Q&A: What do you think a deterministic world would look like?
What do you think a deterministic world would look like?
Question
If we imagine a world with the laws of physics identical to the laws in our world, but without free will.
What would it look like?
Morality would develop among human beings for evolutionary reasons, perhaps even an illusion of free choice among these “biological robots.”
So what would be different? Would reality look different?
A parallel question:
I heard you say that when we do something that goes against our scale of values, then in effect we are “asleep.” We let the body lead us and free will is asleep. How would a person behave whose free will was asleep all the time?
Answer
Well, good morning for remembering the Beatles again.
A. Your assumption that a consciousness of choice would develop is baseless. (That is actually a claim made by many determinists, but I don’t blame them—they’re compelled to it.) Beyond that, you assume that the same morality would also develop, and that too is baseless. Precisely because of this, it is hard to answer the question, since we have no way of distinguishing which of our actions are done out of choice and which out of nature. So we have no way of knowing what a world without choice would look like. (It would include only the actions we do without choice.) But in general, it seems it would be a fairly similar world. See columns 645–6.
B. That is not a parallel question but the same question. When a person is asleep, he does not activate his power of choice. Note that the claim is that when a person acts not according to his values, he is asleep; that does not mean that when he is asleep he always acts not according to his values.