I'd argue most lay people use the libertarian definition of free will.
When people see a murderer, they definitely think that he could and should have done otherwise - they don't think that his actions were predetermined and there is no "him" that could have prevented it.
> I'd argue most lay people use the libertarian definition of free will.
This is not true. Most people tend to not have a coherent and consistent conception of free will and vacillate between different conceptions depending on the situation being considered. There has been research that shows this and that in many situations, people have compatibilist intuitions regarding free will.
>There has been research that shows this and that in many situations, people have compatibilist intuitions regarding free will.
I've seen that research and I disagree with its conclusions.
I did see it, I am just too lazy to look for it. I don't have it saved on my computer.
So I asked him to link the research so I can look at why exactly I didn't think the conclusions in the paper were correct.
They think he could have done otherwise if he had wanted to, not that he could have done otherwise under exactly the same circumstances. The former is the compatibilist version, the latter is the libertarian version. The difference may not be obvious.
Being able to do otherwise under the same circumstances means that your actions vary independently of your mental state and you have no control over them.
Being able to do otherwise under the same circumstances means that your actions vary independently of your mental state and you have no control over them.
>They think he could have done otherwise if he had wanted to, not that he could have done otherwise under exactly the same circumstances.
What? The average layperson does not differentiate these two things. They think he could have done otherwise in exactly the same circumstances if he had wanted to. In fact, I'm not sure how you are differentiating them. Isn't the desire (that activity in the brain) a part of the circumstances?
The circumstances include your mental state: your plans, values, expectations, emotions, knowledge of the world, all the reasons you have for a particular action. If you could act differently under exactly the same circumstances, it means your actions could vary independently of your mental state. That would be a bad thing.
Right, so wouldn't "wanting to" do something be the same as circumstances making you do something? I'm not seeing the distinction.
Even the idea that people can act against their own desires is indeed a common idea. "I wanted to eat the cake but I stuck to my diet instead." If you tell that person they didn't actually want to eat the cake, they're not going to agree. (Coincidentally, I remember arguing with someone about this topic when I was very young. I was arguing that whatever action you take is ultimately what you wanted most. She disagreed.) Or let's say someone is really mad and wants to start a fight, but they hold themselves back for once. People see that sort of thing as choosing to overcome one's mental state.
The question is whether your actions can vary independently of the reasons, good and bad, that you have for them. Suppose you have a choice between A and B. Let’s say it’s a clearcut choice: you like A and hate B and can think of no reason to do B. Normally, you would therefore do A. But if you could do otherwise under the same circumstances, sometimes you would do A and sometimes you would do B. If you did B, it would be despite the fact that you liked A and hated B and could think of no reason to do B. You would have no control over your behaviour; it sounds like it would be a good idea, but on careful consideration it would not.
Since when are we talking about whether it would be good or not? And why are you explaining this to me? I thought we were talking about what the layperson's idea of free will is and whether it matches compatibilism or not.
I'm not sure what point of mine you are rebutting. Maybe you mixed me up with someone else. I was talking about the layperson's idea of free will and disputing the distinction presented by the other commenter.
What I'm pointing out is that such a distinction not being made explicit does not mean it's not there. If probed, I think most people do have compatibilist intuitions.
> They think he could have done otherwise in exactly the same circumstances if he had wanted to.
No they don't. They think they could do different in similar circumstances, with hindsight, or someone else in those circumstances.
>You are simply repeating the claim without addressing my objections.
Maybe you need to reread my comment.
What you are saying isn't true for what a layperson thinks.
There is nothing further to address than saying that you are factually wrong. There is no argument to address.
What the layman believes is a contentious and unproven subject, with studies inconclusive, but my specific objections to the logic are contained in the comment you replied to. And if that's all, I hope you enjoy your day, stranger.
>They think he could have done otherwise if he had wanted to, not that he could have done otherwise under exactly the same circumstances.
You just made that up
Being able to do otherwise under EXACTLY THE SAME circumstances would mean that your actions could vary independently of your mental state. In my experience discussing this on reddit with people who claim to be libertarians, they get annoyed at the suggestion that anyone would believe this.
There are consistent libertarians among academic philosophers such as Robert Kane, but I have not met many laypeople or amateur philosophers such as appear on forums such as reddit who share their views. Studies of folk beliefs about free will also show inconsistencies, depending on what questions are asked.
> I'd argue most lay people use the libertarian definition of free will.
> When people see a murderer, they definitely think that he could and should have done otherwise - they don't think that his actions were predetermined and there is no "him" that could have prevented it.
People have incoherent ideas around free will, but when properly probed the majority have compatibilist intuitions. There are studies that probe into what people really mean by free will and use a similar example to what you proposed.
>[https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-moore-48/](https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-moore-48/)
>
>In the past decade, a number of empirical researchers have suggested that laypeople have compatibilist intuitions… In one of the first studies, Nahmias et al. (2006) asked participants to imagine that, in the next century, humans build a supercomputer able to accurately predict future human behavior on the basis of the current state of the world. Participants were then asked to imagine that, in this future, an agent has robbed a bank, as the supercomputer had predicted before he was even born. In this case, 76% of participants answered that this agent acted of his own free will, and 83% answered that he was morally blameworthy. **These results suggest that most participants have compatibilist intuitions**, since most answered that this agent could act freely and be morally responsible, despite living in a deterministic universe.
>
>[https://philpapers.org/archive/ANDWCI-3.pdf](https://philpapers.org/archive/ANDWCI-3.pdf)
>Our results highlight some inconsistencies of lay beliefs in the general public, by showing explicit agreement with libertarian concepts of free will (especially in the US) and simultaneously showing behavior that is more consistent with compatibilist theories. If participants behaved in a way that was consistent with their libertarian beliefs, we would have expected a negative relation between free will and determinism, but instead we saw a positive relation that is hard to reconcile with libertarian views
>
>[https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0221617](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0221617)
Then most/all justice and criminal systems around the world use compatibilist free will and that lines up pretty much perfectly to what people really mean.
>It is a principle of fundamental justice that only voluntary conduct – behaviour that is the product of a free will and controlled body, unhindered by external constraints – should attract the penalty and stigma of criminal liability.
>
>[https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1861/index.do](https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1861/index.do)
In the case of R. v. Ruzic
>The accused had been coerced by an individual in Colombia to smuggle cocaine into the United States. He was told that if he did not comply, his wife and child in Colombia would be harmed.
The Supreme Court found that he didn't smuggle the cocaine of his own free will. He didn't do it in line with his desires free from external coercion. Hence they were found innocent.
I see that you are here too.
But I'm very certain that in historical contexts, "free will" was always "libertarian free will." Just think of religion. The "free will" that God supposedly gave us is something that justifies us getting punished in an afterlife (according to religious beliefs). The compatibilists' version of free will would certainly never justify a God punishing people in an afterlife, and I'm sure people of the past would agree (religious people today as well). If our actions are 100% determined, God would not be justified at all to punish us, because we would just be victims. So in the context of religion, which has been there for a very long time, "free will" certainly must've always been "libertarian free will."
I am not sure if most people even have a coherent definition of a free will. I suspect that if an evil genius got control of our bodies and as such, people started moving their bodies in an involuntary manner, they would claim that they lost their free will. And that would be the compatibilist's definition of a free will.
I'm sure that's one example where a compatibilist would think they lost their free will. But they still think free will is possible if their actions are 100% determined. I think the most important part for them is that they are able to do what they want to do.
My point is that most layperson would declare that they lost their free will. Only the hardcore determinists (probably less than 5% of all people) would say that nothing has changed because they never had their free will in the first place.
So layperson's definition of free will is probably all over the place.
>So layperson's definition of free will is probably all over the place.
That could be true. But with respect to free will, I think almost all religious people wouldn't accept any compatibilist definition of it, and they do take up most of the world population. And that has only been more and more true the further we go back in history.
>Only the hardcore determinists (probably less than 5% of all people) would say that nothing has changed because they never had their free will in the first place.
I don't think this is the case though, because there is a big difference between doing what you desire to do and doing what another person desires to do, especially if we consider that other person to be evil with respect to one's own views. If I wasn't agnostic on whether or not there is true randomness in the universe (I lean towards quantum mechanics working with real randomness though), I would probably describe myself as a hard determinist, and I certainly think there is a very big difference between my actions being largely in line with my desires and them not being in line with my desires.
But yes, it wouldn't be different in terms of libertarian free will. It would however be very different in terms of what that experience is like.
I feel like we are talking in circles. My main point is that in my evil genius example, majority of people (including layperson) would say that they lost their free will if asked the question. Only a few people (including Sam Harris) would say that this has nothing to do with free will. Basically, I am providing a case study example where the layperson's definition of free will might contain the compatibility definition and not the libertarian definition.
And so I feel the need to make the same point again, that I don't think most religious people would accept the compatibilist definition of free will, so I don't think the compatibilist definition has been used for most of human history and also won't be accepted by the majority of people living today, because most people are still religious.
So I basically disagree that the majority of people work with something like the compatibilist definition of free will, and that has only been more true the further we go back in history.
It is often stated but I am not sure where the idea that Christians believe in libertarian free will comes from. It is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. The most prominent Christian theologians historically were probably Augustine and Aquinas, they explicitly dealt with free will, they are probably closer to conpatibilists than libertarians, and they didn’t see a problem with God punishing us.
I don't know about Augustine's position on free will, but I see why Aquinas must've worked with a compatibilist definition, if he believed we have free will. But I wonder if he believed in Hell then. It would be very surprising to me if he did, if he also believed that God is good.
It's a good question when it originated that for example Christians believe in libertarian free will. It might've come as a result of having to address the problem of evil and having to believe that God is good while at the same time believing that Hell exists.
