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gimboarretino t1_jd2veid wrote

Have you ever noticed that many philosopher, scientists and thinkers that negate Free Will, very rarely admit having been irresistibly coerced and forced into believing that? (and everything else btw). On the contrary, they tendt to act like they came to this conclusion after careful reflection, sound logical reasoning, deep discussions and critical thinking.

They expose their opinion almost as if they really weighed the alternatives, selected and then chose (!) the best thesis.

Isn't that strange? Is there a philosophical explanation behind this curious behaviour?

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kilkil t1_jd7b1mj wrote

> They expose their opinion almost as if they really weighed the alternatives, selected and then chose (!) the best thesis.

Well, of course they chose. The determinist might simply reply that the fact that they ended up choosing that option is the result of ancient chains of cause-and-effect, stretching back far into the distant past, theoretically traceable to the Big Bang.

Those chains of causality, the determinist might continue, led them to have the childhood they did, to developing the thoughts they did, and ultimately, to their own interest in philosophy and to their own careful reasoning and conclusions on the subject of free will: that it is nothing but an occasionally useful fiction.

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gimboarretino t1_jd7gzia wrote

In this context, what is the epistemological diffetence between the brain processing informations according a stricly causal chain of cause effect and the stomach processing food? You can define choiche the first pheonomen and digestion the second, but what is the epistemological extra value of the first?

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kilkil t1_jd7mr1d wrote

I'm not sure what you mean by epistemological value, but I would respond that, from a determinist position, "choice" is just a label we assign to certain kinds of brain activity.

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gimboarretino t1_jd7z6wv wrote

If the theory of evolution by natural selection is the inevitable result of ancient chains of cause-and-effect, stretching back far into the Big Bang, and the hardcore biblical creationism is the inevitable result of ancient chains of cause-and-effect, stretching back far into the Big Bang, why should I "rate higher", ""consider more reliable/correct/true" the first one

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kilkil t1_jd9o2rn wrote

Ah, here I can see how one's epistemological framework plays a role. Speaking as someone who subscribes to empiricism, I would say that there is more convincing evidence for the Big Bang than for Biblical claims.

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gimboarretino t1_jd9shff wrote

I would say that this only moves the problem backwards.

If you are forced to consider the empirical evidence for the Big Bang more convincing than the Bible because of a chain of cause-effect stretching back to the Big Bang, why should I rate this opinion higher/better than being forced consider the empirical evidence for the Big Bang less convincing than the Biblical claims because of the same invincible chains of cause-effect?

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kilkil t1_jdgnqb9 wrote

(I've edited this comment over and over like a dozen times now, so sorry for any confusion.)

Could you please elaborate on your point? As stated, I don't see the contradiction between human thought being deterministic, and human thought being capable of deciding which claims to believe.

In your example, I would say that, even though both positions are determined by "invincible cause-effect chains", there's no rule that says both chains have to produce correct beliefs. In fact, since the claims are contradictory, only at most one of them can be correct, which means that the "cause-effect chain" of the other one must have included some step which entailed faulty information, or faulty logic. Or the same could apply to both, if both claims happened to be incorrect in some way.

To give an example, let's say person A lies to person B. If we accept determinism, that means "invincible chains of cause-effect" led to A and B believing different things, but A still has the correct information and B doesn't. The fact that both have these really long "cause-effect chains" doesn't prevent us from pointing out that A happens to believe correct information, and that B doesn't.

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