Yet another Free Will Thread

[hammegk]

Interesting. I suspect we at least agree "self" is not the controlling mechanism, anyway. You fall back on the automaton computing; an idealist could go with Thought as the control. Back to which epiphenomena best fits in one's worldview, huh?

What do you Think?

 

[chriswl]

I cannot, on logical grounds, deny the possibility of free will. If it were that simple there would be no debate. The debate rages because we have ideas about freedom of the will and empirical evidence and a conceptual framework that contradicts it.

Just because there is a debate doesn't mean there is a consensus that there is anything worth debating. The many people who feel this is just a pseudo-problem, a confusion of language, will of course ignore the debate and spend their time more profitably. In fact my impression is that most philosophers do actually think that the concept of libertarian free will is incoherent.

Sometimes the answer to Big Questions really can be quite simple and obvious, for example all the problems of theology - solved by the simple realisation that there is no God. In general, if a problem seems easy to grasp but has resisted all attempts to solve for thousands of years then it is surely quite likely that the problem is misconceived in some way.

That is where believers in libertarian free will differ from your perspective. They do not believe necessarily that reason is deterministic, or they did not think so for the longest time. But even if they do see reason as deterministic, they view the will as being able to choose between the deterministic dictates of reason and other alternatives. That does not make reason useless. Reason may well provide the best possible course of action, but they do not see us as bound by reason. From their perspective, reason may tell me not to embezzle that $40 million from my company's coffers but I still do it. From your perspective I would do it because I have another drive that overshadows reason, call it greed. From their perspective I have some perversity of the will that allows me to see another course and choose, call it greed.

So libertarian free willers can view reason as part of the will, in which case they would say that reason is not deterministic. Or they can see the will as independent of reason, in which case they can follow the dictates of reason or not. Reason is not useless, again, in that situation because it is simply the means by which we arrive at one possible outcome. It does not dictate the outcome. The will does that job. And the will is perceived as acausal.

The will isn't perceived as acausal. The will is assumed to be acausal because it is imagined that were it causal we would be able to perceive this, and we don't. But is this correct? What would it be like if we could perceive the causal nature of our will (assuming it was causal)? I think people sometimes have in mind here the scenario of a person whose actions were remote-controlled by an evil scientist. We would find our bodies saying and doing things all by themselves while our conscious minds looked on as helpless spectators. That's not how we experience life therefore we say, at least, that our will feels acausal.

But this intuition is clearly wrong. In this scenario we still have a will which is apparently unconstrained but is physically prevented from acting. We are able to appreciate our helpless condition and wish it were different, impotently will it to be different. So this is not an example of what it would feel like to experience one's actual "will" as being caused. If our will is the result of casual processes then this means that all our thoughts and decisions to act are too (these are all things we will). So not only is the raising of my arm causal but so is the thought "I think I'll raise my arm" and the decision to do so. We experience no apparent conflict - our actions line up perfectly with our choices. This is the case if our will is causal and also (it is assumed) if our will is acausal. So therefore we have no reason to say that our will feels acausal - this is not something we could detect anyway. There aren't two types of possible subjective experience, the experience of free will and the experience of unfree will. There is just the experience of will. Whether or not our actions and thoughts have a causal basis has no effect on the subjective experience of what it is like to will something.

So what should we do with the phrase "free will"? I think it has meaning in useage such as "of your own free will" meaning not coerced. But there isn't and cannot be any extra level of freedom beyond this not even if our actions turn out to be acausal due to some quantum mechanical process.

It doesn't even make sense to say that libertarian free will is an illusion. An illusion implies that there is something that it appears to be but actually is not. But what would that thing be? The term libertarian free will is used by people who don't understand that determinism is compatible with our subjective experience of our exercise of will. They assume that something else must be needed to account for our experiences and they call this thing free will. They will never solve the supposed "mystery" of free will (the question of what this other thing is) because the thing they are looking for cannot exist. Their definition of (libertarian) free will is nothing more than "that extra thing which is needed to explain why our subjective experience of our will feels the way it does", but if no such extra thing is needed then their definition has no referent.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Just because there is a debate doesn't mean there is a consensus that there is anything worth debating. The many people who feel this is just a pseudo-problem, a confusion of language, will of course ignore the debate and spend their time more profitably. In fact my impression is that most philosophers do actually think that the concept of libertarian free will is incoherent.