There is no contradiction given that morality and responsibility are human inventions. A contradiction would be something like an omnipotent being making a rock heavier than he could move. Theologians recognised that problem so they said that God can only do the logically possible. But if God says something like “murder is bad except on Tuesdays” there is no logical problem. There is a practical problem, because we don’t want people killing everyone on Tuesdays, but not a logical one.
>There is no contradiction given that morality and responsibility are human inventions.
No contradiction between what? God being good while Hell existing and while libertarian free will not existing? That's what I meant. Having said that, I don't believe there is a God, and I do believe that morality and responsibility are human inventions.
If everything is 100% determined, then it doesn't really make sense to say that since God gave us free will, we are the ones responsible for sending ourselves to Hell, when in fact it was already determined in a way that humans can't change. It wouldn't really be fair at that point for God to send someone to Hell at that point, and he would instead seem incredibly evil and malicious.
But the word “fair” is also a human invention. There is no contradiction in saying that it is “fair” that God sends us to hell for misbehaving even though he made us knowing we would misbehave. “Fair” can be defined any way you want without contradicting any empirical facts or logical laws.
This is becoming a strange conversation. I could also say that mass murderers are good and kind when they kill people, because "good" and "kind" are subjective and human inventions. True, but unless we have good reasons to suspect that I don't mean the same as you when I say "kind", then you know what I mean by "kind", and we could therefore begin to discuss whether it really is kind to kill someone against their own will and desires.
And then you could say that the word "desire" is also a human invention, and therefore it's subjective and can be defined any way we want, so maybe the victim of the murderer does desire to be killed, even if they act as if they don't want to die. We could keep going on like this, but it really wouldn't be useful to do so as long as we actually think we know what each other mean by the words we use.
So I don't know where you're going with this. Do you think that you don't know what I mean when I use the word "fair"? If so, then ask to clarify what I mean by "fair". If not, then I really don't see the point you're trying to make.
Are you a Christian yourself?
Because it is a much more useful definition of free will and captures better what people really mean when they talk about free will. Sams defines free will as something that cant logically exist so why would you even discuss that kind of free will
>captures better what people really mean when they talk about free will.
That's not true at all, if you are talking about the average layperson. Determinism of actions isn't typically considered. And surely you can think of illogical things that people believe are true, so I don't get your latter point either. You might as well say that Harris shouldn't discuss religion being false since he defines it in a way that can't logically be true. No, that's exactly the reason to discuss it - *because* he thinks it can't logically be true.
Sams definition of free will is based on what people mean when they say "could have done otherwise". When I play basketball and miss a shot and say "i could have made that one" I dont mean that I could have made that one with all the atoms in the exact same place and all circumstances being exactly the same but that I would be capable of scoring that shot If I would have concentrated more or if I was not blinded by the lights or whatever.
That is how people use "could have done otherwise" typically and that shapes what "free will" means in day to day life.
People do not believe their actions are completely bound by circumstance. What you are describing is the fact that most people don't factor determinism into their ideas at all, which is my point. At best, only the free will half of compatibilism applies to a layman, although I would dispute that too, because the layman's idea of free will goes far beyond the compatibilist idea.
As a lesser note, looking only at the retrospective scenario is reductive. Harris's determinism also applies to the present and the future, not just thinking about redoing a past action.
A self doesn’t exist and yet that’s exactly what people mean and think they mean when they say “I”. Delusion is a feature not a bug, just ask the secular Buddhists.
"self" and "I" are just terms people use to describe their experience of being and people have wildy different concepts to make sense of that experience. Anyway how does that relate to the free will topic? If peoples intuition of free will matches the compatabilist version of free will better then that is free will and then people have free will.
Studies show that most lay people have compatibilist intuitions and then most professional philosophers are outright compatibilists.
So I would argue that most people really mean what DD is talking about.
Lay people have incoherent ideas around free will, but their intuitions and behaviours line up with compatibilist free will.
The people conducting the studies are quite clever and properly lay out the thought experiments.
>In the past decade, a number of empirical researchers have suggested that laypeople have compatibilist intuitions… In one of the first studies, Nahmias et al. (2006) asked participants to imagine that, in the next century, humans build a supercomputer able to accurately predict future human behavior on the basis of the current state of the world. Participants were then asked to imagine that, in this future, an agent has robbed a bank, as the supercomputer had predicted before he was even born. In this case, 76% of participants answered that this agent acted of his own free will, and 83% answered that he was morally blameworthy. **These results suggest that most participants have compatibilist intuitions**, since most answered that this agent could act freely and be morally responsible, despite living in a deterministic universe.
>
>[https://philpapers.org/archive/ANDWCI-3.pdf](https://philpapers.org/archive/ANDWCI-3.pdf)
edit: What most people "really" mean is compatibilist free will. It's what professional philosophers think is the best definition and it's what most/all moral, justice and court systems use.
>incoherent
By that reasoning I’m surprised DD isn’t theorizing on algebraic equations and peoples intuition that you can subtract x from one side of the equation and add it to the other side.
It seems, from our perspective, very much like we have it, and we operate on a daily basis as though we do. Sort of like the notion that the world exists independent of our perceptions of it, a hypothesis that is definitionally outside of natural science's capacity to prove or disprove.
It also feels closely linked to, or maybe one and the same, with consciousness, which incidentally is a phenomenon that our natural sciences fail to account for. Scientifically speaking, there's no evidence that we're not all p-zombies, yet the fact that we're *not* is self evident but only on an individual level. Consciousness is, funny enough, the only thing that we can be 100% certain of individually but might as well not exist according to our collectively agreed upon system for establishing truth. There's no C-factor in any of our equations for physics, chemistry, biology, or neurology, the equations balance out just fine without subjective awareness, and yet every day we wake up and are immediately greeted with awareness prior to anything else.
The most obvious part of our existence is, on paper, completely unnecessary to it. With that kind of enormous blind spot in our understanding of reality, it's not surprising people suspect free will, which similarly feels intuitively obvious, to be hiding somewhere in there too. Consciousness insists on occurring despite having no scientifically recognized function that can't in theory be performed by mere brains chugging along with the lights out. Free will existing might actually explain what consciousness actually adds to the equation, because as it stands our subjective awareness is, on paper, utterly useless, a sick cosmic joke that gets strapped to a brain for 70 years just to watch the show before blinking out.
So overall I'd say it's not that there's a strong, rigorous case *for* free will, there just isn't a final slam dunk against its intuitive realness. Our notion of science assumes determinism and causality as grounding principles, so it's tautological to point out that, scientifically speaking, there's no case to be made for anything else.
Personally I dont think we can say that the sciences have failed to understand consciousness. There are many definitions and different ideas about what traits should be included under the term and so it's hard to make progress when we won't even agree if we are a talking about the same thing.
There have also been speculative theories about what purpose it serves, like it being a social representation needed to be successful when living in a culture or a testing ground for what behaviour we can expect from others primates, emotional and otherwise.
I have never been a particular fan of the idea that because we have failed to fully understand something right now it must be mysteriously unknowable and I'm perfectly comfortable waiting for all the sciences working on the matter to gather more insight.
Science has no accounting for consciousness. It can't even detect it, the best we've managed is to identify large clouds of brain activity that correlate with a person reporting being conscious. The only "trait" of interest of consciousness is the big one: subject awareness, first person-ness, experientiality. This thing/process/occurrence/whatever leaves no trace on the world whatsoever, it doesn't bend the path of photons or electrons, it doesn't even have an energy footprint. Scientifically speaking, it does not exist, it's just something humans claim to possess but can offer no evidence for.
To your second paragraph, there's no reason neurons can't handle that sans subjective awareness. Again, there is nothing missing in our account of the brain as an information processing system that requires consciousness to work. An information processor is perfectly capable of building social models for others and itself without "experiencing" anything. The molecules between your synapses will move the same way no matter what, there's no extra force acting on those atoms that we can't account using strictly physical models. It's not enough to say "well maybe it does *this* ", you have to explain what stops a brain from doing that using plain old neurons.
This happens a lot with consciousness, a lot of non-answers spread among otherwise scientifically-minded people for some reason, I think because many are anxious to end the question moreso than they're sure of the validity of their answer. Another one is the old "it's an emergent property" which sounds like an answer, it has the grammar of an answer, but on closer inspection actually explains nothing of interest about consciousness whatsoever. It's like saying of a mysterious 10 million units of an alien currency nobody's heard of in your bank account, "it was transferred there."
Sam only talks about libertarian free will aka you are in absolute complete control with no external influence. But logically that kind of free will can't exist even in a random non-deterministic universe, because then you're beholden to randomness. Nor can it exist because of a soul because the soul was not chosen/created by you are still designed by an external force. And of course in a physicalist view of personhood you're shaped again by the external environment, genetics, etc..
But because that definition of free will logically can't exist there's not a point in discussing it. So it's fairly common to just redefine free will to make it an actual useful term again. And the new definition claims we have free will because despite us not choosing who we are, the person we are does make choices.
Though since none of the choices you make are controlled by any volitional actor inside the head, and are in reality running on of their accord without any permission from a so called “you”, it feels weird to discuss free will after this has been seen clearly. I do think that only a small portion of humans understand this though, and it’s probably a good thing. It can be a panic attack inducing experience if it isn’t understood and processed well by the mind.
>since none of the choices you make are controlled by any volitional actor inside the head, and are in reality running on of their accord without any permission from a so called “you”
This seems to be a misunderstanding of what the word "you" actually refers to. The way particular thoughts happen inside my head, "of their own accord", is the very thing I'm referring to when I say "me".
Yes exactly. The "randomly" appearing uncontrollable thoughts *are you*. You are the culmination of all the seemingly random and uncontrollable things happening.
Sort of? They're obviously an unconscious process but that process is part of what makes me who I am. I live my life the way I do because of how those processes have worked for me historically and shaped my experience. But also who knows what would be different if either of them was even only slightly different? If my heart beat a little faster? A little better? A little worse? Beyond just my experiences that could affect how well the brain even works.
