Isn't that the whole point of survivalist/homesteaders, governments and religions -- figuring out those rules?

They don’t seem that chill about it actually.

God driven determinism is the perfect recipe for justifying all kind of atrocities

If humans are subject to their environment the same as everything else then there cannot be free will

Here is a simple question about free will. At what exact moment of human life does it begin? We don’t choose race, family, time/place of birth, or other factors when we are born.

Naturally, children don’t have free will when they are born. They have a will because they manifest themselves by crying, etc., but their choices are unconscious.

So, let’s say that the first act of “free will” occurs when a toddler chooses a banana instead of an apple. That happens at 10:00:00 PST on March 12, 2022. So, at 9:59:59 PST on March 12, 2022, the toddler didn’t have free will and one second later, he magically did.

But what happened in that one second? Nothing magical. ALL events in his life + a myriad of other factors mechanically made him make that “choice.” One second later, he makes another “choice” and so on, before he kicks the bucket.

So at what point his choice became free from everything prior and everything present?

>The reason the compatibalist position is unsatisfying is because compatibalists will typically recognize the determinist nature of everything up until humans come in then they stop.

They recognise the deterministic nature of everything including humans.

>Like what makes us so fundamentally different from everything else in the universe

Nothing, that's the point. Humans are fundamentally just like everything else.

Classical Islamic theology is pretty clear on the position that everything has already been determined by Allah. Obviously that means that he's unfair by human standards, but they seem chill about that.

Because you are a physical being you were destined to end up this way, based on how you were raised where you were raised what you experienced. (Your environment)

This is determinism, your environment was decided by very measurable phenomenon and you are a product of your environment.

If put in the exact same situation an infinite amount of times you would make the exact same devisions. (Exact same situation also means same memories and everything if you remember trying something 50 times you are in a different situation)

Replying to myself as a true beginner haha. I've just watched two well-made videos on the subject from Monsieur Phi (It's in French, but the English dubs are decent Link 1 & Link 2). I agree with the content but I am just paraphrasing here.

There is a philosophical confusion about freedom and free will. Freedom can be defined as (1) being able to make different choices in the same situation and (2) making that decision without being influenced by any external factors. Therefore, being free means being able to determine yourself in a deterministic world, and that sounds like a godly power. This definition seems to be the classical, enlightenment, view of freedom, not mine. But that definition is a philosophical definition of Freedom and not how it is perceived intuitively by common folks (including philosophers) and it s not the definition of Free will.

Free will is simpler than Freedom. Free will is based on (1) I can exert some control over my decision (2) I can deliberate and choose between different options (and not be forced to pick one ie: at gunpoint).

These 2 definitions seem close but the devil is in the details.

Scenario 1 : I wake up extremely sick on Monday and can't go to work. Not going to work is a decision that was determined by external causes, with no control nor different options to choose from. There was no freedom nor free will in this scenario.

Scenario 2 : I wake up on Monday feeling fine, debate whether or not I should go to work, and decide to stay. I had several real options to choose from, deliberated, and freely choose not to go. We can debate on the Freedom part but there was free will here.

Scenario 3 : I wake up, and debate wether or not I should go, remembered that my boss warned me that I ll get fired if I don't show up again. I had several real options and deliberate but the decision was forced on me. Hence no free will.

Scenario 4 : I wake up, debate whether I should go or not, and decide to stay, but, unknown to me, my car is actually broken and I would not have been able to go even if I wanted to. I had no freedom to choose because either way, I would have had to stay, but still used my free will to decide to stay. This is a Franckfurt case where you believe you can choose even if you really cant.

All 4 scenarios illustrate the grey area between Freedom and free will. In a deterministic universe, true Freedom (in the metaphysical definition as stated above) seems impossible, yet Free will is possible. There is a compatibility between the two (hence, compatibilism). Because there is a place for Free will, there is a use for our moral system and justice overall. We are responsible for our own actions as long as we had some control over them and as long as we deliberate and we can choose between them.

