Thoughts on Determinism

[Pa3s]

I've been trying to figure out what bothers me about determinism and it has to do with meaning. For example, I can see meaning to aspects of objective reality, such as the meaning that I exist in some form or fashion in various ways, that I have an identity. But if you looked at the neurons firing in my head, there is just a bunch of neurons reacting with each other. Yet subjectively, those neurons hold abstract interpretations and thoughts about reality, which can't be understood by looking at them empirically because all you'd see is their interaction and not what that interaction means to me. Course, you could make the argument that objectively messing with my neurons changes my thoughts; and I'd agree, but then I'd also have to wonder, if those abstractions can be influenced by modifying my neurons, then why can't those neurons be modified by those abstract thoughts as well (to some degree anyway)? Because after all, they are inextricably tied together.

Not sure how you would resolve that other than to say that the subjective is an illusion. But yet most of us are aware that we exist, so it would be a seeming contradiction to say so.

It's not really a contradiction if you think about it. Illusions might not be what they appear to be (hence the term), but their existence is undisputed.

You could say that these neurons objectively hold abstract interpretations and thoughts about reality and not just subjectively. This is an important difference. According to determinism, these information/thoughts must be regarded as effects of the brain function. That means they are the product of your interacting neurons.

You said neuronal interaction is observable, but not what this interaction means to you. To me, this sounds as if it would depend on you (your psychological ego) to make sense of the objective brain function, as if it was a willful act. If this is the case, I'd disagree. To be honest (and this is something I was thinking right now and never before), we could assume that thoughts and feelings are no less objective than anything else, because we are bound to the thoughts we have and the feelings we feel due to our biological makeup. So if you won 1000$, your reaction as a whole would be the objective effect according to all predefined circumstances. Somebody else would react differently, but this would still be the objective result. It's like having two identical-looking cans of spray paint without labels. Same can, same effect, right? But just because one sprays red paint and the other sprays blue paint we don't consider the colour of the paint to be subjective.

Perhaps not the thoughts/feelings themselves are subjective, but their subjectiveness is actually an illusion. Different people have different thoughts/feelings about the same subject (let's say it's something controversial like abortion) because they are not identical (I mean physically, their neurons ect.). But each individual opinion is objective, as stated above. What makes it subjective to us is the fact that people are considered to be one species and all people "in their right mind" should come to the same conclusions, which is a silly thing to say, of course.


PS: The fact that I was sitting here for about an hour, thinking about a correct answer to this post shows that this topic is extremely confusing.

[strangeling]

Okay, I guess this is how I've come to understand then:

If we take a computer, it has hardware and software. The hardware is capable of dealing with quantifiable information that could be empirically observed; it's designed to run software and to an extent limits how that software will run, similar to how processors have instruction sets. And this software comes in some kind of encoded language that the hardware is capable of executing with its instructions. Those things could be argued observable.

But what happens when the software is designed to rewrite itself? Looking at the hardware and how it executes instructions won't elucidate the nature of the software because its behavior is not a static quantity, but a continuous change. Theoretically speaking then, any attempts to define it in a deterministic sense requires an understanding of all the change that's going on at once. And I guess if someone believes that there are basic laws of change to everything, such as seems to be the goal of physics, and finds those laws, then determinism could be thought of as true and people aren't much more than a result of physics. On the other hand, if there are no basic laws, but relative ones, then there is a pool of relative change, where an absolute cause can not be determined. And then one could imagine determinism as false. I think I prefer this view because it allows life to have the meaning of helping to define a world that would be otherwise undefined. Of course, this can get overly complicated, where one suggests that the sum of all relative change could equal an absolute change (as I think you mentioned by suggesting that knowing all the properties of every aspect of the universe could make it determined), but I'm using relative to mean divergence of how things change with one another, rather than convergence. Physics does seem to look for convergence. That's probably the basis behind the scientific method, anyway.

And sorry if this seems not understandable; you have very clear and explicable thoughts on determinism, but I just wanted to argue against it a bit.