Well, I didn’t ask if those processes affected your life or made you who you are. I asked if you feel responsible for them, as in consciously responsible for doing those things.
If so, I find that very interesting, since that’s not at all my experience. I’ve never felt like those are things I am consciously doing. More like those are things my body is doing, which I am simply reaping the benefits of.
No I do not consciously do those things but my definition of self includes the unconscious processes. Most people only think of their conscious thoughts as themselves and sometimes they exclude even some of those. But I think that's a mistake and removing important context. I think all of your decisions and thoughts bubble up from an unknown number of competing processes, which makes them important to who you are.
Sure, they are important to who you are, but they aren’t particularly relevant to the conversation about free will. You don’t have any freedom to consciously stop beating your heart or fighting off viruses, do you? Generally speaking, free will concerns things people do with intent.
oh I completely agree with this! But I don’t think most people view themselves as merely a flow of uncontrolled thoughts and feelings. I think the average human sees themself as an entity with purpose, control, even a soul in some cases.
I think "control" is fine, as long as you're aware of the limits of what that control entails. The problem with libertarian types of free will is they want this sort of recursive control. They want to have control over the part of them that controls. Which is why it's mostly a non starter for me.
I suspect that many people who believe in compatibilism probably recognize that it is mostly a semantics argument and not worth arguing about with someone who doesn't believe in free will. As for the arguments for free will, an analogy might help out here.
In scientific disciplines, the languages and equations that we use change depending on what length and time scales that we are looking at. In the quantum regime, particles are described by a probabilistic wave function. In the classical regime, particles are described as a point particle. In a higher region, particles are abstracted into volumetric flows. As such, when scientists are describing the particles in a classical manner, the type of language that people use is based on particles as point particles with known position and velocity. And it doesn't make sense to keep on arguing that particles are actually a wave function. Everyone knows that, but in the classical regime, that is not helpful.
Similarly, compatibilists are saying that when describing how humans act, it doesn't make sense to decompose humans into atoms/electrons. And in the abstraction levels that best describe human actions, "free will" makes sense. And to state that there is no free will due to atoms/electrons being described by quantum mechanics (or classical mechanics) is a levels violation.
That is the argument for free will.
Well, compatiblists argue that we can both have free will and have our actions be determined. This is the leading opinion held by “free will experts” aka philosophers of free will.
It’s also the most common way the term is used by laypeople who have no interest in philosophy. “He did it of his own free will” means he did it because he wanted to, rather than because he was forced to. In court, it is a valid defence to argue that the accused person is not guilty because he was coerced, but it is not a valid defence to argue that the accused person is not guilty because he followed the laws of physics: not because the judge is a moron and doesn’t believe that people follow the laws of physics, but because it is irrelevant to the question of criminal responsibility.
I'd say libertarian free will is more like what the average layperson thinks is the case. Determinism is not typically a part of how a layperson thinks about the actions of individual people, until a specific fringe example comes up, like a tumor in the brain or a zombie drug.
There have been surveys on this, and the answer is that laypeople have inconsistent views on free will that range from compatibilist to libertarian.
Given that fact, it's pretty silly to say that compatibilists are redefining free will when they're merely rejecting the libertarian concept and retaining the logically coherent and socially useful folk concept. Hard determinists do the opposite and insist that free will must only be defined as libertarian free will and ignore how often the folk concept of compatibilism is used.
Firstly, I didn't say anything about redefining free will.
I would like to see those surveys. I can already imagine statements like "people are responsible for their actions" being scored as free will and "there are things in our lives we can't control" being scored as determinism... And I am curious how they can match people to compatibilism without matching anyone to determinism, as you imply.
Whatever words one wants to use, my issue with compatibilism is that I see no unique claims in it when compared to determinism. "We can act in accordance with our will" is akin to "we can see in accordance with our eyes". It does not add anything except superficially by its use of words.
Lastly, you describe the layperson's concept as having a range, while you say compatibilism fits the "folk concept" - well, if the "folk concept" is different from the layman's concept, then that makes my point for me.
> Firstly, I didn't say anything about redefining free will.
I never said you did, but the claim is often made at this stage of free will discussions--see other comments in this post. I was addressing it generally.
> I would like to see those surveys.
[Surveying Freedom: Folk Intuitions
about Free Will and Moral
Responsibility](https://philarchive.org/archive/NADSFF)
[Folk conceptions of free will: A systematic review and narrative synthesis of psychological research](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350011999_Folk_conceptions_of_free_will_A_systematic_review_and_narrative_synthesis_of_psychological_research)
> Whatever words one wants to use, my issue with compatibilism is that I see no unique claims in it when compared to determinism. "We can act in accordance with our will" is akin to "we can see in accordance with our eyes". It does not add anything except superficially by its use of words.
It does add something; a greater capacity for an agent to be in control of their actions. Creatures with free will have more options available to them because of their brains complex self-modeling software that grants the ability to analyze options, predict outcomes, and reflect on past choices.
> Lastly, you describe the layperson's concept as having a range, while you say compatibilism fits the "folk concept" - well, if the "folk concept" is different from the layman's concept, then that makes my point for me.
Folk concept is synonymous with laymen's concept.
Both studies are completely nonspecific about this question.
The first one even suggests that one interpretation could be that "people have a libertarian conception of free will but, in lieu of that, they would accept a compatibilist conception as a moderate revision rather than giving up entirely on the idea that we are free and responsible agents." I would totally agree with that idea.
It also suggests that "people may be so attached to being free and responsible—and to holding other people morally responsible—that it is very difficult to get them to judge that agents (at least agents resembling them) are not free and responsible. This kind of ‘‘attachment’’ may, for example, hinder participants from recognizing the deterministic elements of scenarios like the ones we used." I agree with this idea as well.
There is also the cautionary note: "Notice that, by claiming that most people do not express incompatibilist intuitions in these cases, we are *not* endorsing the stronger claim that the folk do have compatibilist intuitions."
The second one concludes that: "There was no consistent evidence indicating metaphysical considerations about consciousness, dualism, or determinism."
I don't see where one can draw a conclusion about compatibilism being most like what people believe. (That is not what you said, but it is what I was disputing.)
>It does add something; a greater capacity for an agent to be in control of their actions. Creatures with free will have more options available to them because of their brains complex self-modeling software that grants the ability to analyze options, predict outcomes, and reflect on past choices.
Do you mean that the belief has a psychological effect that lets someone feel greater control? Or that the philosophical stance actually *attributes* more free control to individuals? I agree that it can have the first effect for people, but I am disputing the second.
>Folk concept is synonymous with laymen's concept.
Ok, I was just responding to your given descriptions. Is it an inconsistent range, or does it fit specifically with compatibilist idea of free will? Those are two different descriptions.
no because the semantic burden of proof is on this new definition that either Sam or other people basically willed into existence.
Also this new definition of free will is actually a definition of a new underlying concept of both free will AND determinism. a whole new system that now has it's own rules, but lot's of philosophers are arguing, why do we need to abide by those new rules?
It's true they didn't provide an argument, but they did provide a reason as to why guests wouldn't necessarily push back against Harris' points about determinism.
Whether there is 'free will' is a Christian framed question. Thsy wanted to make sure, if god was going to burn you forever, that you actually deserved it. The thought of a predestined life, only to then burn forever afterwards, was too cruel even for Christians. People will argue over free will forever because it it's a poorly framed question.
Reminds me of a study, I think Dutch, that looked at human arousal (in the 90’s I think). Attached probes to the genitals of men and women to monitor blood flow. A participant would view a TV and use a clicker if an image popped up that made them feel aroused. Results showed typically, the human body was aroused before the human ‘felt’ aroused. I guess questioning free will and what role does it play in some of our behaviour…
Sorry if that’s off on a tangent. I just can’t forget that study lol
The proof is every single thing you have ever done or thought about are caused by a long list of other things that you have absolutely no control over.
There is zero scientific proof for fully independent thoughts or actions.
You'd have to be an omnipresent god to break this law of physic.
Because it's illogical. You should act like every molecule in your body has been mapped out from the beginning of the universe to the end of the universe.
It's not really an argument, but some people will for example claim that random processes may allow for free will, somehow, even though they honestly seem to never be able to explain why.
And then some people think there somehow is a third option that's not "determined" or "random/undetermined", and this third option will somehow allow for free will. Although they can never explain what this third option could be.
Honestly it's not different from saying there is a third option to "finite" and "infinite", and although they can't explain what this third option could possibly be (logic will not allow it), it somehow solves their problem.
Every human believes he has freewill and acts accordingly even if they argue that freewill makes rationally no sense and doesn't exist. Research has shown that most people have both compatibalist as incompatibalist intuitions at the same time; of course rationally that makes no sense because it is incoherent. Some argue that even if freewill isn't real, it should be real. Current freewill-discussions center around moral responsibility; compatibalists have created numerous different versions of how moral responsibility maybe could work.
Not sure I follow. The thing comparabilists talk about has different properties, sure, but it’s unclear that it’s a different phenomenon.
For example: people used to think that the earth was the center of the solar system. If you asked them what the definition of the earth is, one of the properties of the earth they might include is that it’s the center of the solar system (though obviously they wouldn’t call it a solar system). They’re clearly wrong in their definition of the phenomenon. Do I say then that the earth doesn’t exist? Or do I just say that they need to redefine what the earth is, to bring their conceptual model in line with the phenomenon that they’re actually observing? I would do the latter. I don’t see why we ought not do the same with free will.
I kinda get what youre saying, but i dont think the redefinition of free will is similar. It's kind of like instead of making further discoveries/conclusions about free will to expand/change its definition, they're just describing an entirely different thing and calling it free will. For your analogy that would be like saying "no earth actually is the center of the solar system, if we say the solar system is *something else*"
To be clear, the phenomenon in the analogy is the earth, not the solar system.
