You can be coerced by chemicals in your head, imbalances exist and can be adjusted to change things. You are coerced constantly by these chemicals you are not them

The application of QM to the discussion of free will or determinism is a failure for the applicant to recognize that random =/= choice.

>But you are being coerced, by the chemicals in your head and all youve grown up to become.

That's dualistic thinking. Your brain isn't something separate to you. You are a body, which has a brain that has conscious activity.

Those chemical are you, they aren't something separate coercing you.

Blaise Pascal basically wrote the same thing 400 years earlier.

Every human is wagering their life on some religion, agnosticism or atheism.

Camus wagered his life on atheism.

But you are being coerced, by the chemicals in your head and all youve grown up to become.

>Free will to most people would be you come to two doors you have a choice to use either door or none.

So how do you define choice.

Let's use a simplistic system of a thermostat. That system will make the choice to turn off the heating once it gets to a certain temperature.

Choice is just about a deterministic system being what causes an action.

>A determinist would say you do not you are destined to choose whatever you end up choosing based on your preceding life.

That's what a compatibilist will say also.

>A compatibalist would say you are destined to choose what you choose but it feels free enough as you arent being coerced to choose.

It's got nothing to do with how they feel. It's about whether in fact you are being coerced or not.

Is someone holding a gun making you do an action or did you do it because you wanted to. There is a matter of fact here, it's nothing to do with how they feel.

yes, you are referring to a colloquial definition of free will, or perhaps a compatibilist one. That is, you think that free will is compatible with a deterministic universe. This is a totally valid position to hold. The question is whether we think that this "freedom" is indeed "enough". And that's where I would say that it just isn't. Yes, it serves it's purpose in every-day life, and in normal conversation we all talk about choices, etc.

But if we think about what is fundamentally true in the world, I think this compatibilist version of free will is just weaksauce. No "choices" really exist, except in our imagination. If possessing a mental image of imagined options is "free will" then free will means very little I think. And, furthermore, the imagined list of choices in your mind's eye would also have been determined by prior causes, such that you can only imagine those choices that you are determined to imagine.

I think neuroscience throws another wrench into your common sense reasoning. Namely, the entity that you call "yourself", the "you" is much less of a concrete thing than it appears subjectively. So when you talk about "you" making a choice, this fact further complicates it. Really, there exists a brain that has various inputs and outputs, and it acts perfectly deterministically in connection to the unique evolution of the universe and it's initial conditions, and that's it. The "you" and "choices" are all abstract concepts that we "recognize" but which are not fixed ontological objects or real things.

Free will to most people would be you come to two doors you have a choice to use either door or none.

A determinist would say you do not you are destined to choose whatever you end up choosing based on your preceding life.

A compatibalist would say you are destined to choose what you choose but it feels free enough as you arent being coerced to choose.

This is my current understanding of the differences

>But i think we are making the same point determinists and people who believe in free will are talking about a different thing than what compatibalists are talking about when they say free will.
>
>When a determinist is talking about free will they are talking about the ability to make independent choices.

I'm not really familiar with your terminology. I would say a determinist simply states the world is deterministic, rather than making any comment of free will.

When you say "independent choices" independent from what? If it's independent from some external coercive influence, then yeh, that's what I think most people are talking about. If you are saying "independent" from the laws of physics, then no, I don't think that's what most people mean.

>When someone who believes in free will is talking about it they are talking about the same.

I would say people talking about free will are talking about making decisions in line with their desires free from external coercion/influence.

Which is what a compatibilist is saying.

I think some Calvinists also believe that everything is already determined by God. That is, who goes to heaven or hell is already set.

Because apparently a large portion of humanity would rather watch it burn

Id have a hard time calling myself any kind of philosopher,

But i think we are making the same point determinists and people who believe in free will are talking about a different thing than what compatibalists are talking about when they say free will.

When a determinist is talking about free will they are talking about the ability to make independent choices.

When someone who believes in free will is talking about it they are talking about the same.

