Summations Only

I'd see it as more useful to understand will for what it is. You were asking about the famous "problem of free will", and I was suggesting that people's concerns about moral responsibility may have had a lot to do with it. Christians were just an example. No, it doesn't, but then I'm not consciously following a physics script because I can't read the script. And because the libertarians have a definition of will that is illusory, why do some determinists seem to want to use the same definition?

To cut down the size of messages, I've responded to a selection of your points. If you feel something I missed is important for the advancement of the discussion let me know. I read it all. This is not about the differences between the Incompatabilist Determinists who believe that Freewill is abstract thing only and the Compatabilists. It's about the man in the street and the compatabilist who both agree that Free Will is a concrete actually existing thing.I see no reason to suppose that we must consider Free Will as necessarily being a mere abstraction. How is being able to choose without a gun to your head different from choosing without a gun to the head? It seems like the answer should be self-evident. If I forced you to do everything at gunpoint - would you consider yourself 'free'? On the other hand, if I allowed you to do whatever you want, with a few restrictions (crime etc) would you consider yourself considerably freer? Even though you are a determinist and you don't regard yourself free of the laws of physics, you still consider yourself free in other regards. Not free from the laws of society free, but pretty free nevertheless.Another way to look at the question:
When a person points a gun at me, and says 'pick the red shirt'. Whose will is it that I pick the red shirt? I think it should be apparent that it is the gunholder's will. The gunholder can freely choose between all the different shirts I have (He is still constrained by what shirts I own of course) without any coercive force. He is the thing that makes the decision. While I employ my will to pick up the shirt etc, I am not doing so freely since there is an external (to me) force (viz. a fashion conscious gunman) A distinction without a difference. My point was to say where Dr A and Mr Mits were in agreement. They are both pointing at the same real events and giving them the same names. They do have differences of opinion about how it all works on some metaphysical level. They are in agreement that tigers are big cats, but they are disagreement over whether tigers were specially created by a magic designer. I could choose to steal a necklace. If I wasn't starving, if I have no gun pointed at my head or anything of that sort, if I do steal it, that would be of my own free will. Dr A and Mr Mits agree on this. They both see something in the world and they both call it the same thing. The just disagree about how it can be.So yes, they disagree about the metaphysics of the thing, but they don't disagree about anything concrete about the thing.The substance dualist believes humans have a non-material soul. To them, the very definition of human includes the notion of the soul. But when a substance dualist and a monist come into contact - they can both talk about humans and be referring to the same thing, even though they believe that some of the metaphysical properties are different. And if Mr Mits also says the tiger is the animate spirit of fear. Does that mean tigers don't exist or does it mean Mr Mits has some erroneous beliefs about tigers?If Mr Mits' belief about free will is right - then it is my view that he does not have free will. But I see no reason to believe that his beliefs are right. "I did it of my own free will."I might want to be able to allow Mr Mits to say the above and for it to be a true statement. I might want this so that I have grounds to praise Mr Mits or punish him, depending on the nature of his action.This is where Dr A and Mr Mits are critically agreeing with one another.If it was picking the red shirt out that day, that is presumably because he likes red, that he thought his boss liked red, or because he saw someone wearing red on TV, or it might because an undetermined determiner caused him to pick red. But the decision was made within the mind of the individual, without extreme external coercion. Both Mr Mits and Dr A would agree that it was not a completely random choice. They both agree that the choice is made weighted by such things as social preferences and individual preferences. They both agree that if he picked the blue shirt (a shirt he dislikes) there is probably some reason. They both agree that if the reason is not too strong, then picking it would still be an act of free will. But if the reason is very strong, for example he picked it because if he didn't he'd be murdered, then they both agree that picking the blue shirt is not an act of his free will. I would say that the illusion is the notion that the will is free from determinism. I'd say it was a very strong illusion.When a person says 'I did it of my own free will' they are not referring to something illusory, but an actual fact of human experience. They may be suffering under the illusion that something nondeterministic is going on, but they are right to notice that one can do something that is congruent with ones own desires/will, free of certain constraints.

