Phil 101. Lizhi Xing, Netid Lxing3. The Falsehood Of...

PHIL 101 Lizhi Xing, netID: lxing3 The Falsehood of Determinism 1. Introduction On 20 January 2050, Jax, the worst android in the history of robots was sent to the supreme court of United States in the morning. After robbing five banks and killing over fifty innocent people, notorious Jax was accused of bank robbery and murder. However, in the court, Jax claimed with great confidence that he was not guilty. He maintained that he had no free will and was determined by his program to commit those alleged crimes, but he didn’t intend to hurt anyone. He argued that the one who should be sent to death was his programmer. Nevertheless, the most astonishing thing is not the words from Jax but the sentence from the judge: Jax was acquitted in†¦show more content†¦This free will does not mean that our minds are totally free from the environment near us, the food we eat, the character we have, or the DNA within our body. Free will implies that we have some extent control of our decisions although some of our actions might be determined by s ome other factors. People are, in fact, the agents with reasoning abilities that causally produce something or facilitate something to happen with our free will (Kane 1996). As we all know, one bad apple spoils the whole barrel. Though randomness is not obvious in the macroscale world that we live in and the scope of our free will seems limited, any existence of randomness or free will actually would be an epitome of the falsehood of determinism, which denotes that â€Å"a complete description of the physical universe at a time together with the laws of nature entails a true complete description of the physical universe at any other time† (Mele 2009). A detailed discussion of randomness and free will are presented in the following sections of the essay, and my main argument is shown below: Premise 1: Either randomness or free will entails the falsehood of determinism. Premise 2: Randomness and free will, at least one of them, exist in the word. Conclusion: Therefore, determin ism is false. 2. God is a Source of Randomness Many philosophers come to believe the truth of determinism based on a simple belief: the existence of God or some