I am no expert on the subject, feel free (lol) to poke holes in my block of text =)

The reason the compatibalist position is unsatisfying is because compatibalists will typically recognize the determinist nature of everything up until humans come in then they stop.

Like what makes us so fundamentally different from everything else in the universe

See but religious people like the idea of free will (that way rewards and punishments can make sense) so they say hod said we have free will so we do.

You can just check SEP:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/supplement.html

They have different specific accounts for compatibilism -- example higher-order theories of freedom (from Frankfurt and others), Reason-responsiveness views, and there are also compatibilist variants of "ability to do otherwise".

Also compatibilists are trying to make many different points:

• Some may argue that what we actually want to "track" by freedom and what we care about are compatible with determinism. This can involve some thought experiments and arguments as to how incompatibilist "ability to do otherwise" doesn't really offer anything much.

• They may argue that "ability to do otherwise" itself is compatible with determinism if ability is understood in a unloaded/unbloated sense.

• They often want to argue not only that we have compatibilist free will, it's also moral responsibility inducing. Which is a substantive point and not just "shrugging".

• They may attack incompatibilist intuitions for example -- they may provide cases where it feels intuitive to assign praise even when the person says they are compelled by their nature to do some good, or they may argue lack of meta-wants or meta-meta-wills to control oneself and such are unnecessary demands and not clear why necessary for moral responsibility. And so on.

• They may also provide x-phi support that ordinary humans have elements of compatibilists intuitions.

> This sort of solution essentially splits freedom into two concepts: the type of freedom we recognize in everyday life, and freedom from the laws of causality. Since the latter is impossible, it makes no sense to draw any kind of moral consequence from it, and one must therefore focus on the former. This is rather unsatisfying because it feels like the philosophical version of a shoulder shrug.

But that sounds more favorable to compatibilism than against. If the compatibilist's version of freedom is the very freedom we recognize and talk about in everyday life, what's the practical value and meaning of this "freedom from laws of causality" (which you yourself recognize to be ultimately seemingly incoherent, because to be free from causation is make actions free from the actor which would again be no freedom at all)? So why should anyone bat an eye or lament or celebrate the non-existence of some concept that cannot be even legibly conceived of? It's also not clear if moral responsibility is necessarily threatened by lack of such "freedom from causality". Backward-looking punishment can also be independently argued against. So we don't have to worry about that.

Personally, I am not a compatibilist. I am just trying to give credit where it's due.

this mistakes the idea of determinism with low impulse control, which is nonsense. The whole point is that your 'conscious decision' itself is determined by prior causes. You merely have an illusion of choices and an illusion of choosing.

Please enlighten us, instead of just saying "nope".

> The compatibilists would argue that free will merely means freedom from compulsion.

They don't though.

The article stumbles upon the correct approach of compatibilism, but just finds it unsatisfying without explaining why. It's like someone saying they find 2+2=4 unsatisfying and discounting it.

​

>Compatibilists will argue that freedom merely consists of the absence of compulsion. In other words, if an agent can do whatever they please, they are free and therefore the appropriate target of praise or blame, even if determinism is true. This sort of solution essentially splits freedom into two concepts: the type of freedom we recognize in everyday life, and freedom from the laws of causality. Since the latter is impossible, it makes no sense to draw any kind of moral consequence from it, and one must therefore focus on the former. This is rather unsatisfying because it feels like the philosophical version of a shoulder shrug.

>As discussed in the free will section of the article, the concept of free will makes very little sense

It is only the incoherent libertarian free will that makes little sense, but that doesn't matter since compatibilist free will is what people really mean and what is relevant when it comes to morality.

>This is rather unsatisfying because it feels like the philosophical version of a shoulder shrug.

I don't see why. It's like someone telling you that 2+2 =4, but you just fine it an unsatisfying answer.

