B4: Determinism, Control, and the Consequence Argument

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The central question of the project is whether control over our actions is compatible with determinism. If determinism is true, then the complete state of the world at any time in the distant past (even before we were born) together with the laws of nature completely fixes our current actions. Determinism, therefore, threatens our everyday conviction that we have control over our actions. The project argues that this apparent tension between determinism and control only arises if further assumptions about causation, laws, counterfactuals, and modality are added to determinism. Many of these added assumptions seem intuitively plausible. However, the project will use empirical data (concerning both scientific results and scientific practice) as well as inductive methods to question these assumptions. Among other things, we will show that the so-called 'Consequence Argument', which many consider the strongest argument for the incompatibility of control and determinism, rests on empirically un-founded assumptions about alternative possibilities.