When a compatibalist talks about it they are talking about something different. (Just learned that today)

Why this has happened im not sure and i cant speak on why professionals are more inclined to compatibalism than others.

This!

That’s just the retirement plan for trustfundees who can’t hack it

>Here is a simple question about free will. At what exact moment of human life does it begin?

Not sure if that makes sense. It's like asking At what exact moment of human life does "happiness" begin?

​

>We don’t choose race, family, time/place of birth, or other factors when we are born.

You are your genetics and upbringing, they aren't something separate to yourself.

We aren't talking about being God, so you don't need absolute control over your own genetics and physical being.

​

>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.

Free will is about actions. Think of it as being able to walk. One moment the toddler couldn't walk and then one moment it could. Nothing magical about that.

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

Most people have compatibilist intuitions, where you don't need to be free from everything prior and present.

Seems like you are talking about libertarian free will that doesn't exist, but that doesn't matter since most people are really talking about compatibilist free will which does exist.

Yep, you can summarise it with the statement libertarian free will doesn't exist but that doesn't matter since most people really mean compatibilist free will that does exist.

> this is a different concept than what determinists and free will believers are talking about.

I argue that you have it backwards. What you are talking about doesn't exist and is just an incoherent idea. But what people really mean is the coherent compatibilist free will.

People have incoherent views around free will, but if you properly probe you'll see that people have compatibilist intuitions.

​

>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

Then when it comes to philosophy professors most are outright compatibilists.

[https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all)

There is a saying that that philosophers are mostly compatibilists, most laypeople have compatibilist intuitions, but amateur philosophers don't think free will exists.

So it's amateur philosophers like you that are talking about something completely different to what people really mean.

I think what drives it is that discovery and striving to understand things feels good, or is rewarding in some manner. I guess it’s a result of evolution reinforcing this as well as our intelligence and the ability to reason abstractly, and when they come together, we wander into strange territory and begin to examine ourselves as well as the world.

I have heard a theory that our self-awareness is not even necessary for what we have achieved as a species though, and that it’s simply an incidental byproduct of the development of our intelligence. Some things just evolve incidentally without necessarily conferring a benefit in itself. So maybe the level of abstraction we’ve reached where we are self-aware is just… an accident of evolution. Maybe it’s possible for humanity to have done just as much but not possess this extra ability.

> And paradoxically, this collective experience of absurdity becomes a form of tenuous meaning.

Self circular, and absurd. Yet if no other meaning exists, why not be nice and make others absurdity more pleasant.

This comes down to the semantics of what "free-will" means.

I think it can be agreed that there's a subjective 'free-will'. We know there's something going on. However, this 'thing' is challenging to describe in a way that doesn't evaporate under scrutiny.

It's a challenge of description, rather than a test of existence.

Under compatibalist “free will” your choices are still fully determined, all that is saying is that you arent physically restricted from the choice youre making (like you arent in prison so you are free to choose to travel) this is a different concept than what determinists and free will believers are talking about.

Compatibalists believe in determinism but dont like the idea of fate so they redefine free will and call it a day

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

No because compatibilist free will is "compatible" with a deterministic world.

Or to put it better put, free will has nothing to do with determinism.

Think of free will as like being "happy", the world being deterministic says nothing about whether you can be "happy" or not, similarly the world being deterministic says nothing about compatibilist free will. They are completely different compatible concepts.

All events are contingent.

Not necessary.

This is the shallows waters in which most people drown in determinism.

Why would dying be insane or absurd? Seems like a machine produced article once again.

If you’re whole life philosophy can be simplified to “we are puppets is that so bad?”

I pity your view of the world. What a huge nihilist waste of time this universe is.

The holocaust? We are puppets, that’s not so bad.

A child tell it’s mother he lovers her. We are puppets, who cares?

This very argument we are having - why have it - shouldn’t we all kill ourselves and end it? we are puppets what’s so bad?

Basically you don’t have a philosophy of life. You have a non-philosophy of non-life.