Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-27713488-20180327004110/@comment-31808207-20180409055710

DukeLeto7 wrote: OK, yes, I don't want Sierra to go the route of indeterminism being required for moral choice. A good example of an author trying to do this is Orson Scott Card's "Xenocide" and "Children of the Mind", where the questions of the distinction between mind and personal identity degenerated into confused nonsense because he rigidly adhered to this idea. (The attempt to shoehorn Mormon theological thinking in didn't help things either.) Basically, Card argued that there was the mind and its memories, but somehow also a subatomic particle that is responsible for the quantum indeterminacy required to make moral choices, and this was an integral part of the self. There was a human character with spare bodies and minds but one subatomic particle and one with a subatomic particle that lived in an AI that was going to be turned off, but had arranged to have its memories stored elsewhere. The AI ended up picking up one of the spare bodies and re-establishing its memories in a neural network of semi-sentient trees.

It didn't really make any sense in context.

As to the definition of predetermined, I think you're still trying to smuggle contraband agency in under the radar. The nature of the universe can't predetermine things or exert control over them because it hasn't got a mind. The Langton's Ant example (as opposed to the real ant) was supposed to demonstrate that. The way the universe works is determined by simple rules, but its complexity is emergent from the application of those simple rules.

This may be clearer if we strike the "pre" off of predetermined and just call the choice "determined". What happens is the result of deterministic physical laws, but there is no observer outside or inside the universe watching the stabbing who can turn to another observer and say "I KNEW he was going to do that." There was no point before the event happened where anyone or anything could look at the events leading up to the stabbing and predict exactly what the outcome would be, either inside the universe or from some perspective outside it.

The point in contrasting the ant brain to the human brain is to try and drag indeterministic free will people's attention back to the meaningful and undeniably real distinction between the two that demonstrates how real choice exists. The ant just responds to external stimuli. The human models, in their mind, possible futures where various possible actions lead to results it desires. Moreover, it thinks about different ways to make such models.

That ability, not whether the application of that ability might have yielded a different result if the universe could somehow be run exactly the same way again, is the reality of choice, and what actually matters. I definitely agree that the theme can lead to some nonsensical plotlines. But my observations suggest, as I noted, that predetermination in the strictest sense isn't even what Alanon is talking about. He's definitely not the observing standing outside able to predict everything, because he's been surprised several times, like by Varia's nature.

That said, I think the debate becomes academic in reality because, as you say, it doesn't actually matter in reality. We make a "choice" that's the result of complicated information and has moral implications about our character, regardless of whether we truly chose that or whether we "had" to choose that. The debate about free will versus determination is essentially a debate over a an irrelevant philosophical point because we can't, as you say, test to see whether our response is a point on a probability distribution or a the output of a well-defined function.

But the reason I don't think this is too relevant to Alanon's speech is that the destiny he's talking about seems to be much more something that can -negate- the meaning of choice as opposed to something that prevents the ability to choose. "The world turns in place, rendering the actions of kings meaningless." That's actually a very different sort of predetermination, isn't it? The idea that the world will warp around you to try to bring something to pass no matter what you do to prevent it, no matter how you try to fight it. Thinking about it in those terms, maybe you don't really need an extra piece of the puzzle to see why it's so depressing for him.