Modulous writes: Modulous, and Dr. Adequate and Straggler and bluegenes, et al - are you guys so against Dualism that you have to cling more strongly to Determinism than you should? I don't think so, but I am scratching my head here.I have been avidly following this thread of course, but I sense that my opinion on Determinism is decidedly in the minority amongst the participants here. My opinion is that Determinism is bogus. For me Dualism is also bogus (it basically requires something Supernatural). But why do I think Determinism is bogus?For me it's all chaos that can only be characterized by probabilities. In my studies of Chaos Theory and Quantum Physics, the ability to predict the state of the universe a Planck unit of time later could not be completely derived from the current state, and thus to string together gazillions of Planck time units later, you are at best looking only at relative likelihoods. Something non-deterministic is very definitely going on. A fruit fly in the bathroom distracts the man shaving for a brief second, enough to cut his face and delay the moment he pulls out of the driveway in his car and winds up in an accident that changes your whole day/life/whatever.A planet in orbit is affected by all of the other planets as well as the sun: the many-body problem has not been solved. There are, at best, numerical integrations with fairly well-known error term growths over time. Can the planet decide to wobble slightly off the numerical path? Well, no - it's just a rock (but there have been some science fiction exceptions to this notion that remain unevidenced in our consensus of what reality is). Can a rabbit decide to wobble slightly off the numerical path? Ahah...now things are different, aren't they? Is the ability to decide to wobble in this manner what we mean by Free? For me, not exactly, although it is important.......I feel I am stuck like those sanctimonious State Prosecutors arguing that they don't know what pornography is, but they'll know it when they see it.What does this have to do with Free Will (maybe even as opposed to plain vanilla Will, whatever that is)? Not much at the surface, but when you dig down to the nitty gritty - it's everything important. As I have said earlier, to me, it's the sensation developed through a feedback system each individual develops over their life as they experience chaos. Yes, it is illusory. But so is your mental construct of the image in your mind of the tree you are looking at out the window, which you also learned throughout your life experience from the start. One might argue, "Well - the tree is something real. Is Free Will real?" I will argue it is, but only to the extent that all of us know it and have experienced it. Not everyone on the planet has experienced a tree. There is much more to explore.For me, the sensation of Free Will is very much at the core of what it means to be self-aware. I do not see how something can be self-aware without an awareness of what it wants. And what it wants is developed from the beginning, using a feedback system that has, over time, rejected certain impulses as being counter-productive, while other impulses have had positive results that further flesh out what these wants are. Free Will is the sensation that you are in control of yourself, as confirmed by the feedback.

I'm not for determinism because I'm against dualism.
Though perhaps, partly at least, I am against dualism because I am for determinism. Chaos Theory is deterministic. Just because it is not predictable due to sensitivity to initial conditions that can never be measured with sufficient accuracy, does not mean each step is not determined by a prior one.Think of the classic chaotic system: The Double Pendulum. It is perfectly deterministic, but impossible to predict. When one thing causes another thing, which results in a new state of affairs from which derives another one...we call that deterministic. The man's life was determined to change from the moment that fruit fly flew in through window (and if we follow the reasoning - we find ourselves at the big bang eventually).

You could let him shoot you.Is coercion a restriction on freedom of will?People are coerced all of the time into making choices they otherwise wouldn't make. I'm coerced into taking the longer route to work every day because the government decides to construct the road system in a grid instead of cutting through all those meddling parkinglots between my place and where I work.Does this really hamper my freedom of will?I don't feel as though it does. And the government doesn't either.JonEdited by Jon, : No reason given.

To speak for myself, no.First of all, the view I have argued would, as I have said, apply just as much to an immaterial mind as a material brain.Secondly, I'm not actually a determinist in the strict sense. But I believe that the state of my mind is subject to what is called (not after me, alas) adequate determinism. The future of an unstable isotope is (so physicists tell us) not predictable given even given all the facts and the ability to comprehend all the consequences of these facts; my brain, I think, probably would be fairly predictable under the same circumstances. The systems in chaos theory are deterministic. Our inability to predict their future in that case is simply because we don't know everything about the system and wouldn't have the brainpower to compute its future if we did. (ETA: oh, Modulous said that already. Never mind.)Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

There are Dualist-Determinists and Non-Dualist Non-Determinists. So, I don't think so either.We're probably all scratching our heads a bit, because this is a kind of head-scratching topic.

Hi Modulus, But (a) picking the blue shirt would mean having a preference to live as the reason behind the choice, and (b) there is still the option to pick the red shirt as an act of defiance if that was what the person wanted to do.Would not an act of defiance be an act of free will?Enjoy.

