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> E.g. we judge the weather. If you can give me an example of someone putting "the weather" in jail or forcing it to pay a fine, please do so. > criminals st

> E.g. we judge the weather. If you can give me an example of someone putting "the weather" in jail or forcing it to pay a fine, please do so. > criminals still affect society irrespective of how they make their decisions. That's entirely not the point. If the criminals have no free will, punishing them has no effect whatsoever on society. They had no choice but to commit their crimes, and they will have no choice as to whether or not to commit future crimes, regardless of what punishment is given to them.

vidarh 3y ago
> If you can give me an example of someone putting "the weather" in jail or forcing it to pay a fine, please do so. Irrelevant. We don't put every human we judge in jail or make them pay a fine, or indeed have them put in front of a court either. Most of the time we either just glare at them or tell them off or otherwise express our disapproval. > That's entirely not the point. If the criminals have no free will, punishing them has no effect whatsoever on society. They had no choice but to commit their crimes, and they will have no choice as to whether or not to commit future crimes, regardless of what punishment is given to them. This is blatantly absurd. What you are arguing here is effectively that a different input applied to a deterministic process can't affect the future output of that deterministic process. You can disprove that by flicking a light switch and observing that the light comes on. The light has no free will, and the process is deterministic, and yet the output is different when you apply a different input. In a fully deterministic universe, you were always going to flick that light switch, and so seeing it as a "change" is a point of view not an actual argument for agency. But when you do the light did not have a choice to remain off. With an entity - like a human - with more state, the relationship is not always remotely as predictable, but the notion that changing an input can't produce a different output than would have been produced if the input hadn't been changed given a deterministic universe is equally absurd. [If we add space for actual randomness as one of the inputs or state, we may not be able to say it was "always what was going to happen" but we would be able to say it'd always be what was going to happen given the same set of randomness (and randomness does still not help with the free will argument, so that distinction is not particularly relevant to this subject)]
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  > What you are arguing here is effectively that a different input applied to a deterministic process can't affect the future output of that deterministic process. I am arguing nothing of the sort. If there is no free will, there is no choice about the value of the input.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    That there is no choice does not alter the fact that an input can take on different values at different points in time. See my other answer.

vidarh 3y ago

> If you can give me an example of someone putting "the weather" in jail or forcing it to pay a fine, please do so. Irrelevant. We don't put every human we judge in jail or make them pay a fine, or indeed have them put in front of a court either. Most of the time we either just glare at them or tell them off or otherwise express our disapproval. > That's entirely not the point. If the criminals have no free will, punishing them has no effect whatsoever on society. They had no choice but to commit their crimes, and they will have no choice as to whether or not to commit future crimes, regardless of what punishment is given to them. This is blatantly absurd. What you are arguing here is effectively that a different input applied to a deterministic process can't affect the future output of that deterministic process. You can disprove that by flicking a light switch and observing that the light comes on. The light has no free will, and the process is deterministic, and yet the output is different when you apply a different input. In a fully deterministic universe, you were always going to flick that light switch, and so seeing it as a "change" is a point of view not an actual argument for agency. But when you do the light did not have a choice to remain off. With an entity - like a human - with more state, the relationship is not always remotely as predictable, but the notion that changing an input can't produce a different output than would have been produced if the input hadn't been changed given a deterministic universe is equally absurd. [If we add space for actual randomness as one of the inputs or state, we may not be able to say it was "always what was going to happen" but we would be able to say it'd always be what was going to happen given the same set of randomness (and randomness does still not help with the free will argument, so that distinction is not particularly relevant to this subject)]

Turing_Machine 3y ago
> What you are arguing here is effectively that a different input applied to a deterministic process can't affect the future output of that deterministic process. I am arguing nothing of the sort. If there is no free will, there is no choice about the value of the input.
- vidarh 3y ago
  That there is no choice does not alter the fact that an input can take on different values at different points in time. See my other answer.