https://www.reddit.com/r/freewill/comments/1ewpuvo/the_difference_between_causality_and_determinism/
created by diogenesthehopeful on 20/08/2024 at 07:53 UTC*
0 upvotes, 9 top-level comments (showing 9)
Some people would rather conflate the two and be done with it. However free will implies that we make choices and we have limited control over the choices we make. Assuming there is a lack of free will, people are compelled examine the difference between causality and determinism or compelled to ignore the difference. That means you could stop reading here and now and it wouldn't be your fault for stopping.
Assuming you were compelled to continue to read below the dotted line or you freely chose to do so, some where around the turn of the 20^(th) century, a man by the name of John McTaggart wrote a paper about the unreality of time. For those of you that got this far because you believe determinism is true, it may be noteworthy to recognize that the paper was chronologically after Einstein put out his paper about the special theory of relativity (SR), but before Heisenberg was given a Nobel Prize for quantum mechanics (QM). Again I emphasize the word noteworthy is not to be misconstrued with implying it is necessarily relevant.
The point is that determinism is an orthodoxy.
I learned about the "dichotomy" between the A and B series years before I even heard about the C series. I didn't do my homework and should have read McTaggart's paper as soon as I realized it might be relevant but for some reason I chose not to read for years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.%5C_M.%5C_E.%5C_McTaggart#McTaggart%27s%5C_paradox[1][2]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.%5C_M.%5C_E.%5C_McTaggart#McTaggart%27s%5C_paradox
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._M._E._McTaggart#McTaggart%27s_paradox
According to my understanding of this topic, causality is following McTaggart's C Series of time. In contrast if you believe determinism is true then you necessarily agree with what McTaggart called the A series. Therefore I believe the people who conflate causality and determinism necessarily conflate McTaggart's idea of an A series and a C series. I've stated repeatedly (and I've been told what I post gets old), and I'll continue to say what I say until it is refuted, at which time I'll say what is better: **Determinism puts time and space constraints on causality that wouldn't otherwise necessarily be there if we weren't assuming some things that science is proving over and over are not safe to assume.** The A series is temporal and McTaggart had a problem with temporal order. If you've gotten this far and you doubt what I say, I'll even help you refute me:
https://philpapers.org/archive/MCTTUO.pdf[3][4]
3: https://philpapers.org/archive/MCTTUO.pdf
4: https://philpapers.org/archive/MCTTUO.pdf
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/mctaggart/[5][6]
5: https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/mctaggart/
6: https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/mctaggart/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mctaggart/#UnrTim[7][8]
7: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mctaggart/#UnrTim
8: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mctaggart/#UnrTim
or you can wait years to read this as I chose to do in the "past".
Edit: 100 + replies now and nobody except Marvin's half hearted attempt to blow off the relevancy of McTaggart seems to imply the bulk of the posters didn't bother to read below the dotted line.
Comment by Ok-Cheetah-3497 at 20/08/2024 at 13:52 UTC
5 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Interesting. I am a determinist, and I am very much not a believer in A-series. B-series seems fine, and C-series is probably more accurate. You do not need a directionality of time to have a "connectivity" which is really what causation means. Things are inextricably linked -we just don't generally worry about whether something is a cause or effect, because we experience time in only one direction. If we experienced it the other way, we would flip the way we use those words, and if we experienced it from an external point of view, we would not separate causes from effects. B-series is just the more practical way to think about it for most purposes.
Comment by Squierrel at 20/08/2024 at 10:03 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Determinism is just causality with infinite precision.
Comment by zowhat at 20/08/2024 at 15:41 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
And yet time is real, unlike the dotted line in your post.
Comment by mildmys at 20/08/2024 at 08:09 UTC
1 upvotes, 7 direct replies
The alternative to your choices being determined is that they are random.
Neither leads to free will.
Comment by MarvinBEdwards01 at 20/08/2024 at 11:24 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Causal determinism, which is the strong case for determinism, can be effectively defended. But most of the assumptions that people have made about what causal determinism actually implies, are false.
