Fatalism, Foreknowledge and Determinism

• [[problem of evil]]: How a perfect God would allow the level of suffering that exists in the world. One of the responses/defenses is that free will depends on human freedom etc.
• It leads naturally to questions about moral/criminal responsibility. At a certain level the issues are abstract but relate to very concrete issues.

• We don't always have that kind of freedom, stuck in a traffic jam, boulder on a path etc.
• We don't have to do what we do, we some times have alternative paths into the future. [[The Garden of Forking Paths]]
• Original interpretation of the story, but not anymore: the different paths are equally real: in some sense they're both realized.

• Posing an argument, if the chains were a certain way. Using the past as a constraint. Different senses of "can and can't" - the general ability.

Fatalism/logical determinism

• Comes from the word "fate", in what sense are we using the terms fate and fatalism as a threat to free will?
  • "Something will happen no matter what I do"
  • [[Daniel Dennett]]: pocket of local fatalism.
  • If you had done something different, something different would've happened but the argument is that you are not free to do something different in the first place.
  • [[Aristotle]]: can't change the past, therefore can't change the present. If there's nothing you can do about the past, then you have no choice about the future, etc. There is something fallacious about the inference. You need a necessity of all premises - the fact that you can't do something about the past and therefore about the future.
    • Aristotle denies that there are trues about the future. Given the freedom, it is true then, but does not follow that it is now true. Same thing with the past. Future propositions are not either true or false, but have some middle truth value.
      • Similar to Schrodinger's Cat.
  • If it really was true, then how can we do anything about it now? Intuitively we think we are free. Intuitively, we can do other than we think we can do.
  • It only appears that the first premise is true, that you have no choice about the "past fact". The fact that something was true in the past implicitly contains the present. The whole idea of truth doesn't really add to the statement if it is declarative. Something being true in the past is no different from the fact happening.
  • There's two different past statements: one that you can't do anything about, and one that depends on what happens in the future. Certain facts are dependent and therefore not fixed.
    • There are "hard facts", and "soft facts"

Divine foreknowledge/theological determinism

• Similar to fatalism, but adding a divine being having foreknowledge.
• The fixed past pertains to God having known exactly what we will choose and do, Gods having believed in the past that I would choose and do exactly what I chose and did. God knew a thousand years ago and therefore believed that now is true.
• Since the past is fixed, and I can't do anything given God's belief, it would follow that we can't do anything otherwise. God's belief entails that something is true/implies the future. This entails someone's present behaviour. God's belief behaves in the way facts do - in the way certain truths do.
• This gets generalized: if God is true and all-knowing and perfect, he will know everything that I will ever choose and do. Therefore, there is no garden of forking paths, though it might seem like there is.
• If P entails Q: if you accept P, then you have to accept Q by the laws of logic. [[Philosopher's Toolkit]]. Entailment implies a certain other thing based on the premise of one thing, in every situation. It's not something we should "believe" but it's something that is an inherent metaphysical logical property of the world.

Causal/physical determinism

• In principle, everything could be explained fully in terms of the past and the "laws of nature" (physics). Some people think science is indeterministic and other people think the other way - quantum mechanics.
• If causal determinism were true, real physical conditions/causal conditions in the past along with the laws of nature entail what I choose and what I do.
• Fixative view of the past is even stronger now. No choice about the past, have no choice about those physical conditions in the past and no choice over the laws of nature and therefore no choice about the present/future.