I think it could be true that people exercise real choice. But I don't think it is consistent with determinism.

https://cogsci.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Thesis2018Hietala.pdf

Scholarly definitions aside, ordinary people generally understand free will as the ability to choose a desired course of action without restraint (Monroe, Dillon & Malle, 2014; Feldman, Wong & Baumeister, 2014; Feldman, 2017). Even if some scholars conceptualize free will in abstract, metaphysical terms (Greene & Cohen, 2004; Montague, 2008; Bargh, 2008), people tend to link free will most closely with the psychological concept of choice, not metaphysical concepts (Vonash, Baumeister, & Mele, 2018).

That's why the US likes Jamaica

> free will as commonly understood

Are you certain that the way free will is commonly understood is coherent?

I don't think it is

Dennett has a newer, more generally accessible book on compatibilism called Freedom Evolves - highly recommended!

I will say, I feel like just introducing people to determinism and them suddenly feeling a dampened sense of self or free will is kinda like saying kids who can't swim that get thrown into the deep end of a pool stuggle to stay afloat.

But, I will say that it's a solid point that determinism's immediate logical follow up is "free will as I understand it, is sus."

At the end of the day, I think free will is such a loosely defined concept entirely because it kinda takes a whole lot to justify it. Like beyond what is currently or ever may be possible. But that's kinda why it's all very philisophical and not science really.

I am glad to see Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett in the illustration there. If any two books really introduced the public to the issue it would be Free Will by Harris and Elbow Room by Dennett. Regardless of your own position on the subject or your feelings about these two men, they are required reading. Is there any other work that we think is essential here? If so, why?

This article (and the linked one about Harris) are essentially efforts to add minor nuances to these books. If there is some real new angle I sure missed it.

Having read Dennett’s book, I would argue that his brand of compatibilism is best described by what it is not - by what it attacks rather than what it proposes, if anything.

Compatibilism takes determinism at the level of subconscious cognition to be a given. It then points out all the reasons why people apply motivated reasoning to escape this obvious fact, and how misguided they are. Its only real claim is that the commonsense version and experience of free will does not require the super free will philosophers and theologians are chasing. Anyone who is seeking the latter to justify the former is in error on multiple levels. It is not the compatibilists who are trying yo redefine things, the incompatibilists did it first intentionally to perform a bait-and-switch.

Apart from pointing these two things out, there isn’t much else. What the commonsense free will is, how it emerges, and how we should think about it is murky. Is the divide between conscious and subconscious relevant? Can we draw moral or practical implications from this or are we forced to work-arounds? Do we treat moral failures more like hardware failures and focus on containment and repair rather than punishment and virtue?

I feel Dennett merely raises these resulting questions without attempting to solve them.

It's fairly trivial to contradict libertarian free will. If you can prove to me you don't need to breathe and don't need to crap, I'll entertain a will bound by no limitation.

> This seems quite an extraordinary claim, compatibilism has been around for centuries, it pre-dates back to the stoics, it's not some sporadic desperate invention by philosophers in reaction to scientific consensus regarding determinism.

Compatibilism is implying there exists a determinism without decision making capacity. Which never existed. It was an inadequate conceptualization that deserves no further time. We've always dealt with humans having colloquial "free will" and still continue to.

>> a deterministic universe is incompatible with the idea of choice > ># > >> A pre-determined choice is not a choice. > ># > >> no one is really in control of their actions. > >These are just more assertions lacking any given justification. You aren't bothering to try justify your position at all.

What is a morally relevant choice, if not the ability to freely determine which among a number of options to take? In a predetermined universe, there are no morally relevant choices, because there are no options. Claiming that a morally relevant choice can be made in a fully deterministic universe is like claiming that a person can successfully choose not to be affected by gravity. In a fully deterministic universe, human thought processes are no more sophisticated or chosen than the processes of water molecules flowing down a hill in a creek.

