Summations Only

The absurdum doesn't work here because the nausia you would feel if, for example, you attempted to eat a dogshit sandwich - or, I would hope, rape the nun - happens immediately and is involutary (but is a result of a few million years of evolution).Instead of the nun, try this."Dr A smiled at a child eating an icecream""Oh ... well good for him ... I guess ... why do you mention it?""Well, he had no free will in the matter.""Oh, you mean he didn't want to but couldn't help himself because she was so happy?""No, I mean that he didn't want to.""WTF, dude, WTF?"Empathy is involuntary for most people. I'm sure you could stop yourself smiling at the child if you put your mind to it and thought about it in advance, but your first impulse would be to grin.The Milgram experiments show how far we are prepared to overcome our feelings by excercising our freewill but all involved went through extreme stresst to be able to do what their mind told them not to do. If we had full freewill, our emotions would not apply such pressure, we'd be able to do the wrong thing without have a mental breakdown.Milgram experiment - Wikipedia Yet again, I am not saying that you lack free will, I'm merely pointing out the freewill you do have is not as free as you think. As you have now admited with the phobias.

On one hand you say you want to use man-in-the-street language but on the other you seem to be denying that the term "freewill" as used by the-man-on-the-street comes with a hefty dose of libertarianism attached to it which makes it incompatible with determinism. And therein lies the problem. Because to the-man-in-the-street this gets to the very heart of what possessing "freewill" means. If I were to ask the much vaunted man-in-the street the following question: Question: If your actions and choices are deterministically dictated by events which occurred before you existed and over which you could not possibly have any control would you have freewill?What do you think he would say?Here is a clue.......

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A number of psychologists and empirically oriented philosophers have been doing experimental work relevant to these issues. One especially interesting set of results come from the work of Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe. In one experiment, they gave their subjects descriptions of two different universes, one in which everything is completely caused by whatever happened before it, and the other a universe in which almost everything is determined by whatever happened before except human decision making. Then, they asked their subjects to identify which universe is more like ours. Roughly 95 percent of respondents describe the second universe (the one in which human decision making was indeterministic) as the one most like ours. This result seems to strongly favor the view that our ordinary self-conception of human agency is incompatibilist (specifically, libertarian). It is difficult to imagine why we would suppose human decision making is exempt from determinism if it were not linked to our having free will.

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What the experimental data appear to show is that we really do imagine ourselves to be agents with genuine, metaphysically robust alternative possibilities, and we really do, at least in moments of cool, abstract consideration, tend to favor an alternative possibilities requirement on moral responsibility. So, the experimental data seem to be something of a victory for incompatibilist diagnoses of commonsense.

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LinkEmphasis mine. But the evidence suggests that the man-in-the-street (whose language you want us to use) is referring to non-compatibilist indeterministic human decision making when he uses the term "freewill".

I'm not denying that, but I'm saying that this is the one point on which we disagree. I think that free will is produced by an (adequately) deterministic substratum (the brain, as it happens) whereas he thinks that that's impossible. We agree on what free will is, but differ on how it is possible for it to be.A creationist thinks that it's impossible for tigers to exist as a result of natural and undirected causes. Is this difference between us so definitional of tigers that I should say to him: "There are no such things as tigers"? Or should I say: "We both agree that that thing over there with the fur and the stripes is a tiger. However, you are wrong about why it exists"? As I said, there are other questions I could ask such that he would appear to agree with me. This is because his philosophy is not consistent, which is why he should spend more time talking to me.Let's ask the man in the street something else. "Dr A wants to eat a banana. He eats a banana. Is this an exercise of free will?" Now, the m-i-t-s is not going to answer: "No, because it is only as a consequence of his genes that he likes fruit; if he had the genome of a vulture he would much prefer putrefying carrion"; even though the m-i-t-s does in fact believe every part of that sentence after the word "no". And yet the broad outlines of the human genome, including our liking for fruit, were indeed produced before I existed and are things over which I have no control, and the m-i-t-s knows this too. Therefore, anyone who asserts that this is an example of the exercise of free will is implicitly answering "yes", or at least "in some cases" to your question, even though when explicitly asked your question he might well reply "no" to it.If explicitly reminded of the facts about humans, vultures, and bananas, he would probably (but we should really go out into the street and find a man) still assert that I have free will even when eating bananas. So he'd say "yes" to a specific example of your question, which he'd say "no" to. (One difference between your abstract and my specific question is that in the case of the specific example, he is clear that the river of causality, distant though its wellsprings may be, runs through my desires rather than overwhelming them.)In short, the m-i-t-s may be somewhat confused about what he thinks. This is no reason for me to add to his confusion by telling him that he has no free will.