And with them I agree. But there is a difference between incoherent and logically contradictory. The incoherence depends on what we know of causality. We can imagine libertarian free will. Some people think they can make sense of it, but from what I have seen they tend to ignore the rest of what we know of reality or pretend that dualism has no inherent problems with a causal universe. The distinction I was making was with the a priori false (logical contradiction) and what we call the a posteriori false (contradicts empirical info -- like the presence of a causal universe, which may or may not be correct but certainly seem to be the case). And trying to point out the actual position of the libertarians, despite the fact that I think they are dead on wrong.

Sometimes the answer to Big Questions really can be quite simple and obvious, for example all the problems of theology - solved by the simple realisation that there is no God. In general, if a problem seems easy to grasp but has resisted all attempts to solve for thousands of years then it is surely quite likely that the problem is misconceived in some way.

Yep. It probably is.

The will isn't perceived as acausal.

Did I say "perceived"? Sorry. I should have said conceived.

The will is assumed to be acausal because it is imagined that were it causal we would be able to perceive this, and we don't. But is this correct? What would it be like if we could perceive the causal nature of our will (assuming it was causal)? I think people sometimes have in mind here the scenario of a person whose actions were remote-controlled by an evil scientist. We would find our bodies saying and doing things all by themselves while our conscious minds looked on as helpless spectators. That's not how we experience life therefore we say, at least, that our will feels acausal.

But this intuition is clearly wrong. In this scenario we still have a will which is apparently unconstrained but is physically prevented from acting. We are able to appreciate our helpless condition and wish it were different, impotently will it to be different. So this is not an example of what it would feel like to experience one's actual "will" as being caused. If our will is the result of casual processes then this means that all our thoughts and decisions to act are too (these are all things we will). So not only is the raising of my arm causal but so is the thought "I think I'll raise my arm" and the decision to do so. We experience no apparent conflict - our actions line up perfectly with our choices. This is the case if our will is causal and also (it is assumed) if our will is acausal. So therefore we have no reason to say that our will feels acausal - this is not something we could detect anyway. There aren't two types of possible subjective experience, the experience of free will and the experience of unfree will. There is just the experience of will. Whether or not our actions and thoughts have a causal basis has no effect on the subjective experience of what it is like to will something.

So what should we do with the phrase "free will"? I think it has meaning in useage such as "of your own free will" meaning not coerced. But there isn't and cannot be any extra level of freedom beyond this not even if our actions turn out to be acausal due to some quantum mechanical process.

It doesn't even make sense to say that libertarian free will is an illusion. An illusion implies that there is something that it appears to be but actually is not. But what would that thing be? The term libertarian free will is used by people who don't understand that determinism is compatible with our subjective experience of our exercise of will. They assume that something else must be needed to account for our experiences and they call this thing free will. They will never solve the supposed "mystery" of free will (the question of what this other thing is) because the thing they are looking for cannot exist. Their definition of (libertarian) free will is nothing more than "that extra thing which is needed to explain why our subjective experience of our will feels the way it does", but if no such extra thing is needed then their definition has no referent.

Agreed. But you're preaching to the choir. Sorry, I thought my position on this was clear from previous posts but I suppose not. I was only objecting to the seeming argument against the logical possibility of free will. We can still conceive it, just as we can conceive a 5000 foot tall malodorous tree with carnivorous tendencies. There are simply significant problems making sense of such a "thing". As I mentioned before I know how to destroy your will with a simple incision.

 

[burnvictim77]

Quick note: This is turning into one of the best free will discussions I've had.

