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What evidence directly supports the concept of "deterministic history"? What testable predictions does the concept of "deterministic history" allow one to make?
It seems obvious to me that "deterministic history" is not a falsifiable, testable concept, but rather an axiom. People believe in determinism and deterministic history because doing otherwise would be incompatible with their axioms. Determinism has been used to make testable predictions for many decades, and all those predictions have been falsified. All the evidence we have available to us directly contradicts determinism, none of the evidence we have directly supports it. Each of us has a lifetime's immediate, personal experience of Will, of making free choices moment to moment, of making decisions and struggling to choose one thing versus another. All of this evidence is simply handwaved by Determinism, not based on contrary evidence, of which there is none, but because if it is not handwaved Materialism is invalidated.
And all this is fair enough; axiomatic reasoning is the only reasoning we have available to us. The problem comes when people act as though their axioms are obviously evidence-based, when they are not.
This is a really interesting question. Is determinism falsifiable? that kind of feels like asking if trigonometry is falsifiable. Determinism is more theorem than theory, an exercise in hard logic rather than empirical data gathering. I think almost everyone would agree that the universe moves according to causality; that A leads to B leads to C, in a reliable, repeatable, (one might say deterministic) way. Determinism is merely the philosophy that you can extend that thinking from 'every part of the universe excepting the human brain' to 'every part of the universe'. In a dead universe, we would all be determinists.
I mean, what does the null hypothesis for determinism even look like? That causality is not true? That today we might mix 8 grams of oxygen and 1 gram of hydrogen and receive 9 grams of water, but tomorrow we might receive 15 grams? or that yesterday's water might spontaneously dissociate back into hydrogen and oxygen? Or perhaps into neon and feathers? Empiricism, the entire scientific method, is based on the truth of causality. If causality is false we have to throw pretty much everything out and just accept that we're all living in Plato's cave.
Or perhaps the null hypothesis is that causality is true everywhere... except the human brain. Not much of a null hypothesis, is it? Really feels like, if that's your theory, then determinism ought to be your null hypothesis.
Materialists generally claim that their viewpoint is simply the default, that there's zero evidence for anything non-Materialistic, and so they simply follow where the evidence leads.
Determinism is adopted because non-deterministic free will would pretty clearly break Materialism.
The problem is that there is precisely zero actual evidence for determinism itself, and there is an absolutely staggering amount of evidence for non-deterministic free will.
Every human has an entire lifetime's experience of making choices freely. No one has ever demonstrated actual deterministic control over the human will, in any way, to any degree, ever, despite repeated claims that such control was trivial and extremely-well-resourced and -motivated efforts to implement or demonstrate such control.
Despite this, Materialists routinely reject all evidence of free will on the basis of a determinism-of-the-gaps, having retreated from "we can directly, repeatably and arbitrarily engineer human will to our preferences" to "whatever you do was what you were always going to do, even if we can't predict it or control it or test this claim in any way". Determinism has been tested, and has failed all tests. After decades of steady retreat, the current version makes no testable predictions at all, but is precisely a statement of blind faith.
Observable free will is significant evidence that Materialism is wrong. But no human belief arises deterministically, and every human belief is chosen through an act of the will. Materialists choose to adopt Materialism as an axiom; evidence of free will conflicts with that axiom, and so it is discarded, not because it is disproven, but because weighting and filtering evidence is the purpose of axioms. Materialists know that free will can't exist, because if it existed it would disprove Materialism, and their adherence to Materialism is pre-evidential.
...And all the above is not an error to be corrected on the part of the Materialists, but rather a demonstration of how human reason actually operates. All beliefs are chosen. No one has ever or will ever be "forced" to adopt a belief, by evidence or by coercion or by any other mechanism. Some beliefs require more maintenance and effort than others, and some beliefs pay off more than others, but it all comes down to choice.
That we do not have access to a complete understanding of reality, and that the unknown unknowns are significant and must be accounted for.
Empiricism and the entire scientific method are not universal solvents. They have limits, and those limits should be understood and respected, not papered over, ignored or lied about. The later solutions have caused great harm and misery, and that harm and misery has never been adequately answered for.
Why? Within its limits, science and causality work quite well. Engineering is delightful. But my appreciation of air conditioning and microcircuitry and repeating firearms does not obligate me to ignore significant evidence that free will exists. I am comfortable saying that inert matter seems to run on strict causality, while the human mind does not appear to do so. This costs me nothing, requires me to paper over nothing, offered significant predictive value back when Determinism was still making falsifiable predictions, and seems to me to offer decent predictive value on the currently-untestable predictions that Determinism still allows itself.
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