an uncaused event. It just means the local weather and currents are far more relevant to his current situation.

From memory I believe we talked about this dichotomy before. There's two separate questions is determinism true or false, objectively. And then the separate question of is the illusion of free will highly pragmatic and we should just ignore the objective question entirely? The questions don't have any bearing on the other. Even if we come to the 100% definite conclusion that believing in a non-deterministic free will is beneficial to society you CANNOT say therefore determinism is objectively untrue. That is argumentum ad consequentiam fallacy, or more broadly a non sequitur.

Now, to directly answer your question, I want to point out (I'm assuming you did this accidently) that your question is set up as a bit of a cheat, a bit of a loaded question. I will demonstrate by rewording your question with analogy, but using same structure:

How is using a map useful, if we assume walking blindly in random directions is the most efficient way to travel?

See what I mean? the how part is already setup to be assumed wrong by the if part. I'm going to reword your question to how I hope you meant to ask it, and answer THAT question instead:

"Given that treating the world as if we have free will feels very natural and efficient for everyday life, what is the practical utility of adopting a deterministic worldview?"

I will give you 3 of the biggest reasons I can think of but I imagine there are more:

1. You already adopt this worldview in almost every area of your life anyway. When Tenebrous inventory is glitching - you debug it. When the stove is hot - you don't touch it. You just need to take the final step to applying this worldview to human behaviour. If you want to change a bad habit relyin on 'free will' and just trying to use more willpower almost always fails. But engineering your environment to alter the causal inputs actually works.

2. Radical Empathy - believing in free will it's incredibly easy to fall into moral outrage. "They made bad choices, so they deserve their suffering." When you recognise that a person's behaviour is the ienvitable result of their genetics, their trauma, their socioecnomic environment - it replaces judgement with empathy. By treating underlying causes instead of judging outward behaviour - we can effect actual meaningful positive change in our society.

3. Fixing the justice system - our current system is largely based on the free will model - retributive justice (punish them because they freely chose to be evil) and look at how full your prisons are. Embrace determinism and you shift the focus to rehabilitative justice and containment. Remember Xerxes and the Hellespont, how we all laughed at the absurdity as he thrashed the river for flooding and blocking his army's advance? How stupid we were, because we're doing the exact same thing!


Disclaimer: this post was ethically sourced by human fingers however AI was used to test your logic, test my logic, and research topics!!

I don't know if applying a mathematical axiom to questions of general existence is a categorical error or not - I'll acknowledge that it could be, or it could be if we apply it incorrectly, or it might not be. To me, the utility seems to be that we have some pretty fundamental questions we're discussing here, and this mathematical axiom provides some insight into the nature of choice, and more specifically, when it is even possible to make a choice. I believe we were talking about "is it possible to make a choice when there are no factors to base that choice on" and this is the exact same topic which the axiom addresses. To me, that seems like it is not a categorical error in application.

I would dispute this - the axiom resolves the ability or inability of the mathematician to choose a set in the absence of determining factors. The axiom specifically addresses the mathematician's ability to choose in the absence of any possible choice function

There is a simple rebuttal to this - if an axiom were proven to be true or false, it would no longer be an axiom, it would just be a proven theorem.


Very well - a man is out for a walk. He encounters a fork in the road. He turns left instead of right.

I don't know that I can provide a better description of an uncaused choice without first having proof that parts of the universe are not deterministic. Obviously what we would like is to examine a choice and from its consequences be able to eliminate all deterministic factors that went into making it, showing that both the choice has occurred and there were 0 deterministic factors in making it, therefore "a non-causal choice has been made". Frankly I don't know how to do that though, given that the list of prior deterministic factors is practically infinite, and so eliminating them one by one doesn't seem feasible. This leads me to ask, can we choose a choice to examine with a small/known/finite number of deterministic factors - but that seems like begging the question to me.


I find your arguments in this section compelling. I also have no answers here.