That is where believers in libertarian free will differ from your perspective. They do not believe necessarily that reason is deterministic, or they did not think so for the longest time. But even if they do see reason as deterministic, they view the will as being able to choose between the deterministic dictates of reason and other alternatives. That does not make reason useless. Reason may well provide the best possible course of action, but they do not see us as bound by reason. From their perspective, reason may tell me not to embezzle that $40 million from my company's coffers but I still do it. From your perspective I would do it because I have another drive that overshadows reason, call it greed. From their perspective I have some perversity of the will that allows me to see another course and choose, call it greed.

I would call the idea that we can choose reason or choose to not use reason nonsensical, because while they are asserting free choice LFW is missing the key component to explain the will itself.

Okay, let's say I am confronted with a situation where I could apply reason or I could choose to not apply it. How do I decide which I want to do? Seemingly, if I want to apply reason, then I will. If I do not want to apply reason, I will not. Do I decide which I want? If I do decide which I want, how can I decide it based on anything other than what I want?

How would a libertarian answer this: Can I want to want something that I do not want? It quickly forms an obvious infinite regress. Instead of viewing what we desire, our drives or motivations as REVEALING themselves to our consciousness, they create a false decision to want. However, as I am trying to illustrate, this notion of will is totally nonsensical. The will cannot decide to be. It is there or it is not.

Now, personally, I think this is silly. I can destroy your will with a properly placed incision in the anterior cingulate gyri (it needs to be bilateral). I think we have excellent empirical evidence that the will results from neural action (yes, that sentence relies on dualistic thinking because that's just our language). I cannot, on logical grounds, deny the possibility of free will. If it were that simple there would be no debate. The debate rages because we have ideas about freedom of the will and empirical evidence and a conceptual framework that contradicts it.

I concur. I think that the physical knowledge of the brain we have at this point leaves very little room for a non-deterministic mind to operate in.

I see three possibilities. (1) The universe is dualistic/pluralistic and free will is possible for all thinking creatures (this includes all those forms of "neutral monism" that try to cheat free will out of their system); but this conception depends critically on linking acausal "stuff" with causal "stuff", and I don't see how to do that. (2) The universe is a monism and everything is deterministic with no possibility of free will -- the usual way of thinking about materialism. (3) The universe is a monism and the ground of existence provides the one possible free will -- this is usually expressed as a form of idealism, but I suppose could also be viewed as a form of pantheism if one thought that everything is divine. The only one of those that I think is very, very unlikely is the first. I see no way of determining which of the latter two are correct. In one way of looking at it number two is just a restricted view -- we look only within the universe and do not consider the ground of existence in the equation. But I don't see how we could really understand much about the ground of existence.

Precisely. The third is not a testable hypothesis. It becomes a problem with the epistemology of how to arrive at that knowledge. Wishful thinking, it seems to me, though I cannot disprove it.

The other possibility, I guess, is Kane's view -- that we may think of free will in the wrong way. He conjoins the deterministic parts of "us", which includes reason, to non-deterministic happenings in the quantum world. In his way of thinking about it, if a non-deterministic event is used by deterministic forces (say, our reason, for example), then we cannot properly speak of the outcome as determined. That outcome would not be purely random and would not be purely determined. Would it, then, be free? I don't think so, but he does.

This is an unappealing variety of 'freedom' at very least.

With that I strongly agree, though there are exceptions. Most ways of looking at Christianity dictate a dualistic perspective that allows free will. There are few Christians who see problems with this perspective, though, like the philosophers who are also believers -- like Robert Kane among others -- try to work out a system that allows free will within a deterministic framework. They are driven to it by the problem of evil.

There are others, as well, who are not Christians who simply want to justify what they feel must be true because they seem to experience it all the time. Let's face it. We feel free. Probably because we don't think back to first principles in our daily life - how tedious would that be? When we get down to it, though, it seems pretty clear to me that nothing happens except on some sort of framework. I don't see how libertarian free will can make sense, but I am not willing to state categorically that there is no possibility of free will in the universe because I have no clue how the universe is constructed.