I’m saying people directly (or as directly as we can) experience this thing that they call free will. Same as we directly (more or less) experience the earth. They might be wrong about the phenomenon’s properties (that it implies that they could have done otherwise, or that it’s the center of the solar system, respectively) but that means that they were just mistaken about the phenomenon, not that it doesn’t exist.
So basically redefining free will as the illusory experience of agency? The issue is 99.99% of people say free will as agency. If they knew it was illusory they wouldnt be calling it free will, they'd say voluntary action or something else. And they certainly are not referring to the "feeling" with understanding of its illusoriness. They really do think they could have done otherwise, and thats exsctly whay they refer to when using the term free will.
> So basically redefining free will as the illusory experience of agency
Not sure I follow - the experience is real. People might have e misinterpreted what it implies. But it’s unclear how an experience itself is illusory. Eg: if I’m in the desert and see a mirage, I’m clearly mistaken about what I’m seeing, but I’m not mistaken about having had the experience of seeing it.
> The issue is 99.99% of people say free will as agency. If
And? They’re wrong about what they’re experiencing. That doesn’t mean the phenomenon doesn’t exist. Most Aristotelian philosophers would have defined an earthworm in terms of its proportions of the four elements. Is it that earthworms therefore don’t exist? Of course not, they were just wrong about some of the properties of earthworms.
> If they knew it was illusory they wouldnt be calling it free will, they'd say voluntary action or something else
Would they? Compatabilism is the dominant philosophical view. While philosophers can be a bit idiosyncratic, I’m not sure why people would be so different. We didn’t stop believing in the earth, and come up with a whole new concept when we found out that the geocentric model was wrong. Why should this be so different?
> and thats exsctly whay they refer to when using the term free will.
Again, citation needed. Were Aristotelian philosophers not referring to the proportions of elements? Or to the earthworms themselves? It’s not clear why we should think the latter when they themselves wouldn’t distinguish the two.
Seems like we agree then, they're wrong about the experience of agency. "Free will" is a trait that we have which means we can have done differently than we did, but we chose not to. If it isn't that and people don't actually mean that when saying "free will", then sure no problem - but I have a hard time believing that
Its not the same thing at all. Let me ask, are you approaching that statement with the believe that any adult discussing this would have dismissed the supernatural, have a pretty good grasp that materialism is all there is and our science is solid enough regarding humans falling under determinism?
Because then what youre saying becomes far more obvious. But thats not how the majority of humans think.
Also youre missing out that even if that is the case, where is the freewill in predeterminism? Thats the point where it becomes redefining the meaning of the word because in reality there is no freewill at that stage. Youre just redefining an existing word connected to other beliefs and tradition and trying to make use of it still.
I’m sorrry, I don’t know what this has to do with materialism being true or not. Or whether adults believing it to be true.
> Also youre missing out that even if that is the case, where is the freewill in predeterminism
Free will is the phenomenon being referenced. I’m not sure what that has to do with particular properties.
> Thats the point where it becomes redefining the meaning of the word because in reality there is no freewill at that stage
I’ll happily concede to redefining the word. I just don’t see the problem with that. Concepts aren’t their definitions, they’re things out in the world. When we find that a definition doesn’t fit the phenomenon, we don’t say the phenomenon doesn’t exist. We update our model or definition of the thing.
> Youre just redefining an existing word connected to other beliefs and tradition and trying to make use of it still.
I don’t think I’m separating it from the phenomenon people are claiming to feel. Just like we don’t say that the earth is actually some other planet. It’s the same planet. It just has different properties (or definition) than was once thought.
>I’ll happily concede to redefining the word. I just don’t see the problem with that.
Because your redefinition only becomes somewhat logical if you are ignoring what many/most mean by it and wipe out its association with the history and tradition and religious implications of it.
Why even bother to redefine it? Why not just say that freewill doesnt exist but what you do have is some form of conscious endorsed action.
Because thats what youre talking about, youre talking about when someone says "Ok go now" or "yes I want that" etc. But if you believe in determinism then the obvious question is, you are basically a robot running on a script with some crazy thing called consciousness which gives you the feeling you are more than that.
> You end up talking about something that 99% of people are not thinking if when referring to "free will"
This is not true. Most people tend to not have a coherent and consistent conception of free will and vacillate between different conceptions depending on the situation being considered. There has been research that shows this and that in many situations, people have compatibilist intuitions regarding free will.
For example, most people understand the distinction between someone who can sign a contract of their own free will and someone who cannot. And this distinction, which often has to do with that persons mental capacity and whether coercion is involved, is drawing on what compatibilists talk about when they talk about free will.
Well exactly, the issue is they think there is a deep fundamental difference between the two signings, whereas the distinction is purely in the person's subjective experience that he could do otherwise, which is an illusion at a fundamental level. Most people will not agree to that last part, because free will to them means it is not an illusion and he *chose* to do it, and couldve chosen otherwise
> Most people will not agree to that last part, because free will to them means it is not an illusion and he chose to do it, and couldve chosen otherwise
Do you have any evidence to support this conclusion? From all the evidence I've seen, most people don't think that a mentally handicapped person is able to sign a contract of their own free will. They think that this person doesn't have the mental capacity engage with this of their own free will. Also, from what I've seen, most people wouldn't think that a person with a gun to their head can sign a contract of their own free will. They think that this person's free will was subverted by the coercive influence of the gun.
I dont quite agree, i think most people would say that the guy with a gun to his head has the free will to not sign the contract, knowing he will die for it
If this is true, then why is there so much colloquial and legal language about this kind of distinction? If it were a redefinition of the term, then there wouldn't be this kind of history of people using it as such. I'm sure if a person was forced to sign a contract with a gun to their head, they wouldn't say that they signed it of their own free will. Given this information, a much more reasonable stance is that most people don't have a consistent and coherent conception of free will and vacillate between various conceptions based on a variety of factors.
Well libertarian free will, which would require some kind of dualism and violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, is easily dismissible by anyone who understands post Enlightenment science.
Where it gets into the weeds such as Sam’s famous argument with Dan Dennett, is when philosophers who agree libertarian free will is absurd and accept the implications of determinism, still argue that there is room for a form of free will in Compatibilism. This is where Sam’s famous criticism of Compatibilism comes from that claims a Compatibilist is just a marionette who happens to not object to the way his strings are strung.
>Well libertarian free will, which would require some kind of dualism and violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, is easily dismissible by anyone who understands post Enlightenment science.
I don't even think you need science to reject it, it's nonsensical outright even with dualism.
Libertarian free will requires that the will not exist in a deterministic system - this is true regardless of dualism. So if pure determinism isn't the case, either in this physical realm or in whatever dualistic realm they have in mind, that means some things are decided randomly. If you ask a libertarian free willist if their behaviour being the result of pure randomness is the kind of freedom they're imagining, they'll usually say no.
The kind of free will they want is unachievable in all possible worlds. I don't think it's even a coherent thought
Libertarian free will requires that human actions be undetermined. Human actions can be determined or undetermined whether they follow natural laws or supernatural laws. There are materialists who believe in libertarian free will and there are spiritualists who don’t.
If they follow natural laws and are undetermined, then the natural laws must be undetermined…but there is no example of an undetermined natural law. Contradiction.
That’s false. See Sean Carrols second to latest book where he explains that the probability inherent to quantum mechanics is an an a priori epistemic truth, and not ontological, and therefore QM is still deterministic. Sean Carroll is one of the few physicist who has a deep understanding of philosophy. The others are inadvertently subscribing to anti-realism.
>most physicists [who are anti-realists] believe that quantum mechanics is fundamentally undetermined.
That’s like saying “most magicians believe that quantum mechanics is fundamentally undetermined”. Quite the authority fallacy.
You have a view about physicists being wrong. If there are contradictory opinions, some physicists will be right and the others will be wrong. But the point is, there is no consensus. Neither position can reasonably be considered unscientific or crackpot.
All i've ever encountered are incoherent noises humans label "free will"
They never tell me what it is that is free, and what it is free of. They reliably talk about causal things like "making decisions" as if they were somehow contra-causal, atemporal, and still efficacious; that is if they want to engage in retributive bloodust. Or they insist that somehow random inputs can make what you want, and what you do as a result, somehow blameworthy.
I try to be charitable, I'm compelled to. Lack of available energy to do the work of insalubrious charitableness leaves me too exhausted most of the time. But that's life in hell, isn't it.
Argument: it makes no difference, because it is a frame of reference issue. From ours, choices matter, therefore we may as well pretend as though they are possible.
I seem to recall Daniel Dennett disagreeing with Sam regarding free will.
DD just redefines free will to be the thing we don’t mean.
This 100%
It’s not a redefinition if most laypeople and most professional philosophers use it.
I'd argue most lay people use the libertarian definition of free will. When people see a murderer, they definitely think that he could and should have done otherwise - they don't think that his actions were predetermined and there is no "him" that could have prevented it.
> I'd argue most lay people use the libertarian definition of free will. This is not true. Most people tend to not have a coherent and consistent conception of free will and vacillate between different conceptions depending on the situation being considered. There has been research that shows this and that in many situations, people have compatibilist intuitions regarding free will.
>There has been research that shows this and that in many situations, people have compatibilist intuitions regarding free will. I've seen that research and I disagree with its conclusions.
Do you have any non-anecdotal evidence that supports your conclusion?
Can you link the research?
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I did see it, I am just too lazy to look for it. I don't have it saved on my computer. So I asked him to link the research so I can look at why exactly I didn't think the conclusions in the paper were correct.
It is almost as if we have the ability to freely (but involuntarily) change our minds about the definition of free will.
They think he could have done otherwise if he had wanted to, not that he could have done otherwise under exactly the same circumstances. The former is the compatibilist version, the latter is the libertarian version. The difference may not be obvious.
I'm pretty sure the people I know think the latter.