1. Agreed, randomness != Free Will
2. Perhaps this is overly pedantic, but for me at least, the important part of "free will" is "free" - that is the choices are made solely from the internal state of some unrestricted essence of self. This so-called self must be capable of making choices which contradict the influence of external factors. I would call this free will, if the internal essence was "determined" independently of the external environment. This of course, just brings us back to the question "can there be a choice made by an entity which is independent of external factors"

What I'm driving at here, is that the reality of today is influenced by the state of yesterday, but somewhere along that continuum we have to draw a line if we ever want to say that something is "irrelevant" to something else. Otherwise Grodd's actions ten thousand years ago are part of my decision to wear a blue hat today, and absolutely everything is relevant to absolutely everything else. Its a fun thought maybe, that the entire universe is just one completely interconnected and inseparable event, but practically its not very useful to examine the actions of Grodd ten thousand years ago when investigating how I made my hat choice today. Somewhere the line has to be drawn, and I think where that line is drawn could have an effect on our modelling of the world. For example, if we assume the world is in fact deterministic - we still are not able to effectively decompose many choices, because unravelling the history which led to the choice is so computationally expensive that it cannot be done, or perhaps could never be done. So our choices will fall into at least two categories - lets say "figure-out-able" choices and "not-figure-out-able" choices. What is the practical difference between having "not-figure-out-able" choices, and modelling part of the world as non-deterministic?

What a great segue!!! My next question is the inverse of this - if you have a deterministic worldview, what do you do when you encounter these "not-figure-out-able" choices?

For reference, you're right of course my own actual worldview is a mix of deterministic things and free-will based modelling. I like your 3 big reasons though I don't know that I agree that the causes of that set of problems is too-heavy reliance on free-will-based modelling, discussing that could be its whole own topic involving societal dynamics and religion and probably a bazillion other things.

This post brought to you AI-free by artisanal hand-crafted humanely typed thinking. No humans were harmed in the making of this post.

We're you're going wrong there is you're still equivocating "choice". (equivocation fallacy) In philosophy, a choice is an action occuring in time. A brain processes data and outputs a decision. In set theory, a choice function is not an action. Nothing is "happening". It is a static, timeless relationship that just exists.

A category error is assigning a property to a thing that cannot possibly possess it, eg "what colour is the number 4?". Taking a timeless, non-physical property of abstract set theory and using it as mechanical proof for how a biological brain operates in linear time is the textbook definition of a categoery error.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the axiom. The Axiom of Choice is the exact opposite of what you are saying. In set theory, if the mathematician can actually define a rule to pick elements from sets, you do not need the axiom of choice. In math, there are two ways to prove something exists: Constructive Proofs and Non-Constructive Proofs, and the Axiom of Choice belongs entirely to the latter. Example:

Infinite Pairs of Shoes (famous Betrand Russel analogy)
Imagine you have an infinite number of pairs of shoes. You are asked to create a new set containing exactly one shoe from every pair. You do not need the axiom of choice for this - you just invent a new rule "Always pick the left shoe." Because you (the mathematician) are able to physically define a rule that does the choosing, you have provided a constructive proof. You did the choosing. The math didn't need to do anything magical.

Now imagine instead of being asked for exactly one shoe from every pair you are asked to create a set containing one sock for every pair of an inifinite number of pairs of identical socks. Now you are screwed. There is no left or right sock. You cannot write a rule like pick the heavier one or pick the left one. Because the set is infinite, you cannot go through and pick them by hand one by hand. You are entirely powerless to make this choice. You cannot construct a rule.

THIS is where the axiom of choice steps in. It's a mathematical decree that states: "Even though it is impossible for a rule to be written, and impossible for a human to do the picking, a choice function still logically exists in the abstract." The AoC is a non-constructive proof.

Q.E.D.: you have it entirely backward. The AoC doesn't give you, the mathematician, the ability to choose. It explicitly steps in when the mathematician lacks the ability to choose. It is a declaration that a mathematical structure exists independently of any human cognitive agent's ability to construct it.

You trying to explore AoC to prove a human brain can make a choice without a rule fails - because AoC literally represents a choice that no human COULD ever make or define. It is the ultimate proof that set theory is completely divorced from human agency and physical causality, and thus not useful in our discussion.