>> by definition > >A strange thing to say when you've not defined anything, and also clearly question begging. > >Also, it's very unclear what idea of free will is sitting in your head. You haven't tried to define it, but it seems like you're requiring that, for a choice to be free, it must be made on the basis of something other than the random chance, the facts of the situation, the character of the decision maker, their beliefs, or their experiences. What other factor are you looking for? In fact, why is determinism even a relevant consideration? When a decision is made, all those factors I listed, save random chance, have already been established and set in stone - even in a non-deterministic universe. How would a non-deterministic universe allow for whatever this unstated factor is?

A non-physically-deterministic universe allows (or rather does not forbid) mental processes, which some people think are categorically separate from physical processes, to influence the physical universe. And what that means for the free will question is that free will can exist because the choices made by a moral actor are made via a mental process and are not fully determined by the physical universe.

That's interesting because absurdism appeals to me quite a lot while compatibilism makes little sense to me at all.

want clarity around the words

If my wants and needs, propelled by my brain and body, cause me to choose X, they can’t also make me choose Y unless those wants and needs, body and brain change somehow. If everything stays the same so does the choice

I would say that yes, those variables are beyond are control. I would personally go a bit past that and say that everything that happens is simply the inevitable result of what happened before it, a single line of events tracing back to the beginning of things.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WagdzxAH8EQ

this video really made me start thinking about this topic, I highly recommend anyone with an interest in free will watch this

> a deterministic universe is incompatible with the idea of choice

> A pre-determined choice is not a choice.

> no one is really in control of their actions.

These are just more assertions lacking any given justification. You aren't bothering to try justify your position at all.

> by definition

A strange thing to say when you've not defined anything, and also clearly question begging.

Also, it's very unclear what idea of free will is sitting in your head. You haven't tried to define it, but it seems like you're requiring that, for a choice to be free, it must be made on the basis of something other than the random chance, the facts of the situation, the character of the decision maker, their beliefs, or their experiences. What other factor are you looking for? In fact, why is determinism even a relevant consideration? When a decision is made, all those factors I listed, save random chance, have already been established and set in stone - even in a non-deterministic universe. How would a non-deterministic universe allow for whatever this unstated factor is?

This is my view of it as well. To me it seems more rational based on what is known but of course the merits of that may be debated.

> is it because 2+5=7

And what if you get a calculator that says 2+5 = 6? Is that because it's 6, or is it then only because of that other shit?

Incomplete, and something you said earlier that's important, they are MODELS.

? You must reading some tone/implication into my comment that was not intended. I'm sorry you felt condescended to, just sharing an interesting personal connection I have to this very specific question and responding to the claim that we might be able to think of free will as self-evident or axiomatic.

Your initial claim was that "perhaps the best argument for free will is the fact that we all seem to experience it," which makes sense. All I was saying is that, for most people, even when they don't spend much time with the topic, it's surprisingly easy for their subjective experience of free will to fall away.

That our "baseline" subjective experience seems to be one of experiencing free will is certainly true, and there are really interesting & open potential cultural/social/evolutionary reasons for that, but generally we wouldn't accept a claim on axiomatic principles if it had the property of seeming to exist or fall away with the relative ease that the experience of free will does.

Again, not making any claims about what you do or don't believe, just responding to the comment that accepting free will as axiomatic or self-evident might make sense with some reasons why it might not make sense.

First of all, your answer is condescending, and also doesn't really make an argument so much as imply that if I only knew what you know, I'd agree with you.

Second, I already do not believe in free will. I'm merely commenting that, as a scientist, efforts to argue against the possibility of free will based on our current models of physics are not very convincing to me. Because our understanding is incomplete.

Edit: disagree by downvoting all you want, this is a philosophy forum and we should be directly making our arguments here, not describing how our arguments would make someone feel if we made them. It's not politics or debate club, it's philosophy. I don't care how popular the idea is, I care if it's a sound logical argument.

The issue is that the sense in which it's "self-evident" falls away very quickly, for many people, with even a little bit of concentrated/guided introspection.

I got a chance during undergrad to spend quite a bit of time on research which surveyed non-philosophy participants on their thoughts/feelings regarding free will/self issues. It's the "illusion of free will is itself an illusion" idea; it's difficult, because the whole topic is so conceptually muddy and there are so many concepts which overlap definitionally with day-to-day use, but, overwhelmingly, when you get people thinking clearly about the idea and sharpen some of the conceptual edges they come away with pretty clear incompatibilist intuitions that they do not actually have free will.