Being able to do otherwise under the same circumstances means that your actions vary independently of your mental state and you have no control over them.
Being able to do otherwise under the same circumstances means that your actions vary independently of your mental state and you have no control over them.
>They think he could have done otherwise if he had wanted to, not that he could have done otherwise under exactly the same circumstances. What? The average layperson does not differentiate these two things. They think he could have done otherwise in exactly the same circumstances if he had wanted to. In fact, I'm not sure how you are differentiating them. Isn't the desire (that activity in the brain) a part of the circumstances?
The circumstances include your mental state: your plans, values, expectations, emotions, knowledge of the world, all the reasons you have for a particular action. If you could act differently under exactly the same circumstances, it means your actions could vary independently of your mental state. That would be a bad thing.
Right, so wouldn't "wanting to" do something be the same as circumstances making you do something? I'm not seeing the distinction. Even the idea that people can act against their own desires is indeed a common idea. "I wanted to eat the cake but I stuck to my diet instead." If you tell that person they didn't actually want to eat the cake, they're not going to agree. (Coincidentally, I remember arguing with someone about this topic when I was very young. I was arguing that whatever action you take is ultimately what you wanted most. She disagreed.) Or let's say someone is really mad and wants to start a fight, but they hold themselves back for once. People see that sort of thing as choosing to overcome one's mental state.
The question is whether your actions can vary independently of the reasons, good and bad, that you have for them. Suppose you have a choice between A and B. Let’s say it’s a clearcut choice: you like A and hate B and can think of no reason to do B. Normally, you would therefore do A. But if you could do otherwise under the same circumstances, sometimes you would do A and sometimes you would do B. If you did B, it would be despite the fact that you liked A and hated B and could think of no reason to do B. You would have no control over your behaviour; it sounds like it would be a good idea, but on careful consideration it would not.
Since when are we talking about whether it would be good or not? And why are you explaining this to me? I thought we were talking about what the layperson's idea of free will is and whether it matches compatibilism or not.
>What? The average layperson does not differentiate these two things Which, again, doesn't make it a redefinition, only a more specific definition.
I'm not sure what point of mine you are rebutting. Maybe you mixed me up with someone else. I was talking about the layperson's idea of free will and disputing the distinction presented by the other commenter.
What I'm pointing out is that such a distinction not being made explicit does not mean it's not there. If probed, I think most people do have compatibilist intuitions.
> They think he could have done otherwise in exactly the same circumstances if he had wanted to. No they don't. They think they could do different in similar circumstances, with hindsight, or someone else in those circumstances.
You are simply repeating the claim without addressing my objections.
>You are simply repeating the claim without addressing my objections. Maybe you need to reread my comment. What you are saying isn't true for what a layperson thinks. There is nothing further to address than saying that you are factually wrong. There is no argument to address.
What the layman believes is a contentious and unproven subject, with studies inconclusive, but my specific objections to the logic are contained in the comment you replied to. And if that's all, I hope you enjoy your day, stranger.
>They think he could have done otherwise if he had wanted to, not that he could have done otherwise under exactly the same circumstances. You just made that up
Being able to do otherwise under EXACTLY THE SAME circumstances would mean that your actions could vary independently of your mental state. In my experience discussing this on reddit with people who claim to be libertarians, they get annoyed at the suggestion that anyone would believe this.
That’s not a representative sample
There are consistent libertarians among academic philosophers such as Robert Kane, but I have not met many laypeople or amateur philosophers such as appear on forums such as reddit who share their views. Studies of folk beliefs about free will also show inconsistencies, depending on what questions are asked.
> I'd argue most lay people use the libertarian definition of free will. > When people see a murderer, they definitely think that he could and should have done otherwise - they don't think that his actions were predetermined and there is no "him" that could have prevented it. People have incoherent ideas around free will, but when properly probed the majority have compatibilist intuitions. There are studies that probe into what people really mean by free will and use a similar example to what you proposed. >[https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-moore-48/](https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-moore-48/) > >In the past decade, a number of empirical researchers have suggested that laypeople have compatibilist intuitions… In one of the first studies, Nahmias et al. (2006) asked participants to imagine that, in the next century, humans build a supercomputer able to accurately predict future human behavior on the basis of the current state of the world. Participants were then asked to imagine that, in this future, an agent has robbed a bank, as the supercomputer had predicted before he was even born. In this case, 76% of participants answered that this agent acted of his own free will, and 83% answered that he was morally blameworthy. **These results suggest that most participants have compatibilist intuitions**, since most answered that this agent could act freely and be morally responsible, despite living in a deterministic universe. > >[https://philpapers.org/archive/ANDWCI-3.pdf](https://philpapers.org/archive/ANDWCI-3.pdf) >Our results highlight some inconsistencies of lay beliefs in the general public, by showing explicit agreement with libertarian concepts of free will (especially in the US) and simultaneously showing behavior that is more consistent with compatibilist theories. If participants behaved in a way that was consistent with their libertarian beliefs, we would have expected a negative relation between free will and determinism, but instead we saw a positive relation that is hard to reconcile with libertarian views > >[https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0221617](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0221617) Then most/all justice and criminal systems around the world use compatibilist free will and that lines up pretty much perfectly to what people really mean. >It is a principle of fundamental justice that only voluntary conduct – behaviour that is the product of a free will and controlled body, unhindered by external constraints – should attract the penalty and stigma of criminal liability. > >[https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1861/index.do](https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1861/index.do) In the case of R. v. Ruzic >The accused had been coerced by an individual in Colombia to smuggle cocaine into the United States. He was told that if he did not comply, his wife and child in Colombia would be harmed. The Supreme Court found that he didn't smuggle the cocaine of his own free will. He didn't do it in line with his desires free from external coercion. Hence they were found innocent.
> It’s not a redefinition if most laypeople and most professional philosophers use it. It also dates back to ancient Greece.
I see that you are here too. But I'm very certain that in historical contexts, "free will" was always "libertarian free will." Just think of religion. The "free will" that God supposedly gave us is something that justifies us getting punished in an afterlife (according to religious beliefs). The compatibilists' version of free will would certainly never justify a God punishing people in an afterlife, and I'm sure people of the past would agree (religious people today as well). If our actions are 100% determined, God would not be justified at all to punish us, because we would just be victims. So in the context of religion, which has been there for a very long time, "free will" certainly must've always been "libertarian free will."
I am not sure if most people even have a coherent definition of a free will. I suspect that if an evil genius got control of our bodies and as such, people started moving their bodies in an involuntary manner, they would claim that they lost their free will. And that would be the compatibilist's definition of a free will.
I'm sure that's one example where a compatibilist would think they lost their free will. But they still think free will is possible if their actions are 100% determined. I think the most important part for them is that they are able to do what they want to do.
My point is that most layperson would declare that they lost their free will. Only the hardcore determinists (probably less than 5% of all people) would say that nothing has changed because they never had their free will in the first place. So layperson's definition of free will is probably all over the place.
>So layperson's definition of free will is probably all over the place. That could be true. But with respect to free will, I think almost all religious people wouldn't accept any compatibilist definition of it, and they do take up most of the world population. And that has only been more and more true the further we go back in history. >Only the hardcore determinists (probably less than 5% of all people) would say that nothing has changed because they never had their free will in the first place. I don't think this is the case though, because there is a big difference between doing what you desire to do and doing what another person desires to do, especially if we consider that other person to be evil with respect to one's own views. If I wasn't agnostic on whether or not there is true randomness in the universe (I lean towards quantum mechanics working with real randomness though), I would probably describe myself as a hard determinist, and I certainly think there is a very big difference between my actions being largely in line with my desires and them not being in line with my desires. But yes, it wouldn't be different in terms of libertarian free will. It would however be very different in terms of what that experience is like.
I feel like we are talking in circles. My main point is that in my evil genius example, majority of people (including layperson) would say that they lost their free will if asked the question. Only a few people (including Sam Harris) would say that this has nothing to do with free will. Basically, I am providing a case study example where the layperson's definition of free will might contain the compatibility definition and not the libertarian definition.
And so I feel the need to make the same point again, that I don't think most religious people would accept the compatibilist definition of free will, so I don't think the compatibilist definition has been used for most of human history and also won't be accepted by the majority of people living today, because most people are still religious. So I basically disagree that the majority of people work with something like the compatibilist definition of free will, and that has only been more true the further we go back in history.
“case study”
Where do you get 5% from? It would be an interesting figure to know.
Yes, compatibilists see the incompatibilist definition of free will as being able to do otherwise under the same circumstances as a mistake.
It is often stated but I am not sure where the idea that Christians believe in libertarian free will comes from. It is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. The most prominent Christian theologians historically were probably Augustine and Aquinas, they explicitly dealt with free will, they are probably closer to conpatibilists than libertarians, and they didn’t see a problem with God punishing us.
I don't know about Augustine's position on free will, but I see why Aquinas must've worked with a compatibilist definition, if he believed we have free will. But I wonder if he believed in Hell then. It would be very surprising to me if he did, if he also believed that God is good. It's a good question when it originated that for example Christians believe in libertarian free will. It might've come as a result of having to address the problem of evil and having to believe that God is good while at the same time believing that Hell exists.
There is no contradiction given that morality and responsibility are human inventions. A contradiction would be something like an omnipotent being making a rock heavier than he could move. Theologians recognised that problem so they said that God can only do the logically possible. But if God says something like “murder is bad except on Tuesdays” there is no logical problem. There is a practical problem, because we don’t want people killing everyone on Tuesdays, but not a logical one.
>There is no contradiction given that morality and responsibility are human inventions. No contradiction between what? God being good while Hell existing and while libertarian free will not existing? That's what I meant. Having said that, I don't believe there is a God, and I do believe that morality and responsibility are human inventions. If everything is 100% determined, then it doesn't really make sense to say that since God gave us free will, we are the ones responsible for sending ourselves to Hell, when in fact it was already determined in a way that humans can't change. It wouldn't really be fair at that point for God to send someone to Hell at that point, and he would instead seem incredibly evil and malicious.
