Talk:Hard determinism

"A bleak outlook"?
I think this part, if it is needed, should be revised and renamed to something more neutral, like "psychological effects of hard determinism".83.251.160.139 (talk) 11:10, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Great suggestion. And actually that title will be importantly neutral when I add more empirical research (good or bad) to that section.- Tesseract2 (talk) 15:05, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Tone
The tone and POV of this piece wheels back and forth and has a convoluted chain of logic. Also references to hard determinist thinkers should be general or gender neutral, not "she".

Jpuglionesi (talk) 02:26, 6 October 2010 (UTC)


 * I agree if "she" is distracting and general/neutral pronouns are preferred. As far as POV, maybe lay me down some tags in the spots that need the most attention - I know I will take a look when I can-Tesseract2 (talk) 07:07, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

"that a person's actions can still help shape that future"? But hard determinism (according to this article) doesn't regard the future as a variable that can be shaped at all. Furthermore, the concept of the future, as distinct from the past, makes sense only in the context of presentism, and hard determinism (according to this article) doesn't allow even the weakest form of presentism. Collin237 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.203.79.115 (talk) 01:36, 13 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I am not sure I agree that "present" needs to be used in the sense that believers in Presentism (philosophy of time) use it. I believe the hard determinist would tend to use "present" in an Eternalist sense. - Tesseract2 (talk) 20:58, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

General disatisfaction
This is an incredibly poorly written article. It looks like a long essay of original research and the tone is heavily biased against the subject matter. If there's going to be an article on hard determinism on Wikipedia, it should start from scratch. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 196.214.75.198 (talk) 21:09, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

I rarely see a worse written article on wikipedia... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.169.7.168 (talk) 19:40, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

New expansions give this page more to say. I will move a lot of the info from the ethics section to moral responsibility, and whatever I keep I will try to make sure it is sourced.- Tesseract2 (talk) 19:04, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

I find the so-called "Overview" almost literally unintelligible. Given that heading, I had hoped for some skerrick by way of an introduction, to start. Instead readers must plunge into four bluntly dense (referenced) sources. I observe that this content now seems to stand dated some ten years past? (I have not tried tracking past author(s)-history of "Overview".) Vague thanks to Tesseract2. 106.69.217.57 (talk) 02:47, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

Neutrality tag
So who would like to discuss any parts where neutrality may be lacking? If there are no immediate issues remaining, I will remove the tag. Otherwise, the article only stands to gain from discussion.- Tesseract2 (talk) 21:01, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Bi-directional Determinism?
Near the start of the overview section, it says:

"Just as the initial conditions of the universe presumably determine all future states, so too does the present necessitate the past."

This doesn't make sense to me. A system can be completely deterministic without a present state necessitating a certain previous state. As an example, consider a system with 3 states: A, B, C. Now let's also say that the system evolves in steps, at each step A->C, B->C, C->A, for example you could have: ACACACAC..., or BCACACACAC... . This system is 100% deterministic, and yet if the current state is C, the previous state could have been A or B.

Does this make sense to anyone else? I think this needs to be modified, though looking at the other comments and briefly at the article this may be rather trivial in the face of a large-scale rewrite.

Mozza314 (talk) 13:34, 6 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Good question. Unfortunately Hoefer's article on S.E.P. seems to take bi-directionality of determinism for granted. He seems to suggest that this is not a contentious topic among most philosophers. More research might be in order?


 * I wonder, though. With determinism we seem to be talking about entire states of reality. Can we really imagine that reality state "A" could lead to reality state "C", but so too could reality state "B" lead to that same state "C"? That is, can those two instances of "all reality C" be truly identical - in every fact - after two different origins (and mind you, without being nested in some more global system, from which we can derive elements to cancel out A and B's differences)? Alternative histories would seem difficult if every fact has some non-zero amount of influence on things.


 * This is quickly becoming a bigger and bigger question. Maybe there are ways A could be poised to negate it's differences from B and result in an identical universe C; A and B would then be non-identical even though they result in the same next state of reality. But could that ever be possible, again, given that any minor influence from the differences present in A would impact the rest of reality more and more as time goes on? And is conceiving of all this any easier at certain times (e.g. the beginning of a universe - when things are perhaps simpler)?


 * Or maybe A and B are different in some way that is irrelevant to the progress of that reality. But then we are denying that every fact has some non-zero influence. What facts could ever be truly irrelevant to the movement of the universe? The brief appearance of a ghost would still seem to effect something.


 * I dunno. Thoughts? I will not try brainstorm regarding our other options upon introducing merely "determined probabilities" - like the ones described by some quantum physics. The question remains whether determinism can be true going forward, but not backward (as Hoefer has taken for granted).- Tesseract2 (talk) 20:03, 6 July 2011 (UTC)