199 - Fallacy of Determinism

A recent discussion on ethics and philosophy got me thinking because although scientific evidence currently favors determinism, and subsequently I do, that favor is asymmetrical because determinism currently has an infection of fundamentally incompatible moral beliefs. Like HIV before it, this ideological pathogen has spread through a particular group and requires treatment.

The ideological pathogen is a fallacy that attempts to claim that if the universe is deterministic no reward or punishment "should" exist, as it claims that all entities are "innocent" of what they do, being helpless pawns for the universe. This is basically a warped version of far older concepts of "fate".

Of course, this claim is mutually exclusive with concepts of agency and rights, and claiming that "guilt" is impossible highlights a fundamental misunderstanding of what is being discussed. Also note that the fallacy relies on a claim of "should", not "does", or even "can", since what it proposes is fundamentally incompatible with humans, and all other forms of intelligent animal life yet studied.

As I've discussed in a previous thought experiment, guilt, or "ethical debt" (negative ethical value), is a product of actions and responsibilities. Neither beliefs nor intentions matter in the slightest when determining guilt, but rather they may be useful for predicting individual risks, as they govern motivation, not actions and consequences. How deterministic the universe is or is not is also entirely orthogonal to this.

What the fallacy neglects in particular is the consideration of population dynamics over time, the process by which all life has evolved, and with which humanity is consequently compatible. If a Tech Bro who behaves like Bernie Madoff is made to pay for his crimes in full, and tortured for billions of years (indefinite life extension technology allowing), then that can have a profound impact on the rest of the population as a strong deterrent against more such individuals emerging.

Besides being collectively incompatible at the level of population dynamics, humanity, and intelligent animal life are also fundamentally incompatible with any system lacking reward and punishment at the individual level. The classical theory of rational humans is long dead and buried, but some adjacent domains still like to play Weekend at Bernie's with its corpse, pretending that humans can function as logical systems without the need for reward and punishment.

This is of course incompatible with the entire mountain of cognitive bias research and modern neuroscience since the human motivational system is built on emotions, which allow humans to fluidly and dynamically utilize a vast array of cognitive biases, which in turn allow us to handle arbitrary levels of complexity arbitrarily well or poorly as complexity is traded off for cognitive biases.

To those caught in the fallacy, I say "I wish you would step back from that ledge my friend..."