I can dig up some of the research to link if you're interested, but with even just a little bit of conceptual clean-up most non-philosophy people become pretty quickly disillusioned about their free will.

That inherently depends upon fixing our understanding of choice to only one dimension of it, the particular ways it has been defined in certain academic arguments about it being a choice determined solely by an individual. If we accept that choice, as a concept, has been a bundle of multiple things, some of which are not salvageable and some of which might be indispensible or at least very valuable, then why is it an illegitimate rhetorical move to accept only some of those things which are bundled with the idea of choice? I could equally say that choice was never destroyed because it has always been determined, but as long we continue to pretend there are no social dimensions to the idea of choice then we can pretend choice is destoryed. I think if one is claiming this reduction is accurate, they need to specifically justify the claim that we ought to view free will as determinists do.

Accountability is the field of should and determinism is the field of is, if we accept that determinism destroys accountability we are bridging from an is to an ought. I would be curious to see what the exact chain of logic is from "the world is determinists" to "therefore we cannot be accountable", because here I think is where we could find a bit of a rhetorical sleight of hand among some determinists. When I say I am holding someone accountable, all I have ever been saying (since childhood) is that I am relating to them in a specific way, that is why people hold other people accountable. Even the idea of "accountable" inherently is social linguistically, what is an account (financial or narrative) but a social relationship? To try to surgically remove these social dimensions seems ahistorical, and I think wrong inasmuch as it is ahistorical.

The crux here is that these terms don't exist as absteact precisely defined little neat categories with some presently exhaustible and easily enumerable ideas, leading in some logical chain from A to B. Free will, accountability, choice? They are messy, historical, social terms who are subject both to flux and to unveiling (as well as veiling). If the social dimension is ignored and it is treated as being exhausted by this one facet of its intellectual dimensions, then that strikes me as a fundamental categorical and communication error which inhibits understanding. I think choice is a social object, which can be metaphorically picked up and repurposed while maintaining a sense of identity.

I said that free will does not follow from either model.

However, the models are merely models, and they can't really rule out free will.

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio....

Not suggesting we accept free will either. But again, we accept existence itself on axiomatic principles. I don't know if we have free will or not, but one could argue it's self-evident.

Does it matter if the universe is stochastic or predetermined? It seems that neither leave room for free will.

There is no crack that I can know of in physics where free will could hide.

So if have some options, I’d love to hear them.

> Asserting that determinism removes choice from the equation is question begging. The compatibilists don't think it does and you didn't give even one reason why it would.

Compatibalists can try to play whatever semantic games they like - a deterministic universe is incompatible with the idea of choice. By definition.

The entire premise of compatibilism is trying to square peg that round hole.

A pre-determined choice is not a choice. A deterministic universe neatly wipes out any such concerns as "reason responsiveness" or whatever other definition of free will you care to align on. Zizek's treasured quote that the author presents with such reverence boils down to accepting the lack of choice, and finding "freedom" in that unity with the universe, by recognizing that the "choice" you are making was in fact made by the very universe you are trying to affect, and only has meaning because of that commonality of source.

Which is all fine and good and ultimately meaningless. It gets truly non-sensical however, if you follow the author's proposed approach of accepting this fluff and then pretending that the "common sense" approach to assigning moral responsibility still applies, even though no one is really in control of their actions.

> We don't put moralistic judgements on things we think don't have choice, but if determinism is true than this is sort of trivially untrue: we have in fact been making moral judgements on humans who don't have control over their choices

>Basically, a choice is an empirical fact one could argue. I'm not talking about "a thing determined by nothing other than a person's agency" when I say a choice, but I am talking about whatever we have been pointing to for over a thousand years and calling a choice, an emergent phenomenon of the brain.

>The reason I wouldn't call a volcano free is that I can't enter into a relationship with a volcano as if it were free, and it does not have any (deterministic) process of determination.

All of this boils down to "determinism destroys choice, but as long as we pretend it doesn't and just continue doing the same thing as we did before, then it's all OK."

Which makes determinism worthless and compatibalism so much hot air.