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How does your belief in everything non-quantum being fully clockwork yield non-identical predictions to my belief in free will? I contend that in this case the answer is not mu, as my belief in free will delivers superior predictions about reality. My evidence for this is the way that every functional system we have relating to managing interpersonal interactions operate off the assumption of free will, zero functional systems for managing interpersonal interactions operate off deterministic assumptions, and every attempt to build such systems off deterministic assumptions (and there have been many) have uniformly failed.
Reality around us could not be baseline reality, and our minds have a connection to the actual baseline reality. It doesn't really matter if baseline reality is God or the simulation server in this case. Claims that our minds are deterministic must confront the fact that they do not operate in a deterministic fashion at any level, and most claims and even evidence to the contrary appear to have been falsified.
Determined if you zoom out enough and crank the simulation hard enough doesn't mean it looks determined from up close in-the-moment, same as quantum experiments looking random from inside our lightcone. If the best information you've got looks like free will, use your free will heuristics.
...but if you have better information, well then, feel free to discard another wrong model. Do you have such better information? Knowable and known are distinct.
Why does he need better information to discard your theory? It's your theory that needs to provide better information to justify its adoption.
You misread me. He and you and everyone else are free to use free will as a model, but know that it is a map and not the territory and if/when you get better data, you must discard it.
In turn, so must you. It is on you to demonstrate that your claims of the territory are not just another, and inferior, map.
I believe that if you buy physicalism, I already have. You just have to take it seriously. Further, I'm reasonably certain that if the highest weighted values of an explanation are predictive power and parsimony, physicalism must be selected. If your explanatory judgment criteria are different, I admit little I've said should move you.
If you have to assume the conclusion to be convinced by what follows, you are presenting the map, not the terrain. Particularly when it requires- as you have to @FCfromSSC - ignoring the limitations of the model all the more conspicuously when pointed out.
There is nothing particularly reasonable about requiring pre-commitment to a model. It is an act of faith. Faith can be a useful approach for those who cannot prove foundational beliefs- it is completely tangential to being true or not- but 'just trust me, bro' is not a position from which someone can accuse others of ignoring reality in favor of their own model.
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If better data arrives that goes against determinism, should we discard it? Because determinism has been a popular theory for a very long time, the various deterministic theories have been empirically tested, and they have been uniformly falsified. What you are proposing here is the final stage of Determinism of the Gaps, refusing to acknowledge all previous tests and all previous data, making no testable predictions at all, and relying entirely on, to put it succinctly, faith.
Sure, that might change in the future. Also in the future, the Son of Man might return on a cloud in glory to judge the quick and the dead. Also in the future, the stars in the night sky might be replaced by a high-score readout, and then reality as we know it gets turned off. But I have actually read a few of the old books, enough to know that what your argument is not particularly new, and what is relatively new is the part where you've (wisely) given up on making empirical claims or predictions entirely. I disagree that Determinism should be treated as the best available hypothesis when it now makes no predictions and all previous predictions it made have been falsified.
I do recognize that this is tangential to your main point, though, and my apologies. it's a bugbear for me.
In a purely physical world, there can't be anything that "goes against determinism". You have to bite the whole bullet or not at all.
I really wish people weren't downvoting you just because they disagree. You are clearly contributing tremendously to discussion regardless.
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Yes, I'm aware that if we assume a particular form of hard Materialism axiomatically, then Determinism or something much like it is a necessary consequence. But there is no actual reason to take that particular form of hard Materialism as one's axiom, and crucially, adopting it as an axiom appears, speaking strictly within the Materialist frame, to degrade rather than improve one's ability to make predictions about the material world.
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