RE: Why we don't have the controversial kind of free will, why it's okay, and why it's important - part 2 of 2

Thanks for your response! And you're right, I didn't read you so charitably - it was too easy to lump you in with many of my students, who are often explicitly wishful thinkers when it comes to the conclusion we have no free will. Instead you are making a substantive claim: that life is meaningless if there is no free will.

But first, even if that's true, is that reason to reject the claim that we have no free will? It sounds like you are reasoning from the claim that "life would be meaningless if that's true" to "that therefore can't be true", which is why the "life is meaningless" objection can sound like wishful thinking.

Second, is it true that life is meaningless without free will? You say

It is most certainly true that there can be no actual meaning to any part of reality in a determined universe.

"Certain" means roughly "unable to be doubted." But I don't think this is certain because I doubt it - in fact I actively believe otherwise, and for the reasons I gave in my post. And since I doubt it, and I don't seem to be a total blithering idiot, doesn't this give you some tiny reason to doubt it too? And if you'll pardon me, are you really sure you believe this? If you found out you were the robot in the story above (I suppose you admit this as an epistemic possibility?), would you really be indifferent to whether they turned you off and dismantled you for parts? Or is that the wrong criterion for whether life is meaningful? If so, why?

Meanwhile you basically claim that life would be meaningless if determinism is true, but I'm not clear what your argument for that claim is. You say that

in a determined universe everything you have written ends up being an absurdity. Persuasion, moral responsibility, using words like "should" and "ought" or "deserved" or "earned" are bereft of any meaning. All things just ARE, all the time and they could not be any other way.

Let's take these things you list in parts.

• "Deserved" and "earned" I have granted do not exist (in the deep sense anyway). But does this make life meaningless? Why?
• I have also granted there is no true moral responsibility (in Strawson's words). But there is clearly moral responsibility in that if you stab people, that is a bad result, and I hold you responsible by taking your knives away etc. So this kind of purely consequentialist moral responsibility survives, right? And anyway if there's no true moral responsibility, why does that make life meaningless?
• Persuasion? Why doesn't that exist? Can't I cause you to believe something, or vice versa, in a deterministic world? Or do you mean something more mysterious by "persuasion"?
• "Should" and "ought" are on this view derivative of "good". Even if all choices are determined, there are bad states of affairs and good states of affairs. And while we're reasoning about what to do (as determined by past causes, we suppose) some of those causes can be what we now evaluate as good outcomes. ("Determined choice" is not a contradiction in terms, incidentally, at least in my book - if we are fully determined we can still choose the same way AlphaGo chooses its next move.)

I do not know any of Nancy Pearcy's work, but this excerpt seems to claim that scientific naturalism is less explanatory than the alternative - which, I take it, is to posit supernatural magic and miracles to "explain" the world. I hardly know what to make of that claim, since we obviously use the world 'explanation' in radically different ways. If I ask you how something works and you tell me "special clock magic", I think you have given me zero explanation for how the clock works.

But again - as I keep repeating in comments, so I clearly should have made it clearer in my posts - determinism, materialism, and naturalism are all red herrings. I do not think it has been "discovered" by science that we have no free will. As Peter van Inwagen argues, this same problem would apply to immaterial angels. It has nothing to do with the laws of physics at the end of the day. I am actually quite sympathetic to information-theoretic interpretations of reality - maybe more sympathetic than 99% of my peers. (I am very surprised to hear it's the "consensus position" in physics, but I couldn't speak to that myself.) But I think that has nothing to do with free will. And I certainly don't think that information-theoretic physics falsifies materialism. I just think it might be that matter is made out of information (whatever that might mean) at the bottom, rather than strings or fermions and bosons.

I can anticipate that we won't settle this here, so whoever gets to the bottom of the "reply" chain first, we can assume has not run out of things to say ... but I am at any rate curious about your response.