There's an article about some work by experimental philosophers in the New York Times on 3QuarksDaily. It's one of the usual suspects: do we have moral responsibility in a deterministic universe? Apparently if you ask a lot of people, they will say 'no' if it's about the abstract question, 'no' if it's about cheating on taxes, but seventy per cent will say 'yes' if you're going to kill your wife so you can live with your secretary. I'm not sure what this proves, except that a lot of people aren't very good at conceptual thinking, which we already kinda knew.
Anyway, I found myself muttering, the trick is in the question. If it's a determinist universe, it can't have human beings in it. Because human beings have free will. It's not up to me to prove that free will or moral responsibility makes sense in a determinist universe, because they don't, but then neither does the concept of human being make sense in a determinist universe. It's for the determinist to construct a concept of a human being without free will that we recognise as human.
Because what does anyone mean by "determinist"? What it can't mean is that "living beings have no free will" because then the whole thing dissolves into a tautology. However, I think that's exactly what ordinary people and a lot of philosophers do mean. There's Laplace's idea of the Universe as a giant clockwork mechanism, which amounts to saying that the solutions to the equations of motion of any given ensemble of particles are given by analytic functions (which are identical with their Taylor series and therefore can be calculated at any point when it is known at one). You can only prove that if the True Equations of Motion only have solutions in analytic functions, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you can't do that for a set of equations of motion consistent with the current known laws of physics.
I'm going to say this: the determinist can't provide a coherent account of what a morality-negating, free-will removing "determinism" might be, without making free will depend on ghosts, spirits and immaterial consciousness to provide free will. In other words, they can't equate "determinist" with "material" and then claim free will is ruled out by the material bit. They have to explain how there can be free will in a material universe (or how even spooky stuff is determined) and then how that kind of universe is ruled out.
Like CJ Craig says: deny the assumption in the question.
As for "experimental philosophy" - stayed tuned
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