"Of course. You are determined to eat the apple But you still had the option between apple and pear."

Not in a deterministic universe. How are there any options in a deterministic universe?

AND, even if there are options, how are you navigating between those options, as making a choice requires, in a deterministic universe?

Your point doesn't work on two levels.

How are there not options in a deterministic universe? Deep Blue chooses, yet everything is determined. What is the issue?

"How are there not options in a deterministic universe? Deep Blue chooses, yet everything is determined. What is the issue?"

Circular reasoning. If Deep Blue is choosing, then there have to be options, and there have to be options because Deep Blue is choosing.

It's not a matter of if. Deep Blue evaluates options. That is what it does. That is what it is programmed to do. And then it chooses between them. It is also entirely determined. I'm not arguing that this entails the reality of options. It's a statement of fact.

Consider it a reductio.

"And then it chooses between them. It is also entirely determined."

These two sentences contradict each other. I'm going to just drop this part of the discussion and recommend Peter van Inwagen's book "an Essay on Free Will".

These two sentences contradict each other. — RogueAI

Yet, Deep Blue is real. Between contradicting sentences and contradicting reality, best to choose the former, and reevaluate what we understand of contradiction.

Choices are not antithetical to determinism. And it is not axiomatic that they are. At the very least an argument must be presented. Something has gone wrong in our understanding of one or the other or both if they are taken to be as such.

Suspect there is some confusion between choice as verb and choice as a state of affairs, and over how the one relates to the other. Would be interesting to tease out.

A necessary condition for doing any science is choosing/determining which evidence to believe and how much weight to give it. How do you do that without free will? Because without free will, you're simply compelled to believe that a particular piece of evidence supports a hypothesis. It might, it might not. — RogueAI

I assume you mean "how do you do science without libertarian free will". The answer: with compatibilist free will. Compatibilists account for free will in a manner consistent with determinism. Some people feel that's not free enough because they don't like the idea that what they did was, in principle, determined.

1. The ability to make choices is a necessary condition for the evaluation of evidence.
2. Evaluating evidence is a necessary condition for science.
3. Without free will there is no ability to make choices.
4. Without the ability to make choices, evaluation of evidence is impossible.
5. If evaluation of evidence is impossible, science is impossible.
6. There is no free will.
7. Therefore, science is impossible. — RogueAI

Don't you believe you actually make choices? It seems absurd to deny this. The act of making choices and evaluating evidence could be described algorithmically, so it's consistent with determinism.

Reflect on a choice you made at some point in the past. Why did you make THAT choice instead of an alternative one? Clearly you had reasons for making the choice that you did. Is it possible that you could have landed on all those reasons and made a different choice? You arrived at those reasons after deliberating on your options, anticipating what would happen with each. The strength of various desires entered in. Maybe you overlooked some things, or failed to anticipate something. But given the series of thoughts and feelings that led to constructing the reasons for your decision, how could you have made a different one? With hindsight, you may have come to wish you'd made a different choice, but this hindsight constitutes knowledge you didn't have at the time, or an amount of self-control that you lacked at the time. If indeed no other option could have been selected after that exact deliberation, then your decision was determined by that deliberation.

.

I'm going to just drop this part of the discussion and recommend Peter van Inwagen's book "an Essay on Free Will". — RogueAI

I don't understand what Van Inwagen's argument has to do with what you are presenting here. Van Inwagen's argument is about the necessity of moral responsibility, and the incompatibility of that with determinism. It makes (as far as I recall) no mention whatsoever of judgement of correspondence with reality, which is what are required to make scientific decisions.

My point is an epistemological one: — RogueAI

This isn't an epistemic argument: "1. The ability to make choices is a necessary condition for the evaluation of evidence."

That's saying that if we can't really make choices, despite the fact that it seems as if we can, then we can't evaluate evidence/we can't do science.

Yet particular members of the human species have been engaged in what has been conventionally established as the doing of science from at least the early 1600’s. So either the human species hasn’t really been doing science at all, or your argument is junk because it’s conclusion is catastrophically false.

......Eenie meanie minee moe......

A necessary condition for doing any science is choosing/determining which evidence to believe and how much weight to give it. How do you do that without free will? Because without free will, you're simply compelled to believe that a particular piece of evidence supports a hypothesis. It might, it might not. — RogueAI

Free will is only there whether to choose reason and logical thinking or not. Beyond that, it's on automatic pilot.

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1. The ability to make choices is a necessary condition for the evaluation of evidence.
2. Evaluating evidence is a necessary condition for science.
3. Without the ability to make choices, evaluation of evidence is impossible.
4. If evaluation of evidence is impossible, science is impossible.
5. The universe is deterministic.
6. Therefore, the ability to make choices is impossible.
7. Therefore, science is impossible. — RogueAI

In the above, (1.) is wrong. (3.) is wrong. Therefore (7.) is a false conclusion, because it depends on (1.) and on (3.), among other things, for it to be true.

The ability to make choices is a necessary condition to set up details of experiments, for instance, but it is not a necessary condition to evaluate results. Evaluating results is straightforward.

