In order to seek explanations for the patterns we see in reality, we must first embrace the idea that even when we don’t know the reasons why something has happened, we still hold that there are reasons why it happened.
That’s a much weaker claim than a claim to strict determinism.
Yet you do in fact end with a claim of strict determinism..
Therefore, a person who makes choice A had to make that choice, for to have made any other choice the person would have either had to be different than they actually were, or the situation/environment would have had to be different than it actually was
By a kind of semantic drift … from patterns reasons to causes to deterministic causes .
Causal determinism is a form of causality, clearly enough. But not all causality is deterministic , since indeterministic causality can be coherently defined. For instance: “An indeterministic cause raises the probability of its effect, but doesn’t raise it to certainty”. Far from being novel, or exotic, this is a familiar way of looking at causality. We all know that smoking causes cancer, and we all know that you can smoke without getting cancer...so the “causes” in “smoking causes cancer” must mean “increased the risk of”.
That’s a much weaker claim than a claim to strict determinism.
Yet you do in fact end with a claim of strict determinism..
By a kind of semantic drift … from patterns reasons to causes to deterministic causes .
Causal determinism is a form of causality, clearly enough. But not all causality is deterministic , since indeterministic causality can be coherently defined. For instance: “An indeterministic cause raises the probability of its effect, but doesn’t raise it to certainty”. Far from being novel, or exotic, this is a familiar way of looking at causality. We all know that smoking causes cancer, and we all know that you can smoke without getting cancer...so the “causes” in “smoking causes cancer” must mean “increased the risk of”.