Transcription
And there are obviously questions around free will because if there is no chooser and thoughts are just coming up then it's not like we are choosing necessarily for example torture on a mass scale or any of the the bad activity until we until we see it. So how much influence can we have anyway if reality and life is just unfolding and you know the egoic control that we seem to have is an illusion anyway.
Let me let's imagine that determinism is true. It may be true but let's pretend that it is just for the sake of argument because that's the extreme case that you're bringing up right that so let's address that worst case scenario because if determinism is not true then what we will discuss remains valid um it's the most testing case it's full determinism so let's assume it for the sake of argument um a computer I'm a computer engineer that was my first doctorate and it's still my professional life I just started a company doing AI hardware, doing chips. Uh it's been my life for almost three decades. Next to philosophy, philosophy is something imposed on me. I don't know where that came from. Uh no, by choice. When I turned 17, I went to university to study computer engineering.
A computer is a fully deterministic system. We know exactly what it will do under every circumstance except cosmic rays. But uh we designed the signal to noise ratio in such a way that even when cosmic rays affect the computer uh they will not change u the predict predictability of the computer. Um so every chip is deterministic. The computer as a whole is deterministic and it has many chips and the chips talk to one another. The outputs of one chip become inputs of another chip and the outputs of that chip become inputs to yet another chip whose outputs may even go back to the first chip. It's all an interconnected web of deterministic agents. Every chip is deterministic. They talk to one another deterministically. Therefore, the whole system is deterministic. But if one chip in that web stops producing outputs, the system stops working. Right? So the determinism of the system is not a reason for the chips to not do their task. They still have to do what they do. If they stop doing it, the system stops working even though it's completely deterministic.
So we as agents even if determinism is true and we too are deterministic agents we still have to play our role in the deterministic web. I still have to try to convince you that physicalism is false and idealism is true. I still have to ask you to play your moral role once you have seen the light because if you don't the system stops working even though it's by hypothesis uh deterministic. So even if what we choose we we do choose we always choose the question is could we choose different differently than we did and you could say no for as long as we are who we are we will choose as we choose but even in that case you still have to do your part and perhaps you will deterministically choose to do your part because I asked you to and my asking you was also deterministic and it we still have to go through that dance just like the chips in the computer still have to talk to one another, right? You see what I mean? Yes, I do. Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. You still have to say what I had to say. You still have to read what I had to what you had to read and you still have to do what you have to do afterwards. Yeah. Deterministic or not.
So the conclusion is determinism being true or not doesn't take our responsibility away. There is even a better reason for that. Um even if the universe is deterministic, it is not computationally reducible. In other words, we cannot predict what the universe will do because to do that would require a computer bigger and more complex than the universe. So the only way to know where the universe is deterministically going is to let it go there and find out. So again, it doesn't mean it doesn't matter at all if determinism is true or not because none of the conclusions will change. We will still not know where things are going until we get there and we still have to choose what we choose regardless. So the whole question of determinism is a non-starter. It does not matter. It does not matter for the meaning of your life. It does not matter for the choices you make, for the way you pick. You always have to make choices. Whether they are deterministic or not, doesn't matter. Not even God knows where this whole thing is going. Yeah. Because the universe is computationally irreducible. The only way the universe will know where it's going is for it to go there and get there. Only then it will find out that, oh, this was my deterministic destiny. The only way to find out is to go through the journey. You still have to go through the journey. You still have to do your thing. I still have to do my thing. And we still have to communicate. There is no way around it. So, you might as well forget it. The the whole question of determinism, you might as well forget it. It's irrelevant.