The choices presented when making up an experiment will invariably result in one set up at a time, and one setup only. This feature accommodates the rigour of the deterministic world.

Evaluation of evidence is possible without making choices. It is actually pretty straightforward. If a result agrees with the hypotheses, or disagrees,is all one needs to observe. We don't decide whether it agrees or not; it is the data that satisfies the prediction of the hypotheses / theory or it dissatisfies it, which allows us or disallows us to draw conclusions from it.

I don't understand what Van Inwagen's argument has to do with what you are presenting here. Van Inwagen's argument is about the necessity of moral responsibility, and the incompatibility of that with determinism. It makes (as far as I recall) no mention whatsoever of judgement of correspondence with reality, which is what are required to make scientific decisions.

3.1 No Forking Paths Argument
The No Forking Paths argument (van Inwagen 1983; Fischer 1994; Ekstrom 2000) begins by appealing to the idea that whenever we make a choice we are doing (or think we are doing) something like what a traveler does when faced with a choice between different roads. The only roads the traveler is able to choose are roads which are a continuation of the road she is already on. By analogy, the only choices we are able to make are choices which are a continuation of the actual past and consistent with the laws of nature. If determinism is false, then making choices really is like this: one “road” (the past) behind us, two or more different “roads” (future actions consistent with the laws) in front of us. But if determinism is true, then our journey through life is like traveling (in one direction only) on a road which has no branches. There are other roads, leading to other destinations; if we could get to one of these other roads, we could reach a different destination. But we can’t get to any of these other roads from the road we are actually on. So if determinism is true, our actual future is our only possible future; we are never able to choose or do anything other than what we actually do.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-arguments/#TwoReasForThinFreeWillIncoDete

Intelligence, study, imagination, genetics, nurture, experience and more can make one good at something. Issac Asimov was good at a lot, but he declined credit, saying something like that he was a natural at it.

Fixed will is dynamic; it grows, as it must, to a better, wider fixed will every moment, to whatever degree.

Deep Blue chooses between two possible moves in a chess game. Everything about it is determined. Yet it still makes a choice, among the possible options, to castle or to check, to move the queen, or sacrifice the bishop. This is what Deep Blue is designed to do. Make choices. — StreetlightX

Deep Blue is designed to make choices based on logic applied to all possible moves and countermoves. I can make choices based only on logic, too. But I also make other choices based on ideology, cultural or historical significance, emotions, habit, etc. I can broaden my choices beyond logic based on alternative value systems.

I can also apply logic to adjust my habits, for instance, or apply cultural significance to improve the application of logic-based management systems. I can choose what evaluative system to base my choices on, or I can construct my own, evaluate its effect in relation to experiences/observations/measurements, and make adjustments for future applications. Of course, I can also choose NOT to be aware of the evaluative systems I apply to a choice, and allow it to be determined by my experience of past events with little to no conscious interaction. Such is my freedom.

Application of free will may not be a necessary condition for all science, but in my view it frees scientific endeavour from the ignorance of certain ideologies, and keeps logic-based evaluation systems from losing touch with the human experience.

Just printing out the argument isn't going to help and shows a complete unwillingness to engage. I'm familiar with Van Inwagen's argument, I don't need it repeated. What I don't understand is how it relates to your position. The no forking paths only means that whatever route we take in a deterministic universe, that was the only route. So it could easily be that the 'right' [what appeared to be]choices in an scientific investigation, were, in fact, the only route we could have taken. It's still the 'right' route. Nothing about the no forking paths argument prevents us from being on the 'right' path as far as scientific knowledge is concerned.

"We are never able to choose or do anything other than what we actually do".

There's alot of weird modal shit going in a statement like this. Take 'choose' out of it, and this becomes a tautology: "We are never able to do... other than what we actually do". But what would it mean to do otherwise than what we do? Say doing otherwise were 'possible'. And then you did otherwise. But then, you could not have done otherwise than that. So, no, obviously, you can't have done otherwise than what you did, or do. And the same considerations apply to statements like this:

"So if determinism is true, our actual future is our only possible future".

One can only say to this: of course our actual future is our only possible future. What other future could there be? Another possible future? But were that 'other' future 'actualized', that too would be an actual future. And that too would be the only possible future. So one has to wonder what the qualification 'if', in 'if determinism is true' is doing in a statement like this. I mean, what other state of affairs ought to hold? That other possible futures are... possible futures? Tautology again.

Conceiving the future in terms of "possibility" is where the root of the problem lies, but it suffices to point out the strangeness of the above statements for the moment.

How Do You Do Knitting Without Free Will?

1. The ability to make choices is a necessary condition for choosing what garment to knit.
2. Choosing which garment to knit next is a necessary condition for knitting.
3. Without free will there is no ability to make choices.
4. Without the ability to make choices, choosing which garment to knit next is impossible.
5. If choosing which garment to knit next is impossible, knitting is impossible.
6. There is no free will.
7. Therefore, knitting is impossible.

I brought up Inwagen because the person I was responding to wasn't getting what I was saying (I was making a point about choice being impossible in a deterministic universe due to lack of options).

Inwagen said it much better than I could.

