Choice is the freedom to choose. An action that is merely the result of accumulated cause and effect is NOT choice. Calling determinism "choice that is not random" is just double-speak. ("Integrating all the input variables, our experience and reacting it with our DNA drives and out comes, hey presto, something we CALL choice, but is just the output of a cause and effect process in our tiny little brains.") Except I DON'T call that choice. I call it the determinist religion. Choice is freedom, and my worldview recognizes that freedom exists in nature.
Your belief system does not acknowledge freedom. It can't, because you think everything is determined. However, you ought to ask yourself whether your thoughts on this very subject are free or not. Do you choose to think about determinism? Can you dismiss thoughts and move on to something else? Because if you do, then this very freedom will erode the edifice you have constructed. My "religionist story" doesn't believe in magic, as you like to say it does. It simply recognizes freedom, which your mechanistic religion doesn't. Everyone has to ask themselves which vision accords with reality when they are choosing which vision is true.
And you still haven't offered up a way to test your Determinist Theory. I say you won't be able to construct a test, because unlike the laws of physics, Determinism is not science. It is philosophy, or even metaphysics, just like other religions. "My sweet little fantasy could be falsified by demonstrating a non-causal relationship anywhere in the system." And also by demonstrating that people make choices. Of course, Determinism then sets up an un-falsifiable paradigm by arguing that any choice, even one that goes against self-interest or self-preservation, is always predetermined. Like parlor Marxism, there is no way out of the box invented to keep the belief system safe from reality-testing. Except that people recognize that they do in fact choose, and the determinist paradigm is overthrown just like Hume's radical skepticism is: by the intuitive recognition that we really exist, and are acting agents that affect the world around us by the choices we make. The error of Determinism, like the error of Skepticism, is that both systems are incomplete and have truncated visions of reality. |
