What is the difference between this, and the quote above? Is merely the fact that “I will go to the beach this evening” is about the future,
No, it’s also the fact that the future is taken to be unfixed. Future facts are knowable for a Laplace’s Demon in a determined universe.
(Note that events that are undetermined because they depend on an agentive decision that hasn’t been made yet are only a subset of undetermined events. You would also have difficulty fixing a belief about a random nuclear decay in the future)
Which is to say free will concerns “evaporate” if you assume determinism. This is not rationality. Rationality means believing the world is deterministic iff the world is deterministic ,believing it on the basis of a evidence...not assuming it to make problems go away.
Rationalists want as much as possible to be knowable, but believing things to be true because you want them to be is the essence of irrationality . Rationalists have to recognise that the nature of the world can constrain what is knowable.
(Indeterminism isn’t the only problem area. There is also the indirectness of perception, which allows for simulation and other sceptical hypotheses—you can’t tell what is at the far end of a chain of a perceptual chain from the near end. And there is also the problem that a haphazardly evolved brain doesn’t have any apriori guarantee to be able to.understand anything. And, quite possibly, an is-ought gap that prevents values being fixed by facts. ).
Which is to say free will concerns “evaporate” if you assume determinism. This is not rationality. Rationality means believing the world is deterministic iff the world is deterministic ,believing it on the basis of a evidence...not assuming it to make problems go away.
The point of the quoted line is not that we assume determinism in order to make free-will concerns go away—as you say, that would be obviously irrational.
Rather, the point is that there are other reasons to assume determinism. (Those reasons are described in the linked post, which is why I linked it.) If, for those other reasons, we do indeed adopt such a deterministic perspective—which, again, there are (or so the linked post claims!) good reasons to do—then we will find that free-will concerns have also evaporated.
(If those other reasons do not convince you, and you think that we shouldn’t adopt determinism, that is fine. You will note that this is not in any way a load-bearing assumption of the post’s argument.)
No, it’s also the fact that the future is taken to be unfixed. Future facts are knowable for a Laplace’s Demon in a determined universe.
(Note that events that are undetermined because they depend on an agentive decision that hasn’t been made yet are only a subset of undetermined events. You would also have difficulty fixing a belief about a random nuclear decay in the future)
Which is to say free will concerns “evaporate” if you assume determinism. This is not rationality. Rationality means believing the world is deterministic iff the world is deterministic ,believing it on the basis of a evidence...not assuming it to make problems go away.
Rationalists want as much as possible to be knowable, but believing things to be true because you want them to be is the essence of irrationality . Rationalists have to recognise that the nature of the world can constrain what is knowable.
(Indeterminism isn’t the only problem area. There is also the indirectness of perception, which allows for simulation and other sceptical hypotheses—you can’t tell what is at the far end of a chain of a perceptual chain from the near end. And there is also the problem that a haphazardly evolved brain doesn’t have any apriori guarantee to be able to.understand anything. And, quite possibly, an is-ought gap that prevents values being fixed by facts. ).
The point of the quoted line is not that we assume determinism in order to make free-will concerns go away—as you say, that would be obviously irrational.
Rather, the point is that there are other reasons to assume determinism. (Those reasons are described in the linked post, which is why I linked it.) If, for those other reasons, we do indeed adopt such a deterministic perspective—which, again, there are (or so the linked post claims!) good reasons to do—then we will find that free-will concerns have also evaporated.
(If those other reasons do not convince you, and you think that we shouldn’t adopt determinism, that is fine. You will note that this is not in any way a load-bearing assumption of the post’s argument.)
The linked post gives one reason , which is debatable, since it’s been debated. You don’t seem to have complete confidence in it yourself.