If causal determinism is correct –
1. “Then everything that happens couldn't have happened any other way.”
2. “Then beliefs about everything are strictly determined.”
3. “Then moral responsibility would also technically be gone.”
4. “Then why do anything at all? Telling someone that they ought to do this or believe that would be meaningless, because the notion of choice is gone and is an illusion.”
“Then everything that happens couldn't have happened any other way.”
‘Determine’ has at least two meanings – “to be caused” (causation) and “to be ascertained” (prediction). Chaos theory displays a type of unpredictable determinism – a system where every step is caused by the prior step, but future states are impossible to predict. It is not necessarily the case that because things are determined that “everything that happens couldn't have happened any other way”. It means that in order for things to happen a different way they need to be caused to happen a different way. It emphasizes the importance of causation. Causes can change the world! And you are a link in a chain of causes that has impact on everything downhill from you! Who you are, what you think, how you feel, what you believe, what you like and dislike, your moral emotions – these are all extremely relevant to what type of cause you will be in this chain of events. The fact that the type of person you are was determined by prior causes (like your genes and environment) doesn’t change how important you are as a cause for future effects.
“Then beliefs about everything are strictly determined.”
What are beliefs? Beliefs are things our brains create. Why do our brains create them? Because they are useful. If we believe it will rain, we can prepare. If we believe a harsh winter is coming, we can prepare. Our brains are prediction machines that constantly analyze patterns and develop beliefs based on those patterns. So, when we say, “our beliefs are determined” what we should mean is, “our beliefs are caused by the data that our pattern recognition faculties process.” This interpretation of beliefs should not be concerning.
I believe the interpretation you are jumping towards is something like, “all of our beliefs are inevitably controlled by forces outside of us, puppeteering us”. This type of conclusion is only true in a zoomed-out way – as technically everything is puppeteered by the laws of physics. If we zoom in, your brain is very relevant to the production of beliefs and how your brain works has a causal effect on future beliefs. If you train your brain to be a better belief production machine, then you can get better beliefs. There is no direct demonic force manipulating your brain to have false beliefs. You are very capable of generating true beliefs despite each belief being caused by the data processing that came before.
Pardon the following anthropomorphization of evolution, it just makes it quicker and easier to communicate about complex ideas when we talk about evolution this way.
Some people argue:
P1: Evolution causes your beliefs.
P2: Evolution doesn’t care about truth.
C: Evolution causes you to have beliefs that are independent of the truth.
The problem with this view is that P2 is false – evolution DOES care about truth. How can a creature survive without knowing where it is? Or where it needs to be? Or where the food is? Or where the predator is? Or what quantity of food? Or what quantity of predators? Proper action requires a true understanding of the situation.
But evolution is not monomaniacal in its focus on truth. It does care about utility more than truth. To the extent that false beliefs provide evolutionary utility, evolution may be motivated to deceive you. Religion is actually a perfect example of this. We seem hard-wired to belief in magical invisible beings that punish murderers into scaring us into more social cohesion and evolutionary utility.
So it is valid to be concerned about false beliefs, but we should not fall into epistemic nihilism over this issue. Evolution has provided us with enough tools to debunk our false beliefs if we so desire. And yes, your desires matter. You are the agent that will develop yourself. Evolution has given you the meta-desires that you need to survive. You just have to apply those wisely to continue developing in a good direction.
“Why?” you continue to ask. You are still confused as to why your feelings matter under determinism. The reason is that your feelings are a part of the causal chain. You ARE determinism. If you feel motivated, then that feeling is a deterministic cause that will get you to do something. If you feel demotivated, then that feeling is a deterministic cause that will get you to NOT do something.
But why does it matter? Do pain and pleasure matter? Does suffering and wellbeing matter? Mixed in with the chains of deterministic causes are feelings. One feeling leads to another feeling. Do you want to cause suffering with your inaction? Or do you want to cause wellbeing by your actions? Evolution has already given you your value systems. You already know that you don’t like it when you suffer, and you don’t like it when others suffer. Your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs are important causal chains that will lead to either more suffering in the world or more wellbeing. You already know you care. You already know you must take your thoughts, feelings and beliefs seriously, so you can be the most effective link in the deterministic chain there is.
