Summations Only

It is perfectly reasonable to claim that you have freewill in the general, man on the Clapham Omnibus sense. Never said otherwise.But if the man in the Clapham Omnibus happens to be on his way to lecture on neurobiology of the pre-frontal cortex at the Royal London School of Medicine, you'd need to qualify the claim a little.

Remember how philosophy has none of that rigour you like? We're at one of those positions here. What constraints free will is free of is a debate that has never been conclusively settled.It is not a settled issue on the basis of arbitrary definitions. Sometimes free will is definitionally the ability to take action and express without external coercion. It really depends on who is doing the talking when they make the utterance 'free will' and in what context.To back up my position that there is not one 'definitive free will' I'll quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's opening statement on free will:

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Free Will is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. Which sort is the free will sort is what all the fuss is about.

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The Stanford article goes into this line of reasoning too:

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On a minimalist account, free will is the ability to select a course of action as a means of fulfilling some desire. David Hume, for example, defines liberty as a power of acting or of not acting, according to the determination of the will. (1748, sect.viii, part 1). And we find in Jonathan Edwards (1754) a similar account of free willings as those which proceed from one's own desires.

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One reason to deem this insufficient is that it is consistent with the goal-directed behavior of some animals whom we do not suppose to be morally responsible agents.

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The article spends a lot of time talking about one particular reason most philosophers have cared about free will, and that is that free will gives us moral responsibility.I think we can agree that free will is not 'merely' choosing something we desire. It may require some level of metacognition about the choices available and a weighing up of basal desires with more complex social desires (I want money, but to get it I have to steal, Stealing is bad. I don't want to be bad. I therefore choose not to have money) and perhaps some other elements.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Or my will, as it is also known ... So, to summarize, if some force external to my mind and my desires compels me against my will to eat a shit sandwich, while my brain states out of my eyes in mute horror inwardly screaming "No, God no, please make it stop!", then I have free will, but when I regain control of my body and finally do what I want, namely not eating the shit sandwich, then I'm once more a helpless automaton.Wow, you brought your own reductio ad absurdum.I notice that Straggler hasn't yet chided you for redefining free will, and yet I should like to see you try to explain your concept of it to his friend the pedestrian.

And yet if you asked a hundred people, I'm not sure that one of them would give that definition. Which, I note, includes being compelled to do things that you don't want to do, so long as there's no physical causality involved. Why is your cat not free?

My goodwill towards my fellow man would in fact impel me to engage him in another more urgent topic of discourse, namely the fact that he's on the wrong bus.

You might choose not to, in order to demonstrate that your goodwill, no matter how impelling, can be subjugated by your free will.

Nah, you'd rather be right. You'd tell him to get off the number 170 that you're both on at its terminus at Victoria then take the District line tube to Whitechapel.But of course, being a free agent, he may just choose to get off the bus at Victoria and take the Buckingham Palace tour instead. We just can't know......

To describe the no. 170 as "the Clapham omnibus" would be to make a grotesque mockery of omniburine nomenclature. It may --- I concede, it does --- stop at Clapham Junction en route from Roehampton to Victoria, but this mere fleeting acquaintance with Clapham Junction, which, I beg to point out, is in fact in Battersea and not in Clapham, is scarcely a reason to elevate it to the status of "the Clapham omnibus".The profound though untutored wisdom of the man on the Clapham omnibus has time out of mind been celebrated in story and song; is he at this late date to be confounded with the riff-raff and Johnnies-come-lately who travel from Roehampton to Victoria by way of Battersea? I think not, sir; I think not.

It would be a weird and interestingly useless, but nevertheles iconic omnibus that confined its operations to within confines of its name.Plucky attempt though

Wait, you think the desires are your will?So when you get hungry or tired, that's a choice you're making? Your morning wood, that was by choice? The feeling of a full bladder, that's entirely of your own volition? The cramp in your gut that tells you to grab the TP and a copy of Mad magazine, "oh, don't mind me, I'm just choosing to have to drop Mr. Brown off at the pool and I'd very much appreciate it if you would let me use the toilet right now please!"You're making less and less sense, and talking less and less about anything people commonly understand as "will." I don't know whose position that's supposed to be a summary of, but it's clearly not mine. Did I say "force external to your mind and desires"? Seriously, if you can demonstrate that I did I'll concede all points.The question is whether physical determinism governs your actions. Free will has to mean that it does not. That's what it means. But if your actions are governed by your desires, and your desires are the product of physical determinism, then you have no free will. How can you?