About the Halting Problem and Determinism

Disclaimer: For people that never heard of a deterministic Turing machine (DTM)[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine] or the Halting Problem (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem) the following might not make much sense.

1. DTMs are a theoretical mathematical formalism that describe a system that is intrinsically deterministic. I say this because at any given point of the calculation, considering the configuration, tape content and DTM state we can exactly say what the next configuration/ tape and state will look like.

2. The Halting Problem is an example how some Problems that can be defined for this deterministic theoretical formalism are undecidable.

3. The very nature of the Halting Problem being undecidable implies that something in the formalism is indeterministic. (?) My thought is that if the formalism was completely deterministic, we would be able to decide the Halting Problem for all possible problem instances.

Dear big brains of Reddit: What do you all think about this? Is this an example of how a deterministic system can be indeterministic, or does undecidability imply something different? I am looking forward to your thoughts!

Of course there is free will. As a product of my prior history, my “prior causes” as you put it make me often want to do things that I shouldn’t do, but I don’t do them as a conscious decision on my part.

If I acted on my impulses I’d have been in prison for a very long time.

The proof of free will lies not in doing what you want to do, but in the choice not to.

Dennett is one of the more well known people who argue for compatibilism. I don't like everything he says, in particular the idea about it being a pragmatic approach. I think what people really mean and have always really meant was compatibilist free will.

Here are a couple of papers that I think are nice intros into free will and compatatibilism.

>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

>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

> The marionette controls the puppet, the puppet cannot do otherwise, but surely it's the puppet's story to tell, is it not?

Because the strings controlling us isn't something separate or different to us.

One could say that everything we do is fully determined by our DNA and environment/upbringings/experiences. But someone's DNA and experiences aren't something separate and external to a person.

A person is their DNA and experiences.

Meaning arises from a mind experiencing something. Even if what happens is deterministic, your mind will still assign various levels of meaning to it. You still experience meaning, regardless of whether you had a choice or not.

I think most of my beef is that "prior causes" don't seem to exist? Like, whos done the experiment to show why the the word APPLE just appeared in all caps? Sounds like it would fractal out to nonsense in almost all relevant contexts. I'd reckon more people are uncomfortable with how much of their lives seemingly is/was out of their will/control rather than by this nonsense of predestination masquerading as physics.

Thats what being conscious is, literally having access to free (thoughts) will. We clearly are conscious, and I know a beagle that seems so too, and thats about as far as I can get before this seems to have serious problems. Particles, even quantum ones, don't have such abilities. A chunk of Uranium doesn't decide to decay, the narrative/anthropomorphizing/thought experiment consists of applying metrics for qualities that do not exist . Those questions of "was I always going to live where I live" etc are pointless because they have no further justification than much verbose (as in the article) handwaving about how our understanding of particle/macro physics can allegedly scale or transition to living entities.

I fundamentally do not understand the argument for applying physical models to whatever consciousness/free will is.

With all the determinists on r/philosophy I would be disappointed if I wasn't downvoted. I would expect more, they must be determined to ignore me.

agreed. The only problem is that the common interpretation of quantum mechanics, Copenhagen, truly makes an indeterminacy claim about the universe at a fundamental level. However, I think most physicists would say that Copenhagen cannot be the final answer to how quantum mechanics works.

As discussed in the free will section of the article, the concept of free will makes very little sense, even if the universe is non-deterministic (God save us if it isn't...). This is for the following reason: if free will means you can do what you want, then we must ask why you want the things you want. Well, some prior causes presumably made you want those choices. Is it really free will if all your choices are caused by wants resulting from prior states of affairs? And what would free will even mean then?

I have absolutely no idea why you think particles not being tiny people would make a difference. You'll have to elaborate here. Yes, particles are not conscious living things, but they are basic to what makes reality. Since we already know that determinism is pretty much the case in classical mechanics, a popular criticism of determinism comes from the murky and fuzzy world of quantum mechanics.