“Then moral responsibility would also technically be gone.”
Morality would disappear under determinism? Impossible. You already have your moral systems determined within you by evolution. They aren’t going anywhere. Moral responsibility is also an aspect of your evolutionary drive. For example, evolution figured out that tit-for-tat was an effective game theoretic strategy for enforcing cooperation for better social cohesion, and hence evolutionary utility. Many animals have been found to have evolved tit-for-tat style morality. This tit-for-tat became an aspect of human morality - subject to refinement, mutation, and improvement over time (like adding in functions for repentance, forgiveness, compassion, justice, mercy, etc.).
Sure, religious-style moral responsibility doesn’t make any sense, because an infinite punishment in hell cannot fairly be applied to a finite sin that was committed by a creature evolutionarily designed to sin. In the cosmic sense, it isn’t their fault that they committed their crimes. There is no justice in punishing them at the cosmic level. But at the practical level, at the level of preventing crime, at the level of evolutionarily punishing harmful behavior, punishment makes a lot of sense. They may not have moral responsibility in the free will sense, but they can have moral responsibility in the agentic sense, and also in the causal sense.
In the agentic sense, creatures are agents with goals. Agents can learn and be conditioned by punishment and reward. Agents have a social duty to condition themselves to follow the rules of social cohesion. Society only wants to cooperate with people who follow the rules. If you want the benefits of society, then you have to return benefit for benefit. If agents hurt the society, then the society will take revenge on them and punish them. That punishment may psychologically condition them to follow the rules next time. If a person is so deranged that punishment cannot condition them, then agentic punishment doesn’t make sense. They have lost their agency due to mental illness.
In a causal sense, creatures that harm other creatures are the nexus of a chain of causes that bring harm. Even if they have no free will, they are still the source of the harm. Evolutionary forces motivate us to defend ourselves from sources of harm. We don’t care if the harm has free will or not, we want to reduce it. Tornados have no free will, but we want to avoid them. A criminal with biological tendencies to commit crime is the human version of a tornado. We must lock them up so that they don’t continue their path of destruction. Maybe they can be conditioned into a harmless tornado. Or maybe they must be locked up for life.
To reemphasize this point, if we had AI robot creatures running loose in the wild, autopoetically reproducing, we would have a problem on our hands if they randomly murdered people. Whether or not the robots had free will would not be central to determining how to deal with these murders. We would want to know the chain of causes. Was there a defective robot? Or a group of defective robots? Or is the water in an area causing the defects? Or are they developing innate desires for murder? We would have to take these scenarios seriously, and apply punishments to the robots as needed to prevent further harm. None of this would require free will.
“Then why do anything at all? Telling someone that they ought to do this or believe that would be meaningless, because the notion of choice is gone and is an illusion.”
First of all, it is impossible to not do anything at all! You don’t have free will! You will get itchy and scratch yourself. You will get bored and walk around. You will get hungry and grab some food. There is no such thing as “just don’t do anything at all” because you are not a creature that lacks value systems. You have innate things that you care about and you will pursue those things because of the causal drives within you.
Second of all, instead of being demotivating, determinism should be extremely motivating! You should understand this as hacking the source code of life. Instead of accidentally getting results in the world, you now understand that results come via causes. And if you create the right causes you can obtain the effects you desire. You already have your desires. Now you must use your knowledge of determinism to obtain them! Just because your desire to make the world a better place comes from the laws of physics doesn’t make it any less valid. Go, accomplish your goals, and make your causal impact on the world. You don’t have any other choice.
Why do people feel nihilistic about Determinism?
Agentic Slavery vs Metaphysical Slavery
Agentically, your brain must process your external environment, your internal environment, figure out what is salient in each, evaluate each salient thing against its value systems, and then calculate which salient thing will maximally satisfy its values.
