“Assume X. X-> Y is inappropriate. We do Y. Why we are doing Y as it is pointless?” is kind of sloppy or incomplete logical thinking. One is mixing assumtions and observations. However the repair options seem pretty obvious that automatic steelmanning seems temping to assume.
“Assume X. X-> Y is inappropriate. We do Y. We do not seem to believe X” is perfectly fine argument ad absurdum.
“X- > Y is inappropriate. We do Y. Thefore not X.” is also fine argument ad absurdum.
On the actual determinism side:
If I have a perfectly clockwork piece of code I can talk about the code doing stuff even if there is no possibility that it would run differently. It’s illustrative to think how things would turn out if a piece of code was missing/different but it is not needed fundamentally to give the concepts meaning. On human level affairs “freedom” means something along the lines of “the system has degrees of freedom that include multiple meaningful outcomes” and we don’t differentiate strongly between epistemic degrees of freedom and ontological degrees of freedom. Determinism works on a differnt concept layer and while it’s not totally irrelevant it doesn’t enter as directly relevant as a sloppy thinker would say.
It is possible that a system could be non-deterministic in the determinism way and fail to be determnistic in the human living way. A system that has degrees of freedom all of which correlate to one meaningful outcome would be humanlevel clockwork and physics level non-clockwork. And a physics level clockwork can still be unknown so that socially we must account for all meaningful categories it could turn out to be. For example if a code has a bug the programmer in the course of debugging will narrow down the search on which exact version of the code actually exist as the previous coding actions are consistent for multiple of them. Unchecked portions of it then exhibit “freedom” althought on mechanical level the code runs in only one way.
Crossing from “reasonable doubt” to “beyond reasonable doubt” has little to do with ontology and is analogous to the code bug hunt. Being deterministic is not an effective defence to claim that you do not contain bugs.
I want to focus on the claimed logical fallacy.
“Assume X. X-> Y is inappropriate. We do Y. Why we are doing Y as it is pointless?” is kind of sloppy or incomplete logical thinking. One is mixing assumtions and observations. However the repair options seem pretty obvious that automatic steelmanning seems temping to assume.
“Assume X. X-> Y is inappropriate. We do Y. We do not seem to believe X” is perfectly fine argument ad absurdum.
“X- > Y is inappropriate. We do Y. Thefore not X.” is also fine argument ad absurdum.
On the actual determinism side:
If I have a perfectly clockwork piece of code I can talk about the code doing stuff even if there is no possibility that it would run differently. It’s illustrative to think how things would turn out if a piece of code was missing/different but it is not needed fundamentally to give the concepts meaning. On human level affairs “freedom” means something along the lines of “the system has degrees of freedom that include multiple meaningful outcomes” and we don’t differentiate strongly between epistemic degrees of freedom and ontological degrees of freedom. Determinism works on a differnt concept layer and while it’s not totally irrelevant it doesn’t enter as directly relevant as a sloppy thinker would say.
It is possible that a system could be non-deterministic in the determinism way and fail to be determnistic in the human living way. A system that has degrees of freedom all of which correlate to one meaningful outcome would be humanlevel clockwork and physics level non-clockwork. And a physics level clockwork can still be unknown so that socially we must account for all meaningful categories it could turn out to be. For example if a code has a bug the programmer in the course of debugging will narrow down the search on which exact version of the code actually exist as the previous coding actions are consistent for multiple of them. Unchecked portions of it then exhibit “freedom” althought on mechanical level the code runs in only one way.
Crossing from “reasonable doubt” to “beyond reasonable doubt” has little to do with ontology and is analogous to the code bug hunt. Being deterministic is not an effective defence to claim that you do not contain bugs.