Certainly there are other factors that go into LFW. But for the western layman who claims they believe in free will, it is probably a sort of LFW which is rooted in what I stated in that quote.

The other thing to keep in mind is that this construct we use -- causality -- may simply be a construct. We certainly bring it to the table as a way of making sense of the world whether or not it reflects reality. It is how our brains work. But if we take quantum mechanics seriously and take uncertainty seriously, then the universe is built on a much weirder foundation than we are seemingly willing to admit in most discussions. We say that at the macro level there is determinism and only at the very micro level is there indeterminancy. But this macro level determinism may simply be the way that we look at things, the only way that we can see them because of the way that we are made. None of this speaks to the problem of free will. I add it only as clarification to anything that I said above.

However, this does raise a free will problem: If our minds are the only grounds in which causality is real, does it make sense to say our minds are free from causality?

 

[burnvictim77]

The will isn't perceived as acausal. The will is assumed to be acausal because it is imagined that were it causal we would be able to perceive this, and we don't. But is this correct? What would it be like if we could perceive the causal nature of our will (assuming it was causal)? I think people sometimes have in mind here the scenario of a person whose actions were remote-controlled by an evil scientist. We would find our bodies saying and doing things all by themselves while our conscious minds looked on as helpless spectators. That's not how we experience life therefore we say, at least, that our will feels acausal.

But this intuition is clearly wrong. In this scenario we still have a will which is apparently unconstrained but is physically prevented from acting. We are able to appreciate our helpless condition and wish it were different, impotently will it to be different. So this is not an example of what it would feel like to experience one's actual "will" as being caused. If our will is the result of casual processes then this means that all our thoughts and decisions to act are too (these are all things we will). So not only is the raising of my arm causal but so is the thought "I think I'll raise my arm" and the decision to do so. We experience no apparent conflict - our actions line up perfectly with our choices. This is the case if our will is causal and also (it is assumed) if our will is acausal. So therefore we have no reason to say that our will feels acausal - this is not something we could detect anyway. There aren't two types of possible subjective experience, the experience of free will and the experience of unfree will. There is just the experience of will. Whether or not our actions and thoughts have a causal basis has no effect on the subjective experience of what it is like to will something.

Beautifully put. I frequently ask those who support Free Will to distinguish it from simple Will. And they rarely have an answer for me.

 

[chriswl]

Agreed. But you're preaching to the choir. Sorry, I thought my position on this was clear from previous posts but I suppose not. I was only objecting to the seeming argument against the logical possibility of free will. We can still conceive it, just as we can conceive a 5000 foot tall malodorous tree with carnivorous tendencies.

But I'm arguing that we can't conceive it and that is is logically impossible. Isn't that clear?

My argument is that we cannot imagine two different types of experience - determinism and libertarian free will. They would both feel the same, they would both feel the way our experince of will actually feels. So if you are saying that you can imagine what libertarian free will is like then the thing you must be imagining is the way our will is normally experienced. How does that count as imagining LFW? It could also be called imagining deterministic conciousness, they are subjectively indistinguishable.

And I'm also arguing that, in as far as LFW believers can define LFW at all, it is logically impossible. Its nature is a complete mystery to them, it is merely that they feel something else is necessary to make sense of our experience of will because they have convinced themselves that determinism is not compatible with our subjective experience of ourselves as actors in the world. They would further have to admit that randomness is also, to them, not compatible. But as to what this non-random, non-deterministic thing is they have no clue. They can't conceive of it. It is just a piece of magic that comes in and rescues their arguments.

 

[Mercutio]

Interesting. I suspect we at least agree "self" is not the controlling mechanism, anyway. You fall back on the automaton computing;

No, actually.

an idealist could go with Thought as the control.

How, please?

Back to which epiphenomena best fits in one's worldview, huh?

Perhaps, but I think I want still more flesh on these bones before I know whether I agree with you, or whether you understand my position.

What do you Think?

