Summations Only

FAME AT LAST!

Yes it was. It is precisely my choice and my will not to rape a nun. That's why I don't. By whom? Where is the puppet-master? I am the puppet-master and the puppet. It seems that I don't want to rape a nun, and so a nun is not raped by me. Well, damn you, I, for deciding what me should do! Oh ... wait ... that's a purely grammatical distinction.I don't see what you would want for me to have free will. Would it be an exercise of free will if I raped a nun even though I don't want to? But surely that would be the opposite of free will.This is where you run into difficulties. Apparently what you mean by free will is that my will should be free of me, that I should have a will so free that I am not making the decisions any more, but instead I stand idly by while my body rapes a nun, something that I personally have no intention of doing. But this is the opposite of having free will. Free will means that my actions are determined. They are determined by me, the guy who doesn't want to rape a nun. Because I don't want to, I don't. That's free will.---And this is what I've been talking about in my previous posts. Tangle has this idea that to have real free will I should be able to rape a nun even though I don't want to rape a nun. Well, when I say that I have free will, I am not asserting that I have free will in the sense that Tangle means it. But that doesn't mean that in deference to his bizarre definition of "free will" I should admit that I have no free will.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Yes - I was tempted to make some similar comment about your name as well.But I wasn't sure whether "Adequate Determinism" as described in that article is your position.It seems pretty close.....?If it is an accurate portrayal of your position you should copyright it or something.

I am almost a compatibilist.I agree with the compatibilist conception of free will. However, I am inclined to think it incompatible with determinism. That is to say, if the universe were really rigidly deterministic, I don't think we would be here.

Yeah, I figured it was a case of different definitions, not a signal that we were very far apart in actual thoughts.

I agree, which is why I feel free to say that there is no free will. In ordinary, every day usage, people use free will to describe the ability in humans (and possibly other animals) to break causality, to perform an action that has no cause and then create an entirely new chain of causality.A determinist says that humans don't have this ability, thus free will doesn't exist.You and other compatibilists are the ones changing the definition to one that says that people have free will because free will means that the proximal causes of an action are internal to the being performing the actions.I would argue that the definition you are using is closer to the deterministic definition of moral culpability, but it definitely isn't the normal every day usage of free will that anyone who isn't a compatibilist would use.

Based on current conversation - Me too. Dr A has persuaded me of it's merits. Hence my near conversion. What leads you to this intriguing conclusion?I suspect it might be more to do with your use of the word "rigid" than anything. But I'd like to know more.

That would be because he has redefined free will so that it is the same as the deteministic definition of moral culpability. Yes, almost all determinists agree with his concept, they just diagree with the label that what he is talking about is free will.

No. No, that was not what I did. Well, as I've pointed out at length, I'm the one round here who is as a matter of principle trying to do the least to redefine the concept of free will. While I have opponents who explain to me that free will involves me raping a nun when I don't want to do so. If you have to pick a side, which of us has "redefined free will"?

Yes - Which is why I cheered your Message 51I think Dr A has a very valid point as to why "freewill" should rationally be defined in compatibilist terms.But I wholeheartedly agree with you that this definition of "freewill" is most definitely NOT the common cenception of freewill that people have.The common conception of freewill is (if determinism is true) illusory. The compatibilist philsopher definition of "freewill" is, I am increasingly convinced, justified.Am I coming across as a complete fence-sitter here..........?

I still say you have. Free Will, as it is normally used in ordinary language involves a breakage of causality. If you remove the breaking of causality, you're no longer talking about free will.

I'm not ready to go that far. The concept of free will that we all agree is bogus is the one that has existed for years. It is also the perception people have. When trying to argue that the perception is wrong, using the term free will is much more concise than going the length and potentially confusing route of saying, "The perception that humans have the ability to break causality is wrong."If I'm correct in what Dr. A is saying the compatibilist definition of free will is, I'd use moral culpability, or to differentiate between other forms of moral culpability, perhaps deterministic moral culpability.

There is no puppet master, unless you call evolution the puppet master. Our sense of morality - and it does seem to be something akin to a sense - is the pre-programming and it derives from being social animals.People whose programming goes wrong do not have these moral inhibitors, we call them sociopaths and psychopaths. They behave differently to us - do they have the same free will as you and me? (Real, not retorical question) I run into diffulties all over the place - for a start it's not at all clear what anyone here means by free will, including me. Nor that we're even talking about the same thing. It's a rather slippery concept. You seem to define free will as whatever you want to do. Ok, you think therefore you are etc.My concern with that is that you, like all of us, have our ability to know what we feel/think about, say, rape, prejudiced by neurones in the pre-frontal cortex that have literally and physically made up our minds for us before and very soon after birth. By the age of two, some important parts of our moral senses have been set. It's unlike you to erect straw men in this way.I do not believe that. I'm simply pointing out that our will is not as free as we generally believe it to be. As your man on the Clapham Omnibus would use the term. We have some predispositions that exclude some actions and desires.I am not asking you to admit that you have no free will; I'm suggesting that your freewill is subtley limited.If you define freewill as the ability to do what you want to do, then of course, by that definition, you are free to do what you want to do - but only because you have defined it to be so.My point is that what you want to do (empathise with others, love etc) and not do (rape nuns, sell children etc) has already been at least partially pre-determined at or soon after birth. That does not in any way mean you are a marionette manipulated by a third party, it means that some key elements of you have been pulled up by their own bootstraps.

Again - I think I agree with you.But when I say "I think Dr A has a very valid point as to why "freewill" should rationally be defined in compatibilist terms" I mean literally what I say.His is the rational position.The common conception of freewill isn't rational. It is common. And on that basis alone I would (I think - like you) argue that this is what "freewill" actually means.Words acquire meaning from their actual usage. Not their philosophical, or rational or "should be" ideally arguments.So on the basis of what "freewill" means I'd agree with you. On the basis of what "freewill" should rationally mean I agree with Dr A.I have splinters up my arse.....

I'm not convinced that is correct.For myself, I never thought I was performing an action that had no cause. Rather, I though I was performing an action for which I was a cause.I wonder whether part of the problem is simplistic thinking. As best I can tell, every event has infinitely many causes and contributes as a cause of infinitely many consequences. When we say X causes Y, we only mean that X is a dominant cause of Y. We don't mean that there were no other contributing causes.