RA, just a thought, would it make better sense to ask …"Can you do science without a strong sense of wonder"?

In other words, if we were to use logic, one could argue that a 'synthetic a priori' proposition is essential in science for moving the thought forward, as well as realizing the resulting discovery and uncovery of such things... ?

So I suppose the 'choice' to be curious or having a strong sense of wonder, along with being glass half-full to the spectrum of possibilities is some of what you are getting at... ?

RA, just a thought, would it make better sense to ask …"Can you do science without a strong sense of wonder"?

No, because I don't think a sense of wonder is a necessary condition for doing science. The ability to weigh/evaluate evidence is.

In other words, if we were to use logic, one could argue that a 'synthetic a priori' proposition is essential in science for moving the thought forward, as well as realizing the resulting discovery and uncovery of such things... ?

Are there any scientific synthetic a priori propositions?

So I suppose the 'choice' to be curious or having a strong sense of wonder, along with being glass half-full to the spectrum of possibilities is some of what you are getting at...

No, I was trying to show that science is impossible without the ability to freely choose, and since science is clearly moving forward, we have the ability to freely choose. From there, it's a short hop to "we have free will".

we have the ability to freely choose — RogueAI

We have the ability to sensibly choose, according to how much sense we have in our will. Some do it better; some worse; some are naturals; some struggle. We end up, hopefully, in professions we are good at.

1. The ability to make choices is a necessary condition for the evaluation of evidence.
2. Evaluating evidence is a necessary condition for science.
3. Without free will there is no ability to make choices.
4. Without the ability to make choices, evaluation of evidence is impossible.
5. If evaluation of evidence is impossible, science is impossible.
6. There is no free will.
7. Therefore, science is impossible. — RogueAI

I generally agree with this, most of the objections you've got stem from an interpretation of the word 'choice' different from yours (you're obviously referring to free choices here, which a deterministic machine isn't able to make).

However as someone mentioned, if people's actions were predetermined then it was also predetermined that what we call science would evolve the way it does, so science "moving forward" does not imply free will, however in order to believe in the absence of free will we have to leave plenty of coincidences unexplained.

in order to believe in the absence of free will we have to leave plenty of coincidences unexplained. — leo

Really? What coincidences can only be explained by free will.

7. Therefore, knitting is impossible. — EricH

The conclusion of course happens to be true, but the argument alas does not run. Never mind Deep Blue, we have programs that deterministically evaluate their own performance and modify themselves accordingly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaZero . Trial and error, evaluation, learning, improvement... what was it again that a deterministic mechanism cannot do? Freely choose? But it doesn't choose at all; science allows itself to be entirely determined by the facts. It follows a method that deterministically converges towards truth. Thought is not where freedom resides, because thought is itself mechanical. Freedom lies in awareness, and has nothing to do with choice.

Or it just seems that way and you are utterly determined to think it is so and to base this on utterly determined memories and utterly determined qualia such as the quale '[feeling] I have analyzed this correctly'.

There's certainly no reason that an utterly determined process couldn't be right. But a person who thinks their conclusions are utterly determined would always have to consider that the sense that those conclusions are right is utterly determined and not because they are.

Freedom lies in awareness, and has nothing to do with choice. — unenlightened

How more free must you be, Pinocchio, to yearn for more than the innocuous?
Good night, sweet prince, may your rights rest with the other real boys~

Or it just seems that way — Coben

Indeed, it would be foolish to take my word for it - find out for yourself.

From the POV of thought or of AlphaZero, as it were, it is necessarily the case that a decision cannot be determined in advance of the determination; decisions are always conditionals, and thus program branches. Running the program determines how the branches are navigated, the program itself does not choose.

The point I perhaps ineffectively was making was that as humans, in situ, finding out for ourselves must always be doubted if we believe in determinism. Since we may be determined to think our conclusions are correct. I was not arguing that I shouldn't just accept your authority.

A necessary condition for doing any science is choosing/determining which evidence to believe and how much weight to give it. How do you do that without free will? Because without free will, you're simply compelled to believe that a particular piece of evidence supports a hypothesis. It might, it might not. — RogueAI

I have wrestled with the idea of freewill for so long with zero results. From what I can see the issue is foundational to everything and yet no one has a definitive answer. A theory here and a a theory there but nothing conclusive or even vaguely satisfying.

I can see that choice is part of your argument and from what I've observed it's a key piece of the puzzle. Let's take a more general viewpoint and not just science. Are choices and the ability to make them really evidence of freewill.

We need to qualify choice with "free from influence". Thus qualified, free choice, its existence, can be used to prove freewill. This is where it gets difficult because we don't know how causation works physically or psychologically with regard to choice.

That said one thing worth mentioning is awareness has a big role in freewill. We've all had the experience where we resist our urges which I take as weak evidence for freewill and a requirement for this ability is that we must be aware of the influences that compel us to act in a certain way. If for a moment we let our guards down we're back to behaving like an animal - instinct driven and machine-like.

Humans have, for better or worse, a "more" evolved sense of awareness, specifically self-awareness, that allows for more self-control (freewill if you prefer). I guess we could say freewill is evolving which, sadly, the news channels clearly contradict.