It's not playing with words, it is being precise in their use. I found your definition of choice to be broad enough to cover both choice and its opposite. A certain amount of precision is required in discussing abstractions or you end up including "A" and "not A" in the same term.
The problems you are having with insects and viruses are irrelevant to discussions about choice, since choice demands the ability to reason, and this faculty is only observed in higher forms of animal life. Certainly in the great apes, but arguably in some other animals too. Most animals operate at an instinctual level without any reasoning involved. And Deep Blue is just a program. No reasoning is being done by Deep Blue, especially since it has no consciousness or self-awareness.
A lot of your argument is based on the "fallacy of the beard": since one hair is not a beard, then is two? Three? Eventually the argument is made that beards can't exist since no one can define the precise number of hairs required to constitute a beard. It's a rather common logical error. Beards do exist, as do differences in the mental operations of various life-forms. So you still haven't uncovered any magic here, you have simply employed a common logical fallacy. It's hardly "a convenient out", it's basic logic, and can be found in most textbooks on the subject.
Buridan's Ass is an example of the reality of choice. The animal is stymied precisely because a choice is required and it refuses to make one. The irony of the parable could not be understood by us if we didn't know that we make choices.
>>But in the normal conventional sense of the word I do have a choice and that is obvious - but convention overlooks the tricky process of this pretend "choice". You know very well what I mean. So don't say I want to have choice but no choice.
"Convention" is just good old common sense in this argument. "The tricky process" is the story that you have to weave to try to make the Determinist Emperor appear to be clothed.
>>Okay how to test determinism...
A nice little paragraph follows mentioning quarks and gravitons, but nowhere does it describe a method for constructing a test of the Determinist Theory. No looking for omnipresent background radiation at 3 degrees Kelvin. No testing for Doppler shifts at the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum. No measurements of light in vacuum. Hmmm. But then Determinism is really just metaphysics, so there can be no empirical tests for it anyway, and the subatomic particles here are just serving as a distraction because you can't think of a Determinism test that uses them. Of course, no one else can either, so it's not surprising that you find yourself with all these particles and no way to use them. The problem is that you are mixing two different categories together, and physical science is of little use in what is basically an argument about epistemology. |
