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Comment by randomgyatwork | Hacker News Reader

This isn't a philosophical debate, but consider something like physicalism rather than free will.... No point in getting into a debate about that, but if you believe in science then you kind of have to believe in determinism.

We aren't really special, we ONLY think we are, we are restricted to the same laws as all other animals over all of time. We THINK we are different and ACT differently, but the 'effects' will still come to our 'causes.'

Take a stoic perspective rather than a defeatist one on the deterministic nature of things and it stops being something to get angry about.

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You're telling me that this isn't a philosophical debate and then telling me a philosophical opinion.

Pragmatically, we make decisions. If a car is flying at you at high speed, stopping to think about determinism means you die instead of just jumping to the side and living.

your contribution here is literally null, que sera sera. Yes, the future is not ours to see, but guess what: that means it isn't set in stone.

case in point: heizenberg. measuring something by bouncing photons off it changes it's path. you can't know the future without changing it. thus we can change the future.

Not sure you understand determinism.

Both your examples are examples of deterministic responses.

Also, not knowing what the future will bring, doesn't mean that its not determined to a certain way.

thing is travelling along a pre-determined path.

we can determine it is following this path. but we want to measure it. so we do, and we change it's pre-determined path.

it still is and was always pre-determined. but it is not the same original determination.

I definitely understand determinism. Did you know there is soft and hard determinism?

I'm proving to you here that the future can be determined, but unknown. We can then seek to know it, and in doing so change it's path to another one that is just as determined.

to apply my point - yes, it is determined that the climate will change, temperature will drop and rise. claiming that current changes are a part of this natural change is to say that it was pre-determined, and we didn't do anything to change this.

your mistake is elucidated when you consider this analogy:

'the earth is going to be consumed by the sun eventually. so we shouldn't do anything to save our environment.'

The kind of future you're talking about is going to happen whether we like it or not. but it's SO FAR away. the changes in climate that you say are pre-determined are on a geological time-scale.

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