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Michael M asked in Arts & HumanitiesPhilosophy · 4 months ago

How would knowledge that your future was deterministic affect your behavior?

5 Answers

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  • Git
    Lv 5
    4 months ago

    If it is deterministic but unknown to me, then it makes no difference at all. 

    If it is known to me, I may be happy or sad depending on what is the final outcome of my life. Either way it would make me not strive to do any thing since the outcome will not change whatever I do.

  • 4 months ago

    Hopefully you can be the determinant factor in your future.  Well, actually you already are.  Hopefully you can determine a better future for yourself.  To do so your behavior must coordinate in ways that determine a better future.  

  • 4 months ago

    It is determined but that knowledge has no other effect on me.

  • The universe could not exist without inevitabilities (consequences, logic preceding from actions, if we can call being itself an action, then what follows is determinate). Otherwise it would be nothing and everything at the same time, and so have no distinctions. 

    I believe nothing exists without a reason that is contained within the universe and its inevitabilities. The world itself is power undirected and without purpose. And the universe is the limitations of that power. Power cannot act without Being, and Being is created by Action that produces new Being and new Actions and the Consequences that follow. 

    There is no God but there is unlimited power which can only act through the being of the universe. 

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  • j153e
    Lv 7
    4 months ago

    Hypothetical which even Kant of CPR 2 found implausible (cf his 2nd-most important question in phiosophy:  "Is there 'free will'?").  To "know" determinism asks Noumenal gnosis.

    The future is developed of the present, which is premised on the past.  The past may be likened to Father-Mother, the present to Son/Daughter, and the future to Holy Ghost.  (Cf Dickens' "A Christmas Carol.")

    Per CPR 2, if you're determined by physis, you haven't individuated qua Vernunft (transcendental reasoning), at the level of moral agency; CPR 1 establishes antimony re transcendental reasoning re understanding (Verstand) one's locus in phenomenal physis.

    Therefore, while such "knowledge of determinism" is not possible qua phenomena, if one felt one was so, that would be a symptom of lack of moral agency, and one thus ought seek to develop such personal care (Sorge) for others-as-self (a secular representation of caring for other as one cares for self, aka the "Second Commandment" as related by Christ Jesus; Kant at that CPR 2 1788 time was promoting the Categorical Imperative per moral freedom guiding human will).

    Heidegger's concern was that techne would mechanize mankind in a kind of matrix.  Kant would Rx that with CPR 2, moral freedom per higher reason.  (Thus Husserl's critique of Heidegger as a "cultural" philosopher.)

    Related:

    "The Soulless One."

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