@hue-man,
hue-man;84553 wrote:But determinism does not entail inevitability. Ultimately, no one is controlling my actions but me. Now my actions may be determined by external factors and internal factors, but ultimately I'm the one who makes the decision to pull the trigger.
P.S. So you believe that existentialism is more of a pragmatic interpretation of free will?
Hi,
Yes, I understand that there are many version of determinism. The one that I usually associate with determinism is this one from Wikipedia:
Determinism is the view that every event, including human cognition, behavior, decision, and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences.[1
There is no choice.
However, there is the Eastern from which I am more aligned with also from Wikipedia:
If one's situation in life is surfing on a tsunami, one still has some range of choices even in that situation. One person might give up, and another person might choose to struggle and perhaps to survive. The Yi Jing mentality is much closer to the mentality of quantum physics than to that of classical physics, and also finds parallelism in voluntarist or Existentialist ideas of taking one's life as one's project.
So, I guess we have to understand what we each mean by determinism and Free Will.
My view is that we are all influenced by everything surrounding us, but we can make a choice in which direction we want to go. Like a captain of a ship can decide whether to fight the storm, move away from it, or go around it. There are influences, and these influences may overwhelm, but we do have a choice in direction.
My own feeling is that existentialism is incomplete in that it does not recognize past things that were learned, e.g. inherited characteristics and innate capabilities, etc. We do seem to be all born into this world with certain a certain set of attributes, some of them quite unique.
Rich
---------- Post added 08-20-2009 at 10:43 PM ----------
prothero;84595 wrote:Things can be fairly ordered and predictable without being completely determined. In fact free will would have no real meaning or utility unless at least the material effects of action were highly ordered and predictable.
Yes, I would agree that to a point material objects are more predictable than the decisions that a human mind may make. However, material good themselves can be quite unpredictable also. My car ran fine up until it started to overheat today and then it had to be towed. So there is uncertainty everywhere, though some are more predictable than others.
Rich