I think I'll wait until your suspension is over; then we can get back to this.

 

[burnvictim77]

There are at least half a dozen different ideas of free will. Which one is the real one that gets the quotation marks?

Mercutio?

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

But I'm arguing that we can't conceive it and that is is logically impossible. Isn't that clear?

My argument is that we cannot imagine two different types of experience - determinism and libertarian free will. They would both feel the same, they would both feel the way our experince of will actually feels. So if you are saying that you can imagine what libertarian free will is like then the thing you must be imagining is the way our will is normally experienced. How does that count as imagining LFW? It could also be called imagining deterministic conciousness, they are subjectively indistinguishable.

And I'm also arguing that, in as far as LFW believers can define LFW at all, it is logically impossible. Its nature is a complete mystery to them, it is merely that they feel something else is necessary to make sense of our experience of will because they have convinced themselves that determinism is not compatible with our subjective experience of ourselves as actors in the world. They would further have to admit that randomness is also, to them, not compatible. But as to what this non-random, non-deterministic thing is they have no clue. They can't conceive of it. It is just a piece of magic that comes in and rescues their arguments.

But that's just it -- many can imagine libertarian free will, literally as a form of magic. It works like magic. We have these magic little faeries in us that are "us" and provide our decision making ability. It isn't logically impossible. Faerie world ruled by magic. All is spirit and the rest of the real world is just illusion. We are faerie spirit too. Non-corporeal will.

The logically impossible is impossible by definition -- no square circles, no married bachelors (except as an interesting literary device).

You see free will as impossible and incoherent because you accept determinism. Well, so do I. I find libertarian free will incoherent given my assumptions too. But my assumptions could possibly be wrong. There is no absolute reason why there must be determinism. Libertarian free will makes no sense based on what we see in the universe not only in terms of the working of the universe but also in terms of how we work. We can't see any means by which decision-making is sensical without an underlying framework for action, such as a deterministic universe. That is why people who try to salvage libertarian free will within a deterministic universe seem so utterly silly to us. They are all dualists (or desparate, as Kane appears to me).

Libertarian free will could only make sense from the view of a idealist. But there, again, there can only be one will, which is the will of the ONE, which cannot be explained. The ONE is a mystery. All the rest of us schlubs are stuck in the same determinism even within an idealist framework as the products of the ONE.

There is no framework, except magic, that can possibly explain libertarian free will for schlubs like us. But magic is not logically impossible. As far as I can tell it actually doesn't exist, but it is not impossible by basic definition.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Quick note: This is turning into one of the best free will discussions I've had.



I would call the idea that we can choose reason or choose to not use reason nonsensical, because while they are asserting free choice LFW is missing the key component to explain the will itself.

But, that's just it. They cannot explain the will. By it's very nature it must be unexplainable. If it were explainable then it would work by deterministic forces. That's what explainable means. It isn't explainable. It is magic. It is completely other than the material world. Spirit. The problem they have if they want to maintain a material world is the means by which the spiritual (or mind, or whatever you want to call it) and the material interact. But even there, my materialistic language starts to cause problems because I am again looking for a mechanism -- which, you guessed it, implies materiality.

This makes the conception extremely difficult to reconcile with our current view of the universe. It does not make it logically impossible.

Okay, let's say I am confronted with a situation where I could apply reason or I could choose to not apply it. How do I decide which I want to do? Seemingly, if I want to apply reason, then I will. If I do not want to apply reason, I will not. Do I decide which I want? If I do decide which I want, how can I decide it based on anything other than what I want?

How would a libertarian answer this: Can I want to want something that I do not want? It quickly forms an obvious infinite regress. Instead of viewing what we desire, our drives or motivations as REVEALING themselves to our consciousness, they create a false decision to want. However, as I am trying to illustrate, this notion of will is totally nonsensical. The will cannot decide to be. It is there or it is not.

