If you actually read what he says, Huemer is offering a refutation of hard determinism, by which he means the view that no one could act otherwise. He evenly explicitly says he is not objecting to compatibilism (since compatibilists don’t deny the ability to do otherwise, but simply analyze it in a way consistent with determinism).

So, read the argument with that conclusion in mind.

Wow. It’s striking how many commenters here are just not understanding the argument. Most of these criticisms are just missing the point.

Okay.

Not an argument

Why do you think superposition implies this?

Who says it also goes through none of the slits and only one slit all at once?

The author.

Okay, when you have one slit open and fire a photon or an electron or whatever, you get a dot on the screen on the other side. When you have the other slit open, you get a dot in a different location. If you have both slits open, you don’t get either dot, but instead a band suggesting a wave.

That’s wrong.

I read that. Where is the violation of PNC? Asserting that there’s a contradiction doesn’t mean there is one.

Take wave-particle duality as an example. There are experiments where light behaves as a wave, and some where it behaves like a particle. But none where it behaves as both! How to understand this is a good question, but it’s a big leap to just assume a violation of PNC.

I don’t want to scrap QM. Those examples don’t look like violations of PNC to me, and I think the author is just misunderstanding the examples or PNC.

Give me one example of a genuine violation of the principle of noncontradiction.

If you can satisfy my “unless” condition, go for it.

“Truth is a criterion by which we judge a proposition, or a quality by which we determine a proposition to be factual”

This is conflating a theory of truth with a theory of it’s assertability, or the basis on which we say or judge something to be true.

You might think this is minor, and it may end up being irrelevant to the point, but I people would stop making such stupid mistakes.

Continuing, if quantum mechanics genuinely entails violation of the principle of noncontradiction, QM belongs in the trash heap, unless you can explain how I’m supposed to be able to countenance such violations.

None of the examples presented violate PNC anyways. While there was a movement to modify logic based on QM, denting PNC wasn’t part of it, and anyways that movement has largely been abandoned.

Russell’s paradox shows that Frege’s axioms are wrong, not that every axiom system will be paradoxical.

Way too much of this is just sloppy and wrong.

Okay. You might want to think about the presentation to make your purpose more clear.

You might also want to look at Kant.

I think there’s a big leap here.

So our senses aren’t entirely reliable, and it’s conceivable that we experience colors differently. Is reality itself called into question by this!

Has any doubt been raised about wavelengths of light? Or minds?

Okay. Basic idea: free will is the ability to do other than expected, where the expect-or is Laplace’s demon. Some human actions meet this condition, because the human brain is an undecidable computational system.

I had a couple of issues.

First, intuitively free will involves the possibility of any of multiple courses of action (looking in the future direction, to use the language is the article). The objection to this in the article is basically, when you’re making the choice, you’re only doing one thing. So, it doesn’t make sense to say there are multiple possibilities open to you. To the contrary, we can say that at time t1, it is possible that at time t2 I am doing A, or that I am doing B, whereas at time t2 it is only possible that I am doing 1.

But I don’t think that matters much, since the project is still interesting.

Second, key to establishing that the human brain is an undefinable computational system is the claim that the brain has infinite state spaces. This is supported by the fact that we can conceive of the natural numbers, which are infinite.

I’m not convinced that this means the human brain has infinite state spaces. We never conceive of each natural number itself. What is true is that for any of we can conceive of any of an infinite number of sets of numbers, but each of those will be of finite size. It is also true that we can think such terms “as infinite”, and various associated ideas, “1-to-1 mapping onto the natural numbers” for instance, but everything we’re ever actually thinking is finite.

Basically, it’s possible to represent some facts about infinite sets with finite information, which seems to be what we actually do.

As an additional comment, the article also contained a discussion of human decision-making being self-referential. It’s a bit long, but you may want to check out this talk by Jenann Ismael, in which she makes the self-referential aspect of decision-making key to an account of free will.

What is your objection to the correspondence theory?

Me too! Correspondence with what the statement is about.

The objection was why care about truth if we can’t get to it?

Now, I never said all truths are inaccessible, only that perhaps some are.

So the objection is: why care about truth if some truths may be inaccessible?

My response is: this doesn’t change whether or not the way some things are might be inaccessible to us, and so we want a term for the way things are which applies in the those cases too. I think the term for that is “truth”, but I’ll go with another if you really insist on using it differently.

Perhaps this was the objection intended. But I don’t understand it.

What sort of theory of a concept do you want, other than a definition?

How do you interpret his criticism of the correspondence theory in that video?

Well, I want some term which is correctly applied to a statement in case things are as that statement says they are.

If you want to use “truth” in some other way, I guess I can’t stop you. But I still want a term with such a meaning.

No.

There is no good reason to think “what is true” is the same as “what I can possibly know to be true”. It may simply be that there are things which I cannot know.

Bah. Correspondence, obviously

So his rejection of the correspondence theory is just a conflation of a claim’s between being true and being known to be true.

“How do we know what is true?” And “How do we determine wha this true?” are important questions, but they aren’t the same as “what is truth?”