When you despair about determinism, you imagine a future that is determined regardless of your actions, but it’s actually a future that is determined through your actions (and the actions of everyone else).
If the future was determined regardless of your actions (e.g. through fate), then of course your actions would be meaningless. You might instead enjoy the day. Actually, not even that, because whether you enjoy the day would also be determined regardless of your actions. So it’s not really a coherent worldview, because you clearly do some things based on your decisions—for example you decided to ask this question on LW.
So, I suspect that what you currently believe is an incoherent perspective, where you feel like you can make trivial decisions (such as whether to ask people on Reddit and LW), and it’s just the big decisions (what will happen to you in 5 years, or the future of human civilization) that are determined by fate and somehow causally isolated from your trivial decisions.
And that is a natural mistake to make. For example, people who deny evolution sometimes admit that yes, mutations can cause trivial changes (such as a species of beetle changing its color), but those can never accumulate to big changes (such as fish evolving to reptiles), because… well, intuitively, some big things just seem too big to be composed of little things, no matter how many little things we add together. A mountain cannot be built from atoms, that’s just silly; no matter how many atoms you join together, the result is still something you can only see using a microscope!
Also, in quantum physics, ten or hundred particles can be in a superposition, but it would of course be silly to imagine that entire humans or planets or universes could be in a superposition. That’s silly; no matter how many particles you put together, the result is never a macroscopic object!
And just like that, no matter what control you have over the trivial decisions, such as whether to move your hand, whether to say or write some word, it may feel like this all will somehow cancel out, and won’t make a change in what happens to you in 5 years.
(Just speculating here. Maybe this is not your model at all.)
But if there is no natural boundary between the “small” and “big” things, then the big things can change, as a result of many small changes pushing in a similar direction.
*
The way I solve it, is that I see this as two separate perspectives, “in universe” and “out universe”. In-universe, I make choices, and things happen as a result of my (and everyone else’s) choices. Out-universe, everything is predetermined; in the sense that if some alien recorded a big movie of our universe and played that movie again, the same things would happen again. From the alien’s perspective, when the movie is played again, the people in the movie are utterly predictable, even if from their own perspective they think and make choices. Nonetheless, without their thoughts and choices, the movie could not exist. And I am not the alien; I am one of those people inside the movie.
Basically, it is a logical mistake to mix the in-universe and out-universe perspectives. Things that make sense out-universe, for example playing the movie again or playing it in reverse, do not make sense in-universe, how the people actually experience it.
When you despair about determinism, you imagine a future that is determined regardless of your actions, but it’s actually a future that is determined through your actions (and the actions of everyone else).
If the future was determined regardless of your actions (e.g. through fate), then of course your actions would be meaningless. You might instead enjoy the day. Actually, not even that, because whether you enjoy the day would also be determined regardless of your actions. So it’s not really a coherent worldview, because you clearly do some things based on your decisions—for example you decided to ask this question on LW.
So, I suspect that what you currently believe is an incoherent perspective, where you feel like you can make trivial decisions (such as whether to ask people on Reddit and LW), and it’s just the big decisions (what will happen to you in 5 years, or the future of human civilization) that are determined by fate and somehow causally isolated from your trivial decisions.
And that is a natural mistake to make. For example, people who deny evolution sometimes admit that yes, mutations can cause trivial changes (such as a species of beetle changing its color), but those can never accumulate to big changes (such as fish evolving to reptiles), because… well, intuitively, some big things just seem too big to be composed of little things, no matter how many little things we add together. A mountain cannot be built from atoms, that’s just silly; no matter how many atoms you join together, the result is still something you can only see using a microscope!
Also, in quantum physics, ten or hundred particles can be in a superposition, but it would of course be silly to imagine that entire humans or planets or universes could be in a superposition. That’s silly; no matter how many particles you put together, the result is never a macroscopic object!
And just like that, no matter what control you have over the trivial decisions, such as whether to move your hand, whether to say or write some word, it may feel like this all will somehow cancel out, and won’t make a change in what happens to you in 5 years.
(Just speculating here. Maybe this is not your model at all.)
But if there is no natural boundary between the “small” and “big” things, then the big things can change, as a result of many small changes pushing in a similar direction.
*
The way I solve it, is that I see this as two separate perspectives, “in universe” and “out universe”. In-universe, I make choices, and things happen as a result of my (and everyone else’s) choices. Out-universe, everything is predetermined; in the sense that if some alien recorded a big movie of our universe and played that movie again, the same things would happen again. From the alien’s perspective, when the movie is played again, the people in the movie are utterly predictable, even if from their own perspective they think and make choices. Nonetheless, without their thoughts and choices, the movie could not exist. And I am not the alien; I am one of those people inside the movie.
Basically, it is a logical mistake to mix the in-universe and out-universe perspectives. Things that make sense out-universe, for example playing the movie again or playing it in reverse, do not make sense in-universe, how the people actually experience it.