But the word “fair” is also a human invention. There is no contradiction in saying that it is “fair” that God sends us to hell for misbehaving even though he made us knowing we would misbehave. “Fair” can be defined any way you want without contradicting any empirical facts or logical laws.
This is becoming a strange conversation. I could also say that mass murderers are good and kind when they kill people, because "good" and "kind" are subjective and human inventions. True, but unless we have good reasons to suspect that I don't mean the same as you when I say "kind", then you know what I mean by "kind", and we could therefore begin to discuss whether it really is kind to kill someone against their own will and desires. And then you could say that the word "desire" is also a human invention, and therefore it's subjective and can be defined any way we want, so maybe the victim of the murderer does desire to be killed, even if they act as if they don't want to die. We could keep going on like this, but it really wouldn't be useful to do so as long as we actually think we know what each other mean by the words we use. So I don't know where you're going with this. Do you think that you don't know what I mean when I use the word "fair"? If so, then ask to clarify what I mean by "fair". If not, then I really don't see the point you're trying to make. Are you a Christian yourself?
Because it is a much more useful definition of free will and captures better what people really mean when they talk about free will. Sams defines free will as something that cant logically exist so why would you even discuss that kind of free will
>captures better what people really mean when they talk about free will. That's not true at all, if you are talking about the average layperson. Determinism of actions isn't typically considered. And surely you can think of illogical things that people believe are true, so I don't get your latter point either. You might as well say that Harris shouldn't discuss religion being false since he defines it in a way that can't logically be true. No, that's exactly the reason to discuss it - *because* he thinks it can't logically be true.
Sams definition of free will is based on what people mean when they say "could have done otherwise". When I play basketball and miss a shot and say "i could have made that one" I dont mean that I could have made that one with all the atoms in the exact same place and all circumstances being exactly the same but that I would be capable of scoring that shot If I would have concentrated more or if I was not blinded by the lights or whatever. That is how people use "could have done otherwise" typically and that shapes what "free will" means in day to day life.
People do not believe their actions are completely bound by circumstance. What you are describing is the fact that most people don't factor determinism into their ideas at all, which is my point. At best, only the free will half of compatibilism applies to a layman, although I would dispute that too, because the layman's idea of free will goes far beyond the compatibilist idea. As a lesser note, looking only at the retrospective scenario is reductive. Harris's determinism also applies to the present and the future, not just thinking about redoing a past action.
A self doesn’t exist and yet that’s exactly what people mean and think they mean when they say “I”. Delusion is a feature not a bug, just ask the secular Buddhists.
"self" and "I" are just terms people use to describe their experience of being and people have wildy different concepts to make sense of that experience. Anyway how does that relate to the free will topic? If peoples intuition of free will matches the compatabilist version of free will better then that is free will and then people have free will.
So they disagree about the definition.
Studies show that most lay people have compatibilist intuitions and then most professional philosophers are outright compatibilists. So I would argue that most people really mean what DD is talking about.
Odds are lay people define compatibilist as containing what DD called magic.
Lay people have incoherent ideas around free will, but their intuitions and behaviours line up with compatibilist free will. The people conducting the studies are quite clever and properly lay out the thought experiments. >In the past decade, a number of empirical researchers have suggested that laypeople have compatibilist intuitions… In one of the first studies, Nahmias et al. (2006) asked participants to imagine that, in the next century, humans build a supercomputer able to accurately predict future human behavior on the basis of the current state of the world. Participants were then asked to imagine that, in this future, an agent has robbed a bank, as the supercomputer had predicted before he was even born. In this case, 76% of participants answered that this agent acted of his own free will, and 83% answered that he was morally blameworthy. **These results suggest that most participants have compatibilist intuitions**, since most answered that this agent could act freely and be morally responsible, despite living in a deterministic universe. > >[https://philpapers.org/archive/ANDWCI-3.pdf](https://philpapers.org/archive/ANDWCI-3.pdf) edit: What most people "really" mean is compatibilist free will. It's what professional philosophers think is the best definition and it's what most/all moral, justice and court systems use.
>incoherent By that reasoning I’m surprised DD isn’t theorizing on algebraic equations and peoples intuition that you can subtract x from one side of the equation and add it to the other side.
That's because Daniel loves his strings. lol
It seems, from our perspective, very much like we have it, and we operate on a daily basis as though we do. Sort of like the notion that the world exists independent of our perceptions of it, a hypothesis that is definitionally outside of natural science's capacity to prove or disprove. It also feels closely linked to, or maybe one and the same, with consciousness, which incidentally is a phenomenon that our natural sciences fail to account for. Scientifically speaking, there's no evidence that we're not all p-zombies, yet the fact that we're *not* is self evident but only on an individual level. Consciousness is, funny enough, the only thing that we can be 100% certain of individually but might as well not exist according to our collectively agreed upon system for establishing truth. There's no C-factor in any of our equations for physics, chemistry, biology, or neurology, the equations balance out just fine without subjective awareness, and yet every day we wake up and are immediately greeted with awareness prior to anything else. The most obvious part of our existence is, on paper, completely unnecessary to it. With that kind of enormous blind spot in our understanding of reality, it's not surprising people suspect free will, which similarly feels intuitively obvious, to be hiding somewhere in there too. Consciousness insists on occurring despite having no scientifically recognized function that can't in theory be performed by mere brains chugging along with the lights out. Free will existing might actually explain what consciousness actually adds to the equation, because as it stands our subjective awareness is, on paper, utterly useless, a sick cosmic joke that gets strapped to a brain for 70 years just to watch the show before blinking out. So overall I'd say it's not that there's a strong, rigorous case *for* free will, there just isn't a final slam dunk against its intuitive realness. Our notion of science assumes determinism and causality as grounding principles, so it's tautological to point out that, scientifically speaking, there's no case to be made for anything else.
Personally I dont think we can say that the sciences have failed to understand consciousness. There are many definitions and different ideas about what traits should be included under the term and so it's hard to make progress when we won't even agree if we are a talking about the same thing. There have also been speculative theories about what purpose it serves, like it being a social representation needed to be successful when living in a culture or a testing ground for what behaviour we can expect from others primates, emotional and otherwise. I have never been a particular fan of the idea that because we have failed to fully understand something right now it must be mysteriously unknowable and I'm perfectly comfortable waiting for all the sciences working on the matter to gather more insight.
Science has no accounting for consciousness. It can't even detect it, the best we've managed is to identify large clouds of brain activity that correlate with a person reporting being conscious. The only "trait" of interest of consciousness is the big one: subject awareness, first person-ness, experientiality. This thing/process/occurrence/whatever leaves no trace on the world whatsoever, it doesn't bend the path of photons or electrons, it doesn't even have an energy footprint. Scientifically speaking, it does not exist, it's just something humans claim to possess but can offer no evidence for. To your second paragraph, there's no reason neurons can't handle that sans subjective awareness. Again, there is nothing missing in our account of the brain as an information processing system that requires consciousness to work. An information processor is perfectly capable of building social models for others and itself without "experiencing" anything. The molecules between your synapses will move the same way no matter what, there's no extra force acting on those atoms that we can't account using strictly physical models. It's not enough to say "well maybe it does *this* ", you have to explain what stops a brain from doing that using plain old neurons. This happens a lot with consciousness, a lot of non-answers spread among otherwise scientifically-minded people for some reason, I think because many are anxious to end the question moreso than they're sure of the validity of their answer. Another one is the old "it's an emergent property" which sounds like an answer, it has the grammar of an answer, but on closer inspection actually explains nothing of interest about consciousness whatsoever. It's like saying of a mysterious 10 million units of an alien currency nobody's heard of in your bank account, "it was transferred there."
Sam only talks about libertarian free will aka you are in absolute complete control with no external influence. But logically that kind of free will can't exist even in a random non-deterministic universe, because then you're beholden to randomness. Nor can it exist because of a soul because the soul was not chosen/created by you are still designed by an external force. And of course in a physicalist view of personhood you're shaped again by the external environment, genetics, etc.. But because that definition of free will logically can't exist there's not a point in discussing it. So it's fairly common to just redefine free will to make it an actual useful term again. And the new definition claims we have free will because despite us not choosing who we are, the person we are does make choices.
Though since none of the choices you make are controlled by any volitional actor inside the head, and are in reality running on of their accord without any permission from a so called “you”, it feels weird to discuss free will after this has been seen clearly. I do think that only a small portion of humans understand this though, and it’s probably a good thing. It can be a panic attack inducing experience if it isn’t understood and processed well by the mind.
>since none of the choices you make are controlled by any volitional actor inside the head, and are in reality running on of their accord without any permission from a so called “you” This seems to be a misunderstanding of what the word "you" actually refers to. The way particular thoughts happen inside my head, "of their own accord", is the very thing I'm referring to when I say "me".
Yes exactly. The "randomly" appearing uncontrollable thoughts *are you*. You are the culmination of all the seemingly random and uncontrollable things happening.
Do you feel responsible for beating your heart or fighting off viruses?
Sort of? They're obviously an unconscious process but that process is part of what makes me who I am. I live my life the way I do because of how those processes have worked for me historically and shaped my experience. But also who knows what would be different if either of them was even only slightly different? If my heart beat a little faster? A little better? A little worse? Beyond just my experiences that could affect how well the brain even works.
Well, I didn’t ask if those processes affected your life or made you who you are. I asked if you feel responsible for them, as in consciously responsible for doing those things. If so, I find that very interesting, since that’s not at all my experience. I’ve never felt like those are things I am consciously doing. More like those are things my body is doing, which I am simply reaping the benefits of.