Superficially they agree. But in terms of the conceptual meaning of the word tiger they are a world apart aren’t they? They have completely different beliefs about what a tiger is. That is the point. As recent discussions on abortion and souls aptly demonstrate the two groups of people do have fundamentally different ideas about what qualifies as human. It would be interesting to ask a soul believer whether a physically fully grown homo-sapien who lacked a soul was genuinely human in their eyes. I doubt the answer would be as straight-forward as you seem to be suggesting. Only if you divorce beliefs about a thing from the conceptual meaning of what that thing is. Which when we are talking about conceptual meaning of things like free will you just cannot do without completely changing the nature of the concept in question.Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

I would agree that it is preferable for a variety of reasons. But I suppose by useful I assumed that you were simply referring to it as being a basis for assigning moral culpability. In this sense of being useful I think a libertarian approach is perfectly adequate and indeed how we instinctively ascribe blame and praise anyway. We can’t help but think in terms of could-have-done-otherwise no matter how illusory that may in fact be. The evidence agrees that moral responsibility is tied up with our notions of free will. But it also seems to suggest that this is true across cultures and not purely a product of our Judeo-Christian heritage in the West.

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Previous work in cross-cultural psychology has shown that Westerners and non-Westerners differ in the way they think about moral responsibility, individual agency, and even the more fundamental notion of what it means to be a person; naturally, we expected to find some significant differences in the response patterns of these groups. Not so. In all four cultures, the majority of participants responded as indeterminists and incompatibilists! That is, the majority of participants believed our own universe to be indeterministic, and denied that moral responsibility could be compatible with determinism.

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LinkI don’t want that at all. As a revisionist I think the term free will ought to be redefined so that it is philosophically coherent and compatible with determinism in the way that Dr Adequate has put forward. But what I think ought to be the case and what the term free will actually means in terms of everyday man-in-the-street usage are not the same thing. Unlike Dr Adequate I don’t feel the need to insist that they are the same.

Even if it actually exists, that doesn't mean it is concrete. For example, eyesight exists, but it is not a concrete, physical thing, we can't point at "eyesight", we can only point at the effects eyesight causes, namely, the ability to distinguish colors, not walk into things, etc. "Eyesight" is abstract, but it allows us to do concrete things.Likewise, free will is an abstract ability. You can't point to "free will", you can only point to the effects free will has.Let's try a different example using eyesight, because it is much closer to free will than tigers and unicorns.We all agree that eyesight exists, we see its effects on the animals of the world. We even agree on obvious examples where it doesn't exist for some individuals.Now, let's say there is also a widespread belief in "Supersight." This ability is understood to be the ability to, among other things, read a full eye test chart, top to bottom, from 50 yards, unaided.Now, scientists study optics, doctors inspect the biology of the human eye, and it becomes clear to some that this "ability" is physically impossible. I go ahead and start posting this on fora, becoming a "Sight-Terminust." Sight-Terminusm causes an uproar among Supersightists. Finally, Mr. Mits says, "I can prove Supersight exists, for I know someone who has it."We all head down to the local American football field, and this guy with supersight stands at the goal line. An eye chart is set up at the 50 yard line. The guy squints down the field, and rattles off the letters, top to bottom. Mr. Mits smiles, spreads his ahnds and exclaims, "See! I told you!"I'm less than impressed. "That doesn't prove Supersight. He could have just memorized the letters. In fact, I saw him looking at the chart while we were setting up."Mits: "Did not!"
Me: "Did too!"A compatibilist walks onto the field. "Guys, guys. Your debate is meaningless. You're both right. This is clearly an example of supersight."Mits smiles, "See, he agrees with me."I look at the Compatibilist. "You think he squinted down the field, 50 yards, and read the letters off the chart?"C: "Of course not! That's impossible! That's not supersight."
Mits frowns.
Me: "That's exactly what supersight is!"
C: "But that's physically impossible."
Me: "Yes! I know! That's why I said supersight doesn't exist!"
C: "But why would you define it as something impossible? Supersight requires some sort of aid, either memorization, or a lens or something."
Me: "But that's not supersight. Once you add aids, it's no longer supersight."
Mits: "Yeah, what he said."
C: "Mits! Didn't you just agree with me that what this man did was an example of supersight?"
Mits: "Yes, but..."
C: "No buts. We agree on the phenomenon, you're just a little confused as to the mechanics. We're really talking about the same thing here."
Me: "No, we're not! Even if we accept your definition, it does nothing to answer the debate about whether people can read an eye test from 50 yards!"********************I'll respond to the rest of the post later, but I had this idea whilst driving to work, and we'll see if this explains the point I'm trying to make.

