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cousin_it comments on Two straw men fighting - Less Wrong
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Indeterminism can accommodate "alternate possibilities", but it cannot accommodate meaningful choice between them. As Eliezer said:
Also, starting from "extreme determinism" has been very intellectually fruitful for me. As far as I know, the mathematical part of my comment above (esp. the second to last paragraph) is new - no philosopher had generated it before. If I'm mistaken and your words about it being "not news" have any substance, please give a reference.
"Some patches of determinsim" is perfectly compatible with "some patches of indeterminism". We need more-or-less determinism to carry out decisions, but that does not mean it is required to make them.
The second part of EY;s comment is too vague. If I am being controlled by "physics" outside my body, I am un-free. I am not unconditionally free just because I am physical.
That sounds inconsistent. What's the relevant difference between the two activities? They look like the same sort of activity to me. Both require making certain things correlate with other things, which is what determinism does. (Carrying out a course of action introduces a correlation between your decision and the outside world; choosing a course of action introduces a correlation between your prior values and your decision.)
The difference is that if we tried to carry out decisions indeterministically, we wouldn't get the results we wanted; and if we made decisions determistically, there would be no real choice.
It's a two stage model
I don't understand this statement. Isn't it drawing factual conclusions about the universe based on what sort of choice some philosophers wish to have? Or do you trust the subjective feeling that you have "real choice" without examining it? Both options seem unsatisfactory...
Determinism does not enforce rationality. There are more choices than choices about what to believe. Since naive realism is false, we need to freely and creatively generate hypotheses before testing them.
The part of your mind that generates hypotheses is no less deterministic than the part that tests them. (It's not as if they used different types of neurons!) The only difference is that you don't have conscious access to the process that generates hypotheses, so it looks mysterious and you complete the pattern that mysterious=indeterministic. But even though you can't introspect that part of yourself, you can still influence what options it will offer you, e.g. by priming.
Maybe the two stages are in a time domain, not a space domain.
The "it only seems indeterministic" story is one of a number of stories. It is not a fact. My central point is that to arrive at The Answer, all alternatives have to be considered.
I was mostly trying to argue against the point that human minds need indeterminism to work as they do. Do you now agree that's wrong?
It's not wrong, and it;'s not intended as a mirror-image of the LW official dogma. It's a suggestion. I cannot possibly say it is The Answer, since, for one thing, I don't know if indeterminsim is actually the case. So my central point remains: the solution space remains unexplored, and what I put forward is an example of a neglected possibillity