Jack comments on Freewill vs. Determinism - Less Wrong

-5 [deleted] 05 October 2011 04:41PM

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Comment author: Jack 06 October 2011 12:58:26AM 5 points [-]

I think the comments in reply to this are a really good illustration of how starting a discussion off with confused, unstudied and otherwise poorly framed arguments can doom the entire conversation. It's like there is a conservation of comment quality- where a reply to a post can never be more than twice as insightful as the OP. Given a sufficiently low quality post any comment that directly engages with it is also low quality.

Comment author: [deleted] 14 June 2014 05:48:48AM -2 points [-]

Agreed, the term determinism is being used in a very non-standard way here.

"a theory is deterministic if, and only if, given its state variables for some initial period, the theory logically determines a unique set of values for those variables for any other period."[10]
—Ernest Nagel, Alternative descriptions of physical state''