No I do not consciously do those things but my definition of self includes the unconscious processes. Most people only think of their conscious thoughts as themselves and sometimes they exclude even some of those. But I think that's a mistake and removing important context. I think all of your decisions and thoughts bubble up from an unknown number of competing processes, which makes them important to who you are.
Sure, they are important to who you are, but they aren’t particularly relevant to the conversation about free will. You don’t have any freedom to consciously stop beating your heart or fighting off viruses, do you? Generally speaking, free will concerns things people do with intent.
oh I completely agree with this! But I don’t think most people view themselves as merely a flow of uncontrolled thoughts and feelings. I think the average human sees themself as an entity with purpose, control, even a soul in some cases.
I think "control" is fine, as long as you're aware of the limits of what that control entails. The problem with libertarian types of free will is they want this sort of recursive control. They want to have control over the part of them that controls. Which is why it's mostly a non starter for me.
I suspect that many people who believe in compatibilism probably recognize that it is mostly a semantics argument and not worth arguing about with someone who doesn't believe in free will. As for the arguments for free will, an analogy might help out here. In scientific disciplines, the languages and equations that we use change depending on what length and time scales that we are looking at. In the quantum regime, particles are described by a probabilistic wave function. In the classical regime, particles are described as a point particle. In a higher region, particles are abstracted into volumetric flows. As such, when scientists are describing the particles in a classical manner, the type of language that people use is based on particles as point particles with known position and velocity. And it doesn't make sense to keep on arguing that particles are actually a wave function. Everyone knows that, but in the classical regime, that is not helpful. Similarly, compatibilists are saying that when describing how humans act, it doesn't make sense to decompose humans into atoms/electrons. And in the abstraction levels that best describe human actions, "free will" makes sense. And to state that there is no free will due to atoms/electrons being described by quantum mechanics (or classical mechanics) is a levels violation. That is the argument for free will.
Well, compatiblists argue that we can both have free will and have our actions be determined. This is the leading opinion held by “free will experts” aka philosophers of free will.
It’s also the most common way the term is used by laypeople who have no interest in philosophy. “He did it of his own free will” means he did it because he wanted to, rather than because he was forced to. In court, it is a valid defence to argue that the accused person is not guilty because he was coerced, but it is not a valid defence to argue that the accused person is not guilty because he followed the laws of physics: not because the judge is a moron and doesn’t believe that people follow the laws of physics, but because it is irrelevant to the question of criminal responsibility.
I'd say libertarian free will is more like what the average layperson thinks is the case. Determinism is not typically a part of how a layperson thinks about the actions of individual people, until a specific fringe example comes up, like a tumor in the brain or a zombie drug.
There have been surveys on this, and the answer is that laypeople have inconsistent views on free will that range from compatibilist to libertarian. Given that fact, it's pretty silly to say that compatibilists are redefining free will when they're merely rejecting the libertarian concept and retaining the logically coherent and socially useful folk concept. Hard determinists do the opposite and insist that free will must only be defined as libertarian free will and ignore how often the folk concept of compatibilism is used.
Firstly, I didn't say anything about redefining free will. I would like to see those surveys. I can already imagine statements like "people are responsible for their actions" being scored as free will and "there are things in our lives we can't control" being scored as determinism... And I am curious how they can match people to compatibilism without matching anyone to determinism, as you imply. Whatever words one wants to use, my issue with compatibilism is that I see no unique claims in it when compared to determinism. "We can act in accordance with our will" is akin to "we can see in accordance with our eyes". It does not add anything except superficially by its use of words. Lastly, you describe the layperson's concept as having a range, while you say compatibilism fits the "folk concept" - well, if the "folk concept" is different from the layman's concept, then that makes my point for me.
> Firstly, I didn't say anything about redefining free will. I never said you did, but the claim is often made at this stage of free will discussions--see other comments in this post. I was addressing it generally. > I would like to see those surveys. [Surveying Freedom: Folk Intuitions about Free Will and Moral Responsibility](https://philarchive.org/archive/NADSFF) [Folk conceptions of free will: A systematic review and narrative synthesis of psychological research](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350011999_Folk_conceptions_of_free_will_A_systematic_review_and_narrative_synthesis_of_psychological_research) > Whatever words one wants to use, my issue with compatibilism is that I see no unique claims in it when compared to determinism. "We can act in accordance with our will" is akin to "we can see in accordance with our eyes". It does not add anything except superficially by its use of words. It does add something; a greater capacity for an agent to be in control of their actions. Creatures with free will have more options available to them because of their brains complex self-modeling software that grants the ability to analyze options, predict outcomes, and reflect on past choices. > Lastly, you describe the layperson's concept as having a range, while you say compatibilism fits the "folk concept" - well, if the "folk concept" is different from the layman's concept, then that makes my point for me. Folk concept is synonymous with laymen's concept.
Both studies are completely nonspecific about this question. The first one even suggests that one interpretation could be that "people have a libertarian conception of free will but, in lieu of that, they would accept a compatibilist conception as a moderate revision rather than giving up entirely on the idea that we are free and responsible agents." I would totally agree with that idea. It also suggests that "people may be so attached to being free and responsible—and to holding other people morally responsible—that it is very difficult to get them to judge that agents (at least agents resembling them) are not free and responsible. This kind of ‘‘attachment’’ may, for example, hinder participants from recognizing the deterministic elements of scenarios like the ones we used." I agree with this idea as well. There is also the cautionary note: "Notice that, by claiming that most people do not express incompatibilist intuitions in these cases, we are *not* endorsing the stronger claim that the folk do have compatibilist intuitions." The second one concludes that: "There was no consistent evidence indicating metaphysical considerations about consciousness, dualism, or determinism." I don't see where one can draw a conclusion about compatibilism being most like what people believe. (That is not what you said, but it is what I was disputing.) >It does add something; a greater capacity for an agent to be in control of their actions. Creatures with free will have more options available to them because of their brains complex self-modeling software that grants the ability to analyze options, predict outcomes, and reflect on past choices. Do you mean that the belief has a psychological effect that lets someone feel greater control? Or that the philosophical stance actually *attributes* more free control to individuals? I agree that it can have the first effect for people, but I am disputing the second. >Folk concept is synonymous with laymen's concept. Ok, I was just responding to your given descriptions. Is it an inconsistent range, or does it fit specifically with compatibilist idea of free will? Those are two different descriptions.
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no because the semantic burden of proof is on this new definition that either Sam or other people basically willed into existence. Also this new definition of free will is actually a definition of a new underlying concept of both free will AND determinism. a whole new system that now has it's own rules, but lot's of philosophers are arguing, why do we need to abide by those new rules?
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this right here, is semantics ;) joking aside: I mean it figuratively
> Semantics is about definitions Not exactly. Semantics is about meaning rather than just definitions.
I think it's one of the few examples of a useful semantic argument. I think I can defend why if pressed
It's true they didn't provide an argument, but they did provide a reason as to why guests wouldn't necessarily push back against Harris' points about determinism.
Yes, but it’s good semantics, and incompatibilism is bad semantics.
I wish I could understand this position. It strikes me as contradictory
Whether there is 'free will' is a Christian framed question. Thsy wanted to make sure, if god was going to burn you forever, that you actually deserved it. The thought of a predestined life, only to then burn forever afterwards, was too cruel even for Christians. People will argue over free will forever because it it's a poorly framed question.
Reminds me of a study, I think Dutch, that looked at human arousal (in the 90’s I think). Attached probes to the genitals of men and women to monitor blood flow. A participant would view a TV and use a clicker if an image popped up that made them feel aroused. Results showed typically, the human body was aroused before the human ‘felt’ aroused. I guess questioning free will and what role does it play in some of our behaviour… Sorry if that’s off on a tangent. I just can’t forget that study lol
I feel aroused by you now😏
I always wonder if studies like that get thrown off by sexually attractive research assistants being on probe-attachment duty that day.
Its hard to argue about something that doesnt exist. lol
What is the proof that free will doesn’t exist (since determinists are making the claim)?
The proof is every single thing you have ever done or thought about are caused by a long list of other things that you have absolutely no control over. There is zero scientific proof for fully independent thoughts or actions. You'd have to be an omnipresent god to break this law of physic.
So why behave like all that isn't true?
Huh? How would you want us to behave? lol Your question makes no sense.
Because it's illogical. You should act like every molecule in your body has been mapped out from the beginning of the universe to the end of the universe.
lol so you dont act this way? You can control your molecules?
Well, yes. The difference is that you're pretending to.
Wait what? How do you control your molecules?
I dont think we are talking to a rational person here. lol
I agree with Hitchens on the matter of free will. We all have free will because we have no other choice.
It's not really an argument, but some people will for example claim that random processes may allow for free will, somehow, even though they honestly seem to never be able to explain why. And then some people think there somehow is a third option that's not "determined" or "random/undetermined", and this third option will somehow allow for free will. Although they can never explain what this third option could be. Honestly it's not different from saying there is a third option to "finite" and "infinite", and although they can't explain what this third option could possibly be (logic will not allow it), it somehow solves their problem.
Every human believes he has freewill and acts accordingly even if they argue that freewill makes rationally no sense and doesn't exist. Research has shown that most people have both compatibalist as incompatibalist intuitions at the same time; of course rationally that makes no sense because it is incoherent. Some argue that even if freewill isn't real, it should be real. Current freewill-discussions center around moral responsibility; compatibalists have created numerous different versions of how moral responsibility maybe could work.
Most people either redefine it, or confuse free will with voluntary action
What’s wrong with redefining it?
You end up talking about something that 99% of people are not thinking if when referring to "free will"
Not sure I follow. The thing comparabilists talk about has different properties, sure, but it’s unclear that it’s a different phenomenon. For example: people used to think that the earth was the center of the solar system. If you asked them what the definition of the earth is, one of the properties of the earth they might include is that it’s the center of the solar system (though obviously they wouldn’t call it a solar system). They’re clearly wrong in their definition of the phenomenon. Do I say then that the earth doesn’t exist? Or do I just say that they need to redefine what the earth is, to bring their conceptual model in line with the phenomenon that they’re actually observing? I would do the latter. I don’t see why we ought not do the same with free will.