By telling him that what he calls a "tiger" (i.e. a telepathic beast from hell) probably doesn't exist but that there are physical things which can be called "tigers" which aren't nearly so scarey and on which the false concept of the mythical "tiger" is based.We can take a revisionist approach and revise the meaning of the term "tiger" to be accordance with reality rather than fantasy.Was that so hard? I think this is the position you find yourself in when insisting that you and the man-in-the-street mean the same thing by "free will" when conceptually you are poles apart in many important respects.Better to confront the differences and revise the concept than simply take some sort of head in the sand approach and deny any difference in meaning exists. So you do accept that your use of the term "free will" is very conceptually different to that being applied by the-man-in-the-street? Or not?

No. No. The gun in your hand is a part of the environment that constrains my choices. Without the gun, the environment still constrains my choices. In each case, the action I "choose" is the only action I could have "chosen" considering the constraints placed on me by the environment and my genetics.So, no I don't really consider myself freer. I agree that it seems like I am, but this is an illusion. Exactly, coercion constrains will. I'm with you here. I disagree. His choice was just as constrained by the environemtn as yours is. The only difference is that the agent doing the constraining in your case is another person with will, whereas in the gunman's case, the constraints are all either internal or non-conscious environmental. They are pointing to the same events and saying they are caused by something they are naming the same. When you ask them to describe that thing they are giving the same name, the descriptions are very different. Conflation of terms is at work, not actual identity. If your environment, working on your genetics, conspired to make it such that stealing a necklace was your only option, then yes, you would steal a necklace. It would be your will, but you have still yet to prove that that will is free. If the universe is such that there is no option of your will not being that you steal a necklace, then how is your will free? But its not Mr. Mits' belief about free will, it's his definition of free will. Free will, to him and to me, means that a person can break causality, that he has metaphysically robust options, that it is not determined what course of action he will take such that all other courses are not really options.Any other definition of free will is something else. We may all agree that people have this other ability, but does nothing to solve the debate about whether people have the ability I described above. This is a very important point. This is the basis for a deterministic justice system, and deterministic moral culpability. But it doesn't make the decision a free one, merely that the determining factors were internal rather than external. How do you determine strength to decide "this choice was free" but "this one wasn't"? In all cases, the environment and his genetics prevented him from being able to choose the other option. If we could copy the universe, all states of energy and matter at the moment before selection, all Mits' would pick the red shirt, every single time. Mr. Mits would disagree with that, he would say, it may not be a completely random choice, but the blue shirt was a definite option, it was possible for me to pick it. That's what I'm saying is illusory. That illusion has been labelled free will. That is how Mr. Mits feels, in fact, that's how I feel when I make a decision. I feel like the choice was not predetermined, that until the choice was made, it was impossible to know what I woudl do, even if someone had perfect knowledge of the state of the universe at the moment before the choice. This is a very generous assumption. Doing something according to your desires is entirely possible. The question is whether those desires were predetermined. If they were, they're not free.

Not if your desire to be defiant is itself wholly caused by factors over which you ultimately have no control at all. No.

Hi Xong,I see it this way,determinism dictates what happens after a causal agent is effected by guess what? Yep another causal agent.What bakes my brain is how some folks would say the universe is uncaused and in the same breath tout hard determinism. Which seems contradictory to me.So which is it? I say both. Ut oh, smacks of dualism eh? I say no
it is all one thing. The illusion imo is that it is two separate things. sabe?We humans perceive the world through our senses. We do not and can not know what the real world is. We live in a state of illusory confidence. The quantum world shows how everything is in flux and nothing is nailed down. On a macro level we go about our day using our maps of the world to navigate our lives. Is the map real or illusion? Does something that exist need a physical address? I think free will is like that, although it may be illusory in the sense that it is our perception, it does not make it any less real imo. mah dos centavos.
Monty Python Galaxy song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWVshkVF0SYEdited by 1.61803, : No reason given.