Relating this back to the OT, this is a good example of something in contrast to exactly what we're talking about. Epistemic principles are of no consequence and no value if anything like hard determinism is true. (i.e., we don't choose to believe things.)
If my thoughts are a brute equation of neurobiology + circumstances = Me, and my biology is ultimately pre-determined by the laws of chemistry, and the laws of chemistry are governed by the laws physics, and physics is blind, unaltering, and immutable, then free will and thought are illusory and I've never made a libertarian free-will decision or formed a genuine opinion in my life.
Which means, it's self-refuting. If I believe in determinism, I only "believe" it because it was decided for me by the laws of nature, and not because it's a logically sound principle I could accept or reject. Believing determinism ultimately undercuts believing in determinism (or anything). Beliefs would have no correlation with truth, being only products of pre-set, exhaustive external variables. Epistemology has no place in that world.
This is, in fact, the stated position of many deterministic philosophers.
They are idiots.
I shouldn't insult them like that, but arguably, in the deterministic view, I couldn't help myself.
Yeah, the IMHO this gets to one of the core conflicts of religion, as it relates to the concept of perfect omniscience/omnipotence/omnibenevolence of a supreme being and humanity's free will. God created the universe with perfect knowledge, therefore God is responsible for everyone's actions because God knew what they would be long before creating us. Therefore God punishing anyone for said actions is immoral and cruel, because he's subjecting beings he created to punishment for what they had no choice in doing. Therefore our God is not a benevolent God; we have an asshole God. However, if humans DO have free will, that means God doesn't know what we will choose, because if God knows we have no ability to choose differently and prove God wrong. Therefore God is not omniscient [and therefore not perfect].
It can also be used in the concept of any belief that our universe is Godless and yet based on completely deterministic physics. In this case, there can be no such thing as free will as everything we do/think/know is purely the result of physical laws over which we have no control. The only difference between this and the religious concepts being that this doesn't have any ethical/moral implications about an afterlife and how we're treated there.
I grappled with this in college and still haven't come to a reasonable way out of it. Because even if you take door #2, and further stipulate that there are deterministic laws of physics that are simply unknowable to us--if they're deterministic, then free will doesn't exist. We're all just robots, and not the AI kind.
But this gets back to the epistemic question of what we are capable of knowing/believing, and how that relates to what we
DO. I choose to live my life as if my actions/thoughts/beliefs are not predetermined, even if that is merely an illusion. My lived experience is that I am driving this meat puppet around the world of my own volition, so that's how I'm going to continue to do it. Maybe it's deterministic; maybe it's not. Knowing that either way is beyond my capability, so I have to proceed as if it is not.
