Determinism And Freewill

I think that this is a correct assessment of the metaphysical facts in such a scenario. In a truly predetermined world, the metaphysical facts determine that our actions are preformed the way they are, regardless of anything the agent may think about himself, his situation, or his possible actions. However, even in a deterministic world, certain understandings of ethics can free us from this problem. Whenever we ask such a question, “when does an action count as being performed ‘only because one could not have done otherwise,’” we are invoking more than just metaphysics: we are invoking our ethical system. Because determinism is (or would be) a metaphysical fact of our universe, we are all affected by determinism, and such a constraint on our

However, just because it is counterintuitive does not mean it is false; although we may not particularly like learning that our lives are determined, the decision of whether or not we have ‘free will’ in the classic sense, ironically, is not up to us. Compare the ‘illusion of free will’ to the ‘illusion of time’—if our experience of time is similarly just an illusion, then our intuitions regarding time are incorrect in the same way that our intuitions regarding Free Will are incorrect; both seem very real to us, but it might well be the case that they are equally misleading. In fact, simple mathematic scenarios with a few rules can show ‘life-like’ behavior, yet we ‘know’ that these representations are intimately determined. In highly complex worlds with many, but finite, rules (such as ours), we have no particular reason to believe any differently, despite the appearance of the life-like behavior being much more convincing. Thus, the complexity of our world may simply add to the illusion of ‘Free

However, humanity has operated this far with no assumption of determination: if we were to one day learn that determinism is true, we need not change any of our behaviors for it—for those, too, are determined. Thus, if we sit back and do nothing, then that will be what is determined. Yet, we still have an illusion of choice to choose apathy, or to embrace our causal situation and proceed as we always have. Faced with such a choice, there is no reason for choosing apathy. Even if we could, with certainty, prove that our world is a deterministic one, the mere fact that we have these intuitions of ‘able to otherwise’ free will says something about our nature, which certainly would not change even if we all knew with certainty that our actions are already causally