Ok, but suppose you developed a frontal-lobe tumor, or whatever, that removed your ability to determine right from wrong and caused you to start raping people, including nuns. Then, during your trial, the tumor was discovered and removed. All urges to rape vanish and the court finds you not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, and you're a free man.Most people, I think, would suggest that the verdict was just, that justice was served, because you didn't commit those crimes by your own free will. But by your own definition, that was your free will, because you were acting out your own preferences. You've gotten away with rape and, now, knowing right from wrong you should voluntarily imprison yourself.Right? I mean, whose preferences were those, if not your own? Your tumor's? Seems reasonable to me, I guess. I don't think we have nearly as much choice as you seem to think. In a choice-ful world, walking into the grocery store should be an enormous existential quandary between paying for groceries and stealing them: all before I've even picked up a shopping cart. But that never actually happens. I mean, not even once. I'm literally never tempted by the thought of shoplifting groceries because I'm not in the habit of doing so, and rather than being creatures of free and infinite will, humans are overwhelmingly creatures of habit.

If Dr. A eats a banana every time he wants to eat a banana, how is his will free? How can he do anything else besides eat bananas when he wants to eat a banana? Where's the counterfactual choice?If he wanted a banana but instead ate a shit sandwich, wouldn't that be actually free will? If we can only do what we desire, how are we free?

He would scratch his head, and wonder what you had been smoking.

You'll find that exact situation discussed here with the case of Fred.EvC Forum: Biology is Destiny?(He would be found Not Guilty, imo, but he wouldn't walk free - he'd be sectioned and treated as a patient but not a prisoner.}Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Good grief.No.That would be the opposite of free will. Obviously.Really, you say that it's free will if I was helplessly compelled to do something I really don't want to do. I go around saying things like: "If I want to eat a banana, and I eat a banana, that's free will" ... and then people say to me: "Oh, you cunning sophist, there you go redefining free will again. Well, I'm afraid your wily intellectual machinations would be quite opaque to the homme moyen sensuel."Do I have to come over there and slap someone? Like that. It's when we start doing things that we don't desire that we have to worry.

Well, it's exactly as free as I think: I'm not denying the "millions of years of evolution" nor the automatic nature of empathy, I'm saying that despite these things it is still reasonable for me to claim to be free.

His philosophy is inconsistent. I think this could well be rectified by talking to you. But that is because (as the evidence tells us) the definition of freewill being applied by the man-in-the-street is philosophically incoherent in a way that yours is not.But however you look at it - You and the man-in-the street are quite blatantly not applying the same definition of "freewill" in a very important regard. But the sort of freewill he thinks he has doesn't exist. So you are going to have to educate him about what a coherent concept of freewill actually is before anything else.Which is fine, indeed something I would applaud. But it doesn't meet your own stipulation of using terminology in the same way as the-man-in-the-street.The fact is that the-man-in-the-street often thinks intuitively and his use of terminology reflects this. If you are going to insist both on using man-in-the-street terminology and philosophical coherence you are, from time to time, going to come across conflicts like this one.Thus you can either redefine freewill to make it coherent or you can accept the man-in-the-street definition of libertarian style freewill and point out that freewill doesn't actually exist.Either approach is justifiable. But you cannot have it both ways. Something has to give.

Obviously we would have to pick a man-in-the street with some degree of intellect......

Ahawhat about those indoctrinated with a particular belief do they poses their own free will or is another will imposed upon them.Say a gay child bible bashed in to oblivion that being gay is an abomination and evil so when they grow up they live a deprresed life with a partner of the opposite sex.While their will or desire dictates them that they should be with a partner of the same sex, at the same time their belief dictat4es that that behaviour would be wrong.Are they acting using their own free will, or was someones will imposed uppon them?

The sort of tigers that the creationist thinks we have don't exist. But something that looks just like them does. Well, that depends. Is free will definitionally something that only exists if compatibilists are wrong?The sum total of all the ideas that a person has about a thing are not all of them its defining qualities --- not even for him personally.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

No, it's free will if your actions aren't constrained by your pre-existing inclinations. If all you do is what you feel like doing, then you don't have free will at all, you just have robotic, animal instinct, and your actions are as deterministic as whatever physical processes have given rise to your desire to eat bananas. Like what? Your "free will" is just unexamined determinism. If all you can do is what you desire to do, then you're exactly as pre-determined as your desires are. And we have pretty good reason to believe that our desires are just deterministic physical programming.How do you have more free will than my Roomba or my cat? If all you can do is what you desire, then I don't see how you can.

Free will, definitionally, is your ability to take action and express preference outside the chain of physical causality and circumstance.But if all you can do is what you desire to do, then you're no more free than my cat, because you can only take actions consistent with your desires, and your desires are the deterministic product of physical causality and circumstance. Thus you are without free will.