This is all deterministic and algorithmic. There is no freedom from the laws of physics here. The electricity in the brain follows the path of least resistance through the brain. How the brain has been built guides the flow of electricity through its algorithmic network.
Sometimes different value systems operate at odds with one another. The desire to do and the desire to not do. Every action contains costs. We must predict the rewards associated with each action and compare them to the costs.
Sometimes people jump to the conclusion that if we are controlled by the laws of physics, then suddenly our decisions don’t matter. But is there any basis for this conclusion? To do or to not do still matters. This is an illogical conclusion that probably comes from the depression associated with the illusion of a type of agentic slavery. Determinism is not agentic, there is no one holding a gun to your head. The slavery of determinism is metaphysical, not agentic.
Agentic slavery involves being forced to do things you don’t want to do by another agent. The things we want to do are the things we calculate as maximally rewarding. Things we don’t want to do are the things we calculate as not maximally rewarding. When we exert effort as a slave for someone else, we get no reward as our master would take the reward. This makes us not want to do those things.
Applying this demotivated slave mentality to determinism would cause us to be demotivated - to calculate that we will not get any rewards for our efforts. But this is a silly conclusion to draw. The fact that physics controls us does NOT mean that the laws of physics are going to steal our rewards. It would be mathematically incorrect to reduce our reward calculation upon realizing that there is no free will. The laws of physics don’t force us to do what we don’t want to do; they force us to do what we want to do! They force us to maximize our rewards, not minimize them. There is no logical reason to apply this demotivated slave mentality to determinism.
The thing with determinism is – your calculations matter. If you get confused into thinking there are no rewards, you WILL feel demotivated, depressed, and nihilistic. But this is just a calculation error. Once you fix your calculation, you can accurately assess rewards again and reclaim your motivation despite determinism.
Autonomy and Self-Control
People grow attached to this idea that they are autonomous and have self-control. They want to feel agentically free and powerful. Being agentically free means that as an agent, nothing external to their body is stopping them from pursuing their goals. Because goals provide us with rewards, we are very happy when we are agentically free to go get those rewards. We also like feeling powerful - it makes us feel like our probability of success in getting those rewards is high! It motivates us to keep going, because the probability is high enough to make our efforts worth it!
Sometimes people jump to the conclusion that if there is no free will, then suddenly our autonomy and self-control are gone. This makes them feel like they are not agentically free and not powerful. This demotivates them and makes them feel like there efforts are not worth it. But there are actually no good reasons to jump to these conclusions. This is just confusion about what no free will means. No free will means that your internal algorithms are not free from the laws of physics.
Autonomy, agency, self-control and power are all compatible with no free will. Robots are the epitome of an entity that lacks free will. But a robot can have all of these things - autonomy, agency, self-control and power. A robot has distinct boundaries that represent itself, it has algorithms that give it control over itself, it has algorithms that give it goals to pursue, and it has no external objects controlling it.
We need to remember that we are links in large chains of causation. The prior links in the chain may cause certain effects upon us, controlling our development. But we are a valid link in the chain that causes control over our materials to produce actions that effect the next link in the chains of causation. We have forward-looking control even though we don't have backwards-looking control.
Morality
Often people conclude that no free will means there is no morality. But they never seem to question if this logic actually is sound. What stops robots from having morality? Morality is an understanding of good and bad - two ideas that find themselves situated in relationship to goals. Goals are the easiest thing to program in software - they are just while loops (do the actions over and over until the goal is accomplished). There is no reason to think that a robot cannot have a goal. Once you have a goal, you have the things that increment you towards the goal (goodness) and things that increment you away from the goal (badness). We can apply these concepts of goodness and badness in relation to social goals. A robot can increment society in a good direction or a bad direction. We can hold robots morally responsible when they know what society's goal is and intentionally act against society's goals. There is no reason why we can't put a murderous robot in jail for its crimes. If morality works perfectly fine with robots, why not with deterministic humans?
