Category: Determinism
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Malcolm Pollack on AI and its Threat: Determinism, Predictability, Free Will
Our friend Malcolm Pollock in Brake Failure expresses a reasoned pessimism about our future under AI. I share his concerns. Will we humans have a future? Or are we facing what I have elsewhere called the Ultimate Replacement? In Stephen Wolfram on AI and Irreducible Complexity, Malcolm explains . . . a distinction between two…
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Dennett on the Consequence Argument against Compatibilism
Substack latest
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Victor Reppert on Soft Determinism
Victor writes, Soft determinism is still determinism. And it's really not a different type of determinism. It is, rather, drawing different conclusions from determinism, or rather, not drawing the conclusion that we are not free and not morally responsible for our actions. Exactly right.
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Caesar, the Rubicon, Tenseless Truth, Determinism, and Fatalism
In a post the point of which was merely to underscore the difference between absolute and necessary truth, I wrote, somewhat incautiously: Let our example be the proposition p expressed by 'Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 44 B.C.' Given that p is true, it is true in all actual circumstances. That is, its truth-value…
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What is Fatalism? How Does it Differ from Determinism?
Robert Kane (A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will, Oxford 2005, p. 19) rightly bids us not confuse determinism with fatalism: This is one of the most common confusions in free will debates. Fatalism is the view that whatever is going to happen, is going to happen, no matter what we do. Determinism alone does…