Okay so I've fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole as of late and discovered something that I feel could add a bit of context to Jevil and some of his dialogue. Now this will be a bit complicated, but I'll try to explain this as simply as I can. Sorry if this gets a bit long though.
It's clear at this point that Deltarune plays with the idea of free will, choice, and one's fate being chosen for them, i.e. "Your choices don't matter". This is actually a topic discussed heavily in philosophy. The focal point of the conversation is often the question "If someone's actions are already pre-determined by the universe, God, etc (An idea called Determinism), do they actually have free will?" This question gives rise to two groups: "Incompatibilists", who feel that free will is impossible in a deterministic universe, and "compatibilists", who believe that it is still possible.
We will be talking a bit about both of these here, though we'll focus on compatibilism as I feel it may relate to Jevil.
The core argument of incompatibilism is the "Principle of Alternate Possibilities", or PAP. This principle relies on three things to be true:
1: Someone is only responsible for a choice if could have chosen otherwise.
2: Someone could have chosen otherwise if determinism is false.
3: Therefore, someone is responsible for their actions only if determinism is false.
The PAP assumes all of the above points are true, and this is crucial for incompatibilism. However, compatibilism has one argument, known as Frankfurt cases that refutes the first point and suggests that someone could make a choice freely even if they could not have chosen otherwise. Let's use an example to illustrate this in case you're lost.
Two people, A and B, have to make a choice between two things, Choice 1 and Choice 2.
A and B both have a device implanted in their brains. If either of these two people attempt to make Choice 1, the device will activate, forcing them to make Choice 2. If they make choice 2 voluntarily, the device will not activate and they will not be forced into anything.
If Person A makes Choice 2 voluntarily, without being forced, they would be making that decision of their own free will, despite not having the option of making Choice 1 instead. If Person B attempts to make Choice 1 but is forced to make Choice 2, they have lost their free will in this scenario. In this case, Person A would have more free will than Person B, as they were not forced.
Now I k
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I had always found something not entirely compelling about Frankfurt cases, but I couldn't pinpoint my problem. Then I found this accusation directed towards Frankfurt cases:
"Here, after all, is the classic Frankfurt case set-up. We are supposed to (A) imagine a person making a choice P, and then (B) imagine a mechanism which, if the person tried to make some alternative choice Q, would force the person to instead choose P."
"Here is the problem. Frankfurt cases are strongly disanalogous to physical determinism. In a Frankfurt case, the person's action is not determined by any actual physical laws. The sense in which the person "cannot do otherwise" is entirely counterfactual. It is that if they tried to choose otherwise, someone (or some mechanism) would step in and ensure that they don't succeed. But this "trying" isn't even possible under physical determinism. It's not the case that if I tried to behave otherwise than I do, physical laws would step in and stop me. It's that I can't even try to behave otherwise if physical determinism is true (it is not a physical possibility). This, then, is the problem with Frankfurt cases. They push certain intuitions -- that we can be morally responsible for our actions even if we couldn't do otherwise -- because, contrary to determinism, they smuggle in libertarian intuitions. They do this because alternative possibilities are only ruled out counterfactually. For all Frankfurt cases show, the reason why we judge a person free and responsible in those cases is that (A) we judge the person had libertarian free will to make the choice (they caused their action independently of physical laws), but (B) alternative possibilities are counterfactually ruled out because, if they libertarian-ly tried to choose something else, some mechanism would force them to behave the same way."
Source: https://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2013/06/trouble-with-compatibilism.html
Is that accusation accurate?
Here, on his podcast, and in debates, Craig has made the claim that, due to Frankfurt cases, Libertarian Free Will is compatible with an inability to do otherwise (aka rejecting* the principle of alternative possibilities, or PAP).
Whenever Iβve heard Frankfurt cases used by other philosophers, theyβre used to show that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism, denying the PAP for moral responsibility. But Craig uses them to say that Libertarian Free Will stands without the PAP. He acknowledges that LFW is inherently incompatible with causal determinism, but does it not inherently entail the possibility of having done otherwise? It seems to me that the inability to do otherwise just is what is meant by causal determinism.
Thanks in advance.
So, I read this news story a while ago about an Iranian businessman traveling around the world.
He traveled to South Korea a few years ago, and brought his son with him. His son converted from Islam to Catholicism when he was an elementary student, following his friends to a local church. A few years later, he converted his dad too.
They started to fear that they might be convicted of apostasy when they get back, (which is punishable by death in Iran) they pleaded refugee status under religious persecution criteria.
The court evaluated his plea, and the district court found the plea to be valid, but the superior courts rejected it.
The judges said that although the father said he converted to Catholicism, the times he went to church were few and far between, and the 14yo son seems too young to have a serious religious conviction nor there were any extraordinary occasions where he demonstrated his faith.
Now, I thought this was a total bullcrap.
Are these people seriously counting how many times he and his son went to church, or how vocal and visible they were at their local church events to decide whether or not to send them to a land where they will potentially face public execution?
What if they pleaded as atheists? or Hindus where they decided that praying to a sculpture in their house was okay enough? Well, what if they just claimed they changed their mind and they don't really have a strong faith in Jesus, but they still don't believe in Islam so they will be just as convictable?
Whatever their level of devotion to whatever their new religion is, it shouldn't be the judges' damn concern.
They left Islam, they faced persecution for that, that's violation of freedom of religion with a violent threat which Korea is supposedly to protect against. End of story.
If they were to lose again in their re-evaluation plea, they were likely to be deported. Luckily, maybe because of all the media coverage and the protest from the son's school friends, in 2018, they got their win.
So I got on my soapbox and told a friend of mine that I even think that they should be protected and be allowed to live in Korea if they were still Muslims and claimed
"Hey, we both still strongly identify ourselves as Muslims very much, but I think our freedom to abandon our faith anytime in the future will be violated in Iran. Can we live here?"
to which he replied, "That's just ridiculous.", "So, you mean let literally everybody in?"
When I thought about it, that actuall
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So Frankfurt cases typically have a scientist implanting a chip in someone's brain that the scientist will only activate if the person does not choose choice A. The person then goes to choose choice A without the scientist needing to activate the chip
However, if determinism is true, would not the chip be activated from the start? Wouldn't a proper analogy be that the scientist activates the chip, then the person chooses choice A?