Because nobody is. We're all Roombas.

Yes, as distinct from the physical sensations which you seem to be trying to conflate with them. Back in the English language, the word are synonymous: if I desire to do something I will to do it. If you don't think so then you should bear in mind that I, being an English speaker do, as this will assist you in reading my posts. What you said was that it would be free will if I "wanted a banana but instead ate a shit sandwich". Since by hypothesis it would not be my intention to eat a shit sandwich, the causal factor would therefore be something other than my thoughts and wishes; something other than me, the person who wants to eat the banana and not the shit sandwich.It does, therefore, seem that to fulfill your ideal of free will I would indeed have to be the helpless puppet of a force external to my self.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

If "freewill" of the intuitive man-in-the-street sort were compatible with determinism there wouldn't be anything to discuss. There would be no "problem of freewill" and everyone would be a determinist and a compatibilist anyway.That doesn't mean that the man-in-the-street notion of freewill is "correct" as such. Indeed I think you have persuasively argued that the compatibilist definition of free will is intellectually superior and should be adopted on that basis. But it does mean that when you use your compatibilist definition of freewill you cannot also claim to be using man-in-the-street terminology as you have stipulated one should.Thus the dilemma. The man-in-the-street notion of freewill is made up various components not all of which are consistent or coherent. But you cannot just pick out the sensible components and ignore the silly components and then claim that you are using the man-in-the-street definition of the terminology in question. Nor can you sensibly claim that the issue of determinism is not one of the "defining" qualities of one's notion of free will.The man-in-the-street notion of free will has a strong indeterministic libertarian component to it. As long as you are using free will to mean something that is compatible with determinism and which is non-libertarian you cannot claim to be using a man-in-the-street definition of free will. That there are areas of overlap between your definition and his is not in doubt. That the man-in-the-street notion of freewill is less coherent than yours is also not in doubt (by me anyway).But the fact remains that if you are claiming that free will is compatible with determinism you are not applying a man-in-the-street- definition of free will. Even if a tiger were zapped into existence fully formed ex-nihilo we could still all agree that it was a tiger couldn’t we? But if you tell someone that they both have freewill and that their choices and actions are deterministically dictated by a chain of causal events going all the way back to a point prior to their own existence they are likely to strongly object.Because the common sense intuitive man-in-the-street notion of free will considers human decision making to be exempt from determinism and for humans to be agents that are choosing between genuine, metaphysically robust alternative possibilities (to use the jargon).

Why, are you feeling them with something besides your physical brain? You're trying to sneak some kind of dualism up in here, but that's bullshit. Yes. Now, pay attention, because this is where it gets tricky: do the words "force external to your mind and desires" appear anywhere in that phrase? Right. The causal factor would be your free will. That's because this would be a test of the existence of free will, as I said. Is it your assertion, now, that your free will is a "force external to your mind and desires?"

No, it's not. If someone sets up an exercise where a person who is deathly allergic to peanuts has a choice between a Payday bar and a Milky Way bar, is there really a choice, or is everythying set up such that there is only one possible outcome? No, I merely want a will that is not just a step in an unalterable causal chain. I don't want it divorced of "me", I want "me" divorced from causality. This is impossible, but this is what I would consider a free will. I'm not saying it has to be random. I'm merely saying that the prior state of the immaterial or material you does not dictate that only one action can be performed, that there can be two solutions to the question of "What will I do." I believe that the universe is constructed in such a way that the previous state of your being, combined with the environment as it is perceived, equal one and only one possible action. For free will to exist, the universe has to be such that there are two equally possible outcomes from the equation and that you are free to follow either path. And it doesn't even have to be for every decision, if there is at least one decision that you make thusly, there is room for free will. I challenge you to find such an occurance. Compatibilism only does this by redefining what people mean by free will. A hard determinist just doesn't bother. He is unperturbed by admitting that free will, as it is commonly held, is not possible, and goes about his day. If the word "Horizon" were defined as "the edge of the world" then yes, I would say there is no such thing as the horizon. You can come along and say, the Earth has no edge, therefore horizon must mean something else, but it's not going to change the fact that horizon, as it is commonly defined and used, does not exist. It would be easier and less confusing to just come up with a different term, rather than redefining one that already has a meaning simply because the meaning makes no sense. I believe I have. If you mean something different than what I have addressed, then perhaps you are not explaining yourself very clearly.