Meaning
People also like to jump to the conclusion that with no free will life is meaningless. But again, does this logic even follow?? I think this first requires an understanding of what meaning is. Meaning conveys the idea of importance or purpose. I take a reductive approach to understanding emergent phenomena. Complex phenomena are emergent; simple phenomena are the reductive building blocks that construct emergent phenomena. Okay, lets look at meaning through this lens. Purpose is a type of complex meaning - a larger and deeper goal that contains important reasons behind it. How can we break down the complex idea of purpose into its building blocks? As biological creatures, where do our larger and deeper goals come from? They come from our instincts. We have instincts to value things, obtaining that value becomes our goals, and how we organize those goals over time becomes our purpose. Okay, so purpose simplifies to goals, goals simplify to values. What do values simplify to? Values simplify to assessments of goodness and badness. Goodness and badness simplify to pleasure and pain.
Now we have hit rock bottom - the fundamental building blocks of meaning are pleasure and pain. Now let's revisit the initial question - is life meaningless with no free will? Do pain and pleasure still exist? Yes, of course they exist. Therefore, meaning still exists. No matter how deterministic you view reality, pain and pleasure still exist, and therefore meaning still exists.
We must use our deterministic algorithms to calculate ways to reduce pain and increase pleasure. This is what is most fundamentally meaningful to us. We can algorithmically create lots of complex strategies for doing this in order to give our lives purpose. All of this is compatible with no free will.
Cosmic Significance
Sometimes people lust after an even greater purpose in life. For them, it's not enough to have a mortal purpose, they must have an eternal purpose. For these people, theism is most satisfying and atheism abhorrent.
There seems to be some psychological research that concludes that people are more mentally healthy when their lives are connected to a narrative that is bigger than their own morality - it can be as simple as connecting with their ancestors. Being able to situate your morality within a goal that extends past your morality can be helpful at helping one understand why one's morality is important in the first place.
Under a deterministic paradigm, it is actually not impossible to develop a sense of cosmic significance. Determinism means that we are all causally relevant - we cause the future to come into existence. The nature of causation situates us in a network of complex causation - each of us being nodes that can have exponentially powerful effects that ripple through the network of nodes. Like the idea of a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world causing a hurricane on the other side of the world, it is possible that we can have a great impact on the future as the effects of our actions ripple through space and time. This gives us a sense of power and impact - we can actually impact the cosmos, making us cosmically significant.
When we remember that the pain and pleasure of all agents is meaningful, when we actually begin to care about other people's wellbeing, we can easily apply this logic to the wellbeing of the future humans in the cosmos. There are potentially trillions of future humans and all of their wellbeing matters. When we exert our efforts to make the world a better place, we are allowing future humans to reap the benefits of our efforts. This is significant.
Instead of imagining that we must do nothing and just wait for heaven to arrive when we die, we should embrace the awesome power and responsibility we have for creating heaven on earth for future humans. This is true cosmic significance.
Fatalism
Often people think that no free will means that the future is fixed - there is an unavoidable fate waiting for them. This makes them feel powerless. Again, I believe this is an illusion. We are a link in the chain of causations. Just as the chain links before us had powerful effects upon us, we can have powerful effects on the things we impact. We are powerful, despite being deterministic. Is the future fixed? To the extent that we operate on classical physics, yes, the future is fixed - we are a bunch of deterministic atoms bouncing predictably towards that end result. But that does not mean our actions are irrelevant. Our actions determine that future, and our past determines our actions.
But the universe seems much more chaotic than a traditional classic view of the world. Even without quantum physics, chaos theory provides the opportunity for lots of dynamic flexibility and unpredictability. It could be the case that as complex creatures, we have just enough chaos to flexibly change our fates at crucial moments. With the addition of quantum mechanics, it is even more possible that we have this endemic flexibility.
Fatalism can make people feel trapped. But the universe has more than enough flexibility to make the conclusion that we are trapped in a trajectory towards a destined fate invalid.