LuckyR wrote: ↑March 21st, 2023, 5:39 pm"I opted to have lunch at McDonalds yesterday."Bahman wrote: ↑March 21st, 2023, 12:30 pmOK, let's make sure we're speaking of the same things. The fact that animals pause and go through the process of decision making does NOT prove that there are legitimate options. It is possible that the process of "decision making" will 100% of the time lead to a pre determined outcome, given the pre conditions. Of course there is absolutely no subjective or objective experience consistent with this scenario, but it is technically possible.LuckyR wrote: ↑March 20th, 2023, 6:46 pmBut how could that be true? There are two things when we are dealing with options, the subjective experience of options and the interruption in our activity where the latter is due to the fact that the brain is in an undecided state. First, these two things cannot coincide by chance. Second, if one of the options is predetermined then why does the person who is dealing with options pause at all?Bahman wrote: ↑March 20th, 2023, 12:37 pm To understand the implication of the question we need to understand what determinism is. Determinism is a doctrine that states that the future state of a system is uniquely determined in terms of the current state of the system. This means that there exists only one option, the future state, at any given time. We however without any doubt say that we experience options in our daily life. We pause and think about options and eventually choose one of them. The very existence of the pause means that the brain is also interrupted as well with the situation so one cannot say, as determinists say, that only one of the options is real. So options are real since otherwise, the state of the brain evolves deterministically without any pause one option is chosen and others are disregarded. Now that we established options are real we face the question of "How could there be options in a deterministic world?".I converse with Determinists routinely and they typically say that the appearance of options is an illusion, thus the actual outcome is the only possible outcome thus it is not an "option", it was predetermined.
I cannot, of course, opt otherwise at this stage of the game. Nonetheless, the sentence is coherent, descriptive, and meaningful. If we can "choose" in the past tense, surely we can choose in the present tense. "Options" is a meaningful word whether or not they are determined.