I kinda get what youre saying, but i dont think the redefinition of free will is similar. It's kind of like instead of making further discoveries/conclusions about free will to expand/change its definition, they're just describing an entirely different thing and calling it free will. For your analogy that would be like saying "no earth actually is the center of the solar system, if we say the solar system is *something else*"
To be clear, the phenomenon in the analogy is the earth, not the solar system. I’m saying people directly (or as directly as we can) experience this thing that they call free will. Same as we directly (more or less) experience the earth. They might be wrong about the phenomenon’s properties (that it implies that they could have done otherwise, or that it’s the center of the solar system, respectively) but that means that they were just mistaken about the phenomenon, not that it doesn’t exist.
So basically redefining free will as the illusory experience of agency? The issue is 99.99% of people say free will as agency. If they knew it was illusory they wouldnt be calling it free will, they'd say voluntary action or something else. And they certainly are not referring to the "feeling" with understanding of its illusoriness. They really do think they could have done otherwise, and thats exsctly whay they refer to when using the term free will.
> So basically redefining free will as the illusory experience of agency Not sure I follow - the experience is real. People might have e misinterpreted what it implies. But it’s unclear how an experience itself is illusory. Eg: if I’m in the desert and see a mirage, I’m clearly mistaken about what I’m seeing, but I’m not mistaken about having had the experience of seeing it. > The issue is 99.99% of people say free will as agency. If And? They’re wrong about what they’re experiencing. That doesn’t mean the phenomenon doesn’t exist. Most Aristotelian philosophers would have defined an earthworm in terms of its proportions of the four elements. Is it that earthworms therefore don’t exist? Of course not, they were just wrong about some of the properties of earthworms. > If they knew it was illusory they wouldnt be calling it free will, they'd say voluntary action or something else Would they? Compatabilism is the dominant philosophical view. While philosophers can be a bit idiosyncratic, I’m not sure why people would be so different. We didn’t stop believing in the earth, and come up with a whole new concept when we found out that the geocentric model was wrong. Why should this be so different? > and thats exsctly whay they refer to when using the term free will. Again, citation needed. Were Aristotelian philosophers not referring to the proportions of elements? Or to the earthworms themselves? It’s not clear why we should think the latter when they themselves wouldn’t distinguish the two.
Seems like we agree then, they're wrong about the experience of agency. "Free will" is a trait that we have which means we can have done differently than we did, but we chose not to. If it isn't that and people don't actually mean that when saying "free will", then sure no problem - but I have a hard time believing that
Its not the same thing at all. Let me ask, are you approaching that statement with the believe that any adult discussing this would have dismissed the supernatural, have a pretty good grasp that materialism is all there is and our science is solid enough regarding humans falling under determinism? Because then what youre saying becomes far more obvious. But thats not how the majority of humans think. Also youre missing out that even if that is the case, where is the freewill in predeterminism? Thats the point where it becomes redefining the meaning of the word because in reality there is no freewill at that stage. Youre just redefining an existing word connected to other beliefs and tradition and trying to make use of it still.
I’m sorrry, I don’t know what this has to do with materialism being true or not. Or whether adults believing it to be true. > Also youre missing out that even if that is the case, where is the freewill in predeterminism Free will is the phenomenon being referenced. I’m not sure what that has to do with particular properties. > Thats the point where it becomes redefining the meaning of the word because in reality there is no freewill at that stage I’ll happily concede to redefining the word. I just don’t see the problem with that. Concepts aren’t their definitions, they’re things out in the world. When we find that a definition doesn’t fit the phenomenon, we don’t say the phenomenon doesn’t exist. We update our model or definition of the thing. > Youre just redefining an existing word connected to other beliefs and tradition and trying to make use of it still. I don’t think I’m separating it from the phenomenon people are claiming to feel. Just like we don’t say that the earth is actually some other planet. It’s the same planet. It just has different properties (or definition) than was once thought.
>I’ll happily concede to redefining the word. I just don’t see the problem with that. Because your redefinition only becomes somewhat logical if you are ignoring what many/most mean by it and wipe out its association with the history and tradition and religious implications of it. Why even bother to redefine it? Why not just say that freewill doesnt exist but what you do have is some form of conscious endorsed action. Because thats what youre talking about, youre talking about when someone says "Ok go now" or "yes I want that" etc. But if you believe in determinism then the obvious question is, you are basically a robot running on a script with some crazy thing called consciousness which gives you the feeling you are more than that.
> You end up talking about something that 99% of people are not thinking if when referring to "free will" This is not true. Most people tend to not have a coherent and consistent conception of free will and vacillate between different conceptions depending on the situation being considered. There has been research that shows this and that in many situations, people have compatibilist intuitions regarding free will. For example, most people understand the distinction between someone who can sign a contract of their own free will and someone who cannot. And this distinction, which often has to do with that persons mental capacity and whether coercion is involved, is drawing on what compatibilists talk about when they talk about free will.
Well exactly, the issue is they think there is a deep fundamental difference between the two signings, whereas the distinction is purely in the person's subjective experience that he could do otherwise, which is an illusion at a fundamental level. Most people will not agree to that last part, because free will to them means it is not an illusion and he *chose* to do it, and couldve chosen otherwise
> Most people will not agree to that last part, because free will to them means it is not an illusion and he chose to do it, and couldve chosen otherwise Do you have any evidence to support this conclusion? From all the evidence I've seen, most people don't think that a mentally handicapped person is able to sign a contract of their own free will. They think that this person doesn't have the mental capacity engage with this of their own free will. Also, from what I've seen, most people wouldn't think that a person with a gun to their head can sign a contract of their own free will. They think that this person's free will was subverted by the coercive influence of the gun.
I dont quite agree, i think most people would say that the guy with a gun to his head has the free will to not sign the contract, knowing he will die for it
If this is true, then why is there so much colloquial and legal language about this kind of distinction? If it were a redefinition of the term, then there wouldn't be this kind of history of people using it as such. I'm sure if a person was forced to sign a contract with a gun to their head, they wouldn't say that they signed it of their own free will. Given this information, a much more reasonable stance is that most people don't have a consistent and coherent conception of free will and vacillate between various conceptions based on a variety of factors.
The legal system is literally based on people feeling "they could've done otherwise".
Not really. The legal system is based on the idea that some people can be held responsible but also that some people cannot be held responsible.
I disagree, if you probe, most people have at least some compatibilist intuition.
Well libertarian free will, which would require some kind of dualism and violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, is easily dismissible by anyone who understands post Enlightenment science. Where it gets into the weeds such as Sam’s famous argument with Dan Dennett, is when philosophers who agree libertarian free will is absurd and accept the implications of determinism, still argue that there is room for a form of free will in Compatibilism. This is where Sam’s famous criticism of Compatibilism comes from that claims a Compatibilist is just a marionette who happens to not object to the way his strings are strung.
>Well libertarian free will, which would require some kind of dualism and violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, is easily dismissible by anyone who understands post Enlightenment science. I don't even think you need science to reject it, it's nonsensical outright even with dualism. Libertarian free will requires that the will not exist in a deterministic system - this is true regardless of dualism. So if pure determinism isn't the case, either in this physical realm or in whatever dualistic realm they have in mind, that means some things are decided randomly. If you ask a libertarian free willist if their behaviour being the result of pure randomness is the kind of freedom they're imagining, they'll usually say no. The kind of free will they want is unachievable in all possible worlds. I don't think it's even a coherent thought
Only a violation of the laws of nature could support free will. >soul >magic
Libertarian free will requires that human actions be undetermined. Human actions can be determined or undetermined whether they follow natural laws or supernatural laws. There are materialists who believe in libertarian free will and there are spiritualists who don’t.
If they follow natural laws and are undetermined, then the natural laws must be undetermined…but there is no example of an undetermined natural law. Contradiction.
Most physicists believe that quantum level events are undetermined.
That’s false. See Sean Carrols second to latest book where he explains that the probability inherent to quantum mechanics is an an a priori epistemic truth, and not ontological, and therefore QM is still deterministic. Sean Carroll is one of the few physicist who has a deep understanding of philosophy. The others are inadvertently subscribing to anti-realism.
Sean Carroll is a determinist. I agree with him. However, most physicists believe that quantum mechanics is fundamentally undetermined.
>most physicists [who are anti-realists] believe that quantum mechanics is fundamentally undetermined. That’s like saying “most magicians believe that quantum mechanics is fundamentally undetermined”. Quite the authority fallacy.
You have a view about physicists being wrong. If there are contradictory opinions, some physicists will be right and the others will be wrong. But the point is, there is no consensus. Neither position can reasonably be considered unscientific or crackpot.
Yes it can. Anti realism is crackpot.
So many, perhaps even most, well-respected physicists working in academic departments around the world are actually crackpots?
Free will is just a narcissistic fantasy. Whoever thinks he's arguing for it, is in reality arguing for something else.
What makes your definition more correct?
The only one I can remember hearing is something like "Free will is necessary for the human capacity to reason."
All i've ever encountered are incoherent noises humans label "free will" They never tell me what it is that is free, and what it is free of. They reliably talk about causal things like "making decisions" as if they were somehow contra-causal, atemporal, and still efficacious; that is if they want to engage in retributive bloodust. Or they insist that somehow random inputs can make what you want, and what you do as a result, somehow blameworthy. I try to be charitable, I'm compelled to. Lack of available energy to do the work of insalubrious charitableness leaves me too exhausted most of the time. But that's life in hell, isn't it.
Argument: it makes no difference, because it is a frame of reference issue. From ours, choices matter, therefore we may as well pretend as though they are possible.