Sure axioms have sometimes become theorems, but this is Motte and Bailey fallacy. This was not your original position. You originally challenged me: "if you were able to prove it (Axiom of Choice) false, that would probably show very strong support for determinism". I've hopefully explained by now that what you're asking is nonsensical in the context of ZF theory. The Axiom of Choice will never become a theorem.

Like you say below, this is begging the question.

Sounds to me what you're saying is "I can't prove the choice was uncaused, because there are too many causes." It's god of the gaps/argument from ignorance. You're trying to sift through an impossibly large sea of deterministic factors to find this hypothetical uncaused event. Occams razor - there is no uncaused event.

The irony of what you're asking is once we do this, create some super-specific artificial simple scenario - the determinism will just become incredibly obvious. Strip way all the confusing complexity of the human brain until you're left with let's say a thermostat, that 'chooses' to turn on the heat based on a very strictly finite number of deterministic factors (the ambient room temperature). It makes the choice, but no one would argue the thermostat has free will.

Human beings are just biological thermostats with a bazillion other functions. The only reason we feel like we have free will is because the math is too complicated for us to calculate in real-time.

So whether the list of causes if ininfitely large (the man at the crossroads) or your artificially finite scenario (the thermostat) the mechanics are exactly the same. The choice is always caused.

You're forgetting that determinism is not just external forces (like gun to your head, the weather). The internal 'essence' is also caused by deterministic causal chains. If your 'internal essence' dictates that you will choose A over B, then your choice was 100% determined by your essence. Did the self choose its own 'internal essence'? No. How can you choose your own essence before you have an essence to make choices with?? As Schopenhauer said, "A man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills."

Here's the practical difference.

Let's look at a complex chaotic system: the weather.

It's a strictly deterministic system, however, because there are trillions of variables, predicting the weather perfectly a month in advance is entirely "not-figure-out-able".

So what's the practical difference between modelling the weather as deterministic vs non-deterministic?

If we model it is non-deterministic (the gods are angry, the clouds have free will) we stop trying to understand it. We do rain dances and just hope for the best.

If we model it as deterministic, we accept that it is caused by physics. Even if we can't trace the chain perfectly back to the beginning of time, we build Doppler radars, launch satellites, and trace the most immediate local causes to get highly accurate 7 day forecasts.

The practical difference is we replace judgment with empathy (They made a bad choice - vs - what environmental or biological inputs caused this behaviour and how can we prevent it in the future)

The practical difference is we replace arrogance with gratitude. (I authored my own greatness - vs - I am the lucky recipient of a causal chain)

Deterministic worldview forces a troubleshooting mentality on a societal level. I genuinely think the world would be massively more moral place if everyone accepted it.

Couple of options.

1 - just admit it. If we can't figure out the exact causal chain, we just we can't figure out the exact causal chain. We don't need to invent some magic uncaused ghost to fill the gap. Just accept with humility our own epistemic limitations

2 - inventions / technological progress - just because we cannot figure out the exact causal chain today, does not mean we can never figure it out. god of the gaps, as our knowledge grows, our technology develops, the gaps get smaller.

3 - probability and pattern recognition type calculations. I touched on this above with the weather analogy. If the precise perfect truth of a causal chain isn't possible, we can still use certain probabliatistic and pattern matching techniques to get closer to the truth than simply throwing up our hands and saying zeus did it. Clear cut physics example: we can't fully map out every possible trajcetory of every air molecule hitting a plane wing, but we know enough to shape a piece of metal that will reliably produce lift and keep 300 ppl safe in the air. Human behaviour example: when pt flips out at my hospital in mental health ward, wats going on in their brain is a black box, but we know enough about the employment of certain techniques, dimming lights, speaking in calm tone, removing the thing/person that set them off in the first place - to reliably de-escalate

if you want to give some precise examples of non-figure-out-able choices, instead of generic hypotheticals, we culd discuss that it may be interesting