It only matters in matters of free will and ethics. One actual scenario where it's relavant would be the discussion around the criminal justice system. If the universe is deterministic, how can punitive justice be justified?
I do not excuse any crime, nor do I excuse any punishment. Every individual is responsible for their own actions, regardless of the circumstances. However, I see little use in revenge from a legal standpoint. Instead our main motivations should be deterrence and incarceration.
As a recipient of punitive justice myself, being punished had a tangible effect on how I thought about crime and thus how I behaved post-punishment. Whether you believe that was deterministic or due to my own free will doesn’t change the outcome.
There are plenty of medical interventions, particularly for mental illnesses, that would dream of 1/3 effectiveness. Now consider the fact that recidivism rates are often much lower than 2/3, and in many cases are closer to 1/3. That tells me that punishment actually is quite effective at reducing crime.
See e.g. the debates over lenient prisons in Scandinavia such as Bastøy Prison, where the lenient treatment is seen as justified on a deterrence and recidivism basis but which would be seen as negative if you see the goal of the sentencing to be harsh in order to punish.
it’s obvious in its absence
The secret is that we are all philosophical zombies to begin with.
Trying to determine if she was acting in a certain way intentionally or unintentionally was fundamentally impossible. In the past, I mistreated her thinking she was choosing to behave in certain ways whenever she really didn't have much of a choice, but then later I realized that to some extent and in some situations, she was. It's an extremely murky line, what decisions were being made due to other influences and what decisions were being made by her, that line never existed to begin with as who her consciousness is fundamentally is determined exclusively by 'outside' influences. Separating her identity as an entity from her material manifestation is likely nonsensical.
Determinism doesn't necessarily mean that organisms always act in the same way. They act in the same way given the exact configuration of them and the world.
Obviously, justice changes the configuration of an organism (fines, prison, ...). To me it boils down to the question whether justice decreases the likelihood to commit crimes again. Given that our systems of justice have evolved over a long time, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt.
The same goes for culture. Most changes tend to have unexpected consequences, and if you try to change everything at once, society tends to collapse.
I’m still disturbed by peoples confidence in a deterministic universe—I suppose such confidence is based on the success of inductive reasoning but inductive reasoning is a phenomenon based on how our minds work.
As far as I know the philosophical problem of causation is not considered solved?
In any case, elements of randomness seem likely to play a role in human intelligence but what that role is, who knows?
The other goals of justice include rehabilitation (re-intgation of the criminal into civil society), deterrence (using the threat of punishment as a means to scare would be criminals), incapacitation (remove dangerous people from society to protect public order), and denunciation (public shaming).
One could imagine an impossibly vast cellular automata system which develops individual cellular 'agents'. Over time the agents develop some means of reproduction/death/reward system and become more and more complex. Then the agents that evolve with cooperative behaviours start to dominate. One might imagine that the system as a whole would also evolve these kind of 'self corrective' behaviours for anti-cooperative behaviours of the individual agents.
This is ignoring the whole philosophical ethics discussion and consciousness of course.
In fact, if free will were absolute, punishment wouldn't make any sense because it wouldn't have any effect on your will.
If you have absolute free will you are free to disregard or consider inputs.
What is being claimed by a deterministic world model is that the output (behavior and internal state change) of a human is a pure function of its current state and inputs. Then we try to give inputs that will lead to desired outputs.
The non-compatibilist view of free will is that it is not a pure function, namely that there is a third independent factor, the “free will”, that influences the behavior (and possibly the internal state). If that is the case, there may never be a way to choose inputs that lead to the desired outputs, because the free will could simply void their effect.
If I tell someone not to do something again, then that is an input to their future states whether or not my decision to tell them that was freely chosen or not.
If you go into that situation with the belief that not having free will means that what you do does not matter, and your action as a result is to not tell them, then that will affect their future states too. And so whether or not you have a real, free choice, it is beneficial to act as if free will exist even if you see it as an illusion.
I strongly believe we have no free will. I still get up and work, and try to do as best I can. I believe those choices are not free, but they feel like choices, and they impact my life, so I am happy I act as if they are free.
And so I'll still talk about making choices and trying to do things because of that illusion even though I believe it's all a chain of cause and effect.
Determinism does not mean "irrespective of what else happens, X will happen". It means "because of what else happened, X will happen". You can't say ahead of time that X will happen irrespective whether between now and then something else occurs that might affect the next events, such as actions meant to discourage you. You can only make that determination knowing the full chain of events and the full state.
One of the main argument people use against determinism is this notion that X will happen irrespective of what else happens or what you choose to do. But this is nonsense. You can't say that e.g. whether you keep your job and get fired is already determined, so it makes no difference if you stop going to work. If you stop going work you'll eventually get fired, because your failure to go to work will form part of a chain of cause and effect. Determinism, or even a stochastic universe, without free will just means that you did not have a free choice in the decisions involved. But you still took an action, and that action determined the consequences.
A rejection of free will means we should look differently at the past, because it has moral implications; it does not mean we should stop making the best choices we can going forward, even if we believe those choices are illusory and deterministic.
> Making the best choices we can.
You are not making choices.
I am in favor of punishment for deterrence, denunciation and incapacitation. I am not in favor of punishment for retaliation (punitive justice) or rehabilitation (restorative justice).