I am not arguing that our acts are not partly determined by prior events. I am arguing that our choices in moral acts are not absolutely constrained by externalities. You decided to eat the bagel, not the broken guitar string.
No-one has mentioned constraints. Breaking the string didn't constrain me to eat croissant. There were events without limit that determined the outcome. Some girl happened to meet some guy in NZ, they got married, had a son, he moved to Australia, he became a baker, he opened a bakery near me...if none of that had happened, then no croissant for me for breakfast.
You can go back 6 generations in the baker's family and there were 64 people who had to meet and get married for him to exist. For him to open the shop. For him to sell me a croissant. There is a direct link between any one of those people who happened to meet and get married and the type of breakfast I had. A
direct link. One that patently obviously could not possibly have been predicted.
That's what it means for an event to be determined.
The author at Stanford I fear is less articulate...
That's just saying 'I don't agree with him'. You can see from the above that events are almost always totally unpredictable.
If determinism is true then t+n must be predictable. If the claim is that t+n would be predictable but we're just not smart enough to do so puts determinism outside of the realms of both science and philosophy as meaningful.
If you want to bring Laplace's Demon to the party then be my guest. But just because we can't predict something doesn't then mean it's not determinate. It's like your eclipse. We aren't smart enough to gather all the
exact information we need to predict the
exact position of the shadow. The eclipse was, obviously, still determined.
Or you can go to another scientist (neurology and genetics) and get a materialistic explanation for free will.
Like the physicist, previously cited (Del Santo), Mitchell argues from science and philosophy. From his own discipline, Mitchell argues that free will in human beings evolved naturally.
I've read and listened to Mitchell a lot (I think I linked to something of his earlier). Whether he has anything different to say in the video...I doubt it. I also read his book 'Free Agents' some time ago. Needless to say, I'm not convinced by his arguments therein. I might skim through it again and precis what those arguments were. Which, from memory, were something along the lines of 'we all do what we need to do to advance our own position for reasons which are our own'.
He discussed this with Sapolski, who pointed out that that wasn't in dispute. But we have our reasons because of who we are. And there is no ghost in the machine determining that character external to all influences. See here:
Del Santo's paper can be downloaded as a PDF at:
https://arxiv.org › pdf › 2003.07411v3
From the paper:
'If one asks the reason why a certain event Ej occurred, is now possible to reply: “Because another event Ei/A happened before (i.e., i < j) and not its mutually exclusive alternative Ei/B”
The guy is making the same mistake as you seem to be making. If you are looking at an event such as a decision you just made, then it's not the case that one single event caused it. It was an infinite cascade of events, each individually caused. And not all of them would be equally responsible. Del Santo's view is that there is zero possibility of measuring the number of possibilities, therefore it's not predictable. And he somehow then jumps to the conclusion that it must be indeterminate.
As he says: 'On the contrary, indeterminism introduced the possibility of alternatives'. But there are countless alternatives in a determinate world. An infinity of alternatives.