Free will is a question of who or what is doing the causing when we choose to do one thing rather than another. Obviously this ordinary notion of free will is also concerned with causation.
While your intention to educate us as to this McTaggart's opinions of these matters is well meant, I'm going to assume that he is not adding anything that I've not already dealt with from others. So, if McTaggart wants to discuss his ideas here, then he'd certainly be welcome, but I don't want to waste my time seeking him out.
If you have already read those resources you listed, then by all means, feel free to explain what you think he means to say. But if you've read those resources and are unable to defend McTaggart yourself, then the only benefit of my reading them would be to explain them to you. And that would be unfair to me.
Comment by spgrk at 20/08/2024 at 09:34 UTC
1 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Determinism and causality do not need time and space at all. The world we live in could be a series of simulated time slices on multiple parallel computers, and we wouldn’t know it.
Comment by Pretend_Performer780 at 20/08/2024 at 17:06 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The difference between causality and determinism
Phft It's not complicated.
Causality (of effect) is what defines determinism.
Comment by LokiJesus at 20/08/2024 at 19:42 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Determinism is a consequence of locality. This is a major conclusion that Einstein and others arrive at. It's a deep requirement of relativity. Part of this is that we cannot agree on the simultaneity of events, so this puts a deep critique on the concept of "now" as a discrete and universal concept. For every "free choice" you're going to make, that action is already part of someone else's past in some other reference frame. A-series (which free will requires) is incompatible with the fact that the speed of light is constant in all inertial reference frames. This is a major issue for free will believers.
I'm more on the side of block cosmology... eternalism. The whole universe being a 4D block of spacetime that is "there" both in past an present and future. It sounds like it's more in line with his B-series of time stuff. I think I've heard it called that. Again the language on this is all wonkey. McTaggart and others seem to claim that block cosmology (a 4D block of spacetime) means that the past-present-future are fixed.. static.. not flowing as we normally experience it.
But static and flowing are "time words." There IS variability in the time dimension of the block just like if you move in a spatial dimension there is variability in space. "Flow" and "dynamic" are like the word "hilly" or "jagged" when describing a landscape in space. "Then" and "now" for time coordinates are like "there" and "here" in space coordinates. The idea that the future is "fixed" is nonsense in a B-series interpretation and I think that this is a hole in McTaggart's take.
It's also an inconsistency in LFW interpretations of determinism. It's the core reason that people fall into fatalism. They think that the future is "fixed" independent of what they do. But that's not what relativistic eternalism says. The future is "there" (actually "then") but the word "unchanging" or "fixed" has no application here. "Fixed" is a word used to describe a temporal trajectory. If a plate stays for some period on a table top, it is "fixed" there in time. The notion that I wave a plate around in the air and place it on a table is a description of something dynamic and changing. The fact that at a certain time coordinate in block spacetime, a plate is at a given coordinate is not "fixed." To get that, you have to invoke a fifth temporal dimension in which the time coordinate could change. There's no evidence for that.
Locality demands determinism. Locality is a requirement of relativity. Here's Maudlin[1] on Bell on this point from his understanding of EPR. B-series is more consistent with block cosmology that seems to be demanded by locality. It just makes libertarian free will a non-starter.
1: https://youtu.be/mRT5zXAwvBs?t=8622
And it's totally consistent with our experience. Take the 4D block and ask what the person is experiencing in a slice of time. They experience memories of the past up to that point and not of the future. Every slice of the block feels like now. That's why it always feels like now.
Comment by [deleted] at 20/08/2024 at 10:57 UTC
0 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Determinism by itself makes sense and is compatable with free will (to an extant I.E, compatibilism). But hard determinism makes a quantum leap of faith by claiming that everything was pre determined by the big bang. The idea that everything was pre determined by the big bang pre supposes that there is no spiritual realm to life and that everything has been figured out by basic Newtonian physics including the birth of the singularity itself which was infinitely dense and came from nothing.