No, they would say that their faerie sees the possibilities -- those provided by reason, those provided by desire and which may contradict one another -- and the faerie decides amongst the choices. Your brain does something similar under deteministic forces -- it arrives at a decision by weighing different possible courses of action (OK, it's easier to use dualistic language and this really bears no realitionship to what actually occurs in the brain) and that decision presents itself to consciousness. Consciousness is just what we use to reconcile decision (which is almost if not always unconscious) with the outside world -- that is one of the reasons why I think the mirror neuron system is intimately tied to this process we call consciousness.

an unappealing variety of 'freedom' at very least.

Personally, I think it's worse. I don't think it's freedom at all. It may be un-determined, but I don't see how the conjuction of indeterminacy and determinism creates libertarian free will. In essence, I think he is fooling himself. I still like him as a person and teacher very much, but he very clearly (to me) wants to hold onto his theistic views and is willing to fool himself into believing in free will as the only way to make sense of the problem of evil.

However, this does raise a free will problem: If our minds are the only grounds in which causality is real, does it make sense to say our minds are free from causality?

Well, I don't think so, but I am open to the proposition that I am wrong. I also don't think it is safe to say that our minds are the only grounds in which causality is real. What Kant seemed to produce, at least for me, is the idea that we bring causality to the table. We see causality. That does not mean that there is no causality out there, but we have no possibility but to see it. The quantum world creates problems for us, but we still see causality at the level that we operate, I believe, because we are evolutionarily adapted to think in that way -- because that form of thinking works in the universe we inhabit. It means that we must be careful in our thinking and our language. (And, yes, for those of you playing at home, I am well aware that evolution as an idea depends on a causal-deterministic framework, so I am making an assumption of causality in the preceding statements.)

As to whether or not it means our minds are free from causality, that doesn't matter as far as REALITY is concerned. It is clear that we can only see what our sensory systems allow us to see (using one sensory system for the metaphor). But with the aid of science, we know that there is much more to the electromagnetic spectrum and much more to the olfactory world, for instance, than we can ever experience directly ourselves. It could be that there is an entire world of magic/spirit out there that we cannot experience because we don't have the receptors for it. I still see no way for material and non-material to interact -- in any way -- since any such interaction would necessarily be material for it to have a mechanism. But I am also open to the very real possibility that our thinking ability is puny compared to what the universe may contain/be. This does not mean that we should begin to believe in woo, but that there may be more in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in all our philosophies.

Regardless, we are stuck in who and what we are. We have no option but to believe what we can make sense of and to forgo all the woo possibilities. Knowing our limitations, however, forces me to be a fallabilist. I don't pretend to know the nature of REALITY.

 

[Mercutio]

Mercutio?

Sorry, there, BV--I thought your question rhetorical.

IMO, the only Free Will that does not fall victim to the "that's just an illusion" charge is Libertarian Free Will. Compatibalist versions are basically "it feels free, so it is", and that is rubbish. If I can force you to want to do something, it does not matter whether it feels like you want to; you are being controlled. They also fall victim to parsimony; we can explain any compatibalist choice without the "free will" portion, so why add that superfluous bit? "Compatibalist free will" is nothing more than determinism in a dress.

 

[mookid]

Depends on the frame of reference. From the viewpoint of the universe, morality is possible only if free will exists. But we fudge what we mean by morality in our sphere of action.

Not sure why you chose to use the term fudge , unless you're agreeing with me??

For us, morality means the rules of human engagement. It exists from that perspective regardless of a universal framework that may be deterministic.

I disagree entirely with your definition of morality "For us" (presumably you mean humans?), you are describing the layman's term for morality - a subjective evaluation of a given actions or set of actions.
I also take exception to the idea that humans are somehow exempt from the "universal framework". Presumably you have made that distinction on the basis (and assumption) that the 'soul' or 'conscious' (making our choices) is intangible and therefore somehow external from said framework. Doesn't energy not have the same properties, and yet would not be described as external to the 'universal framework'?
Hard determinists believe that every cognitive thought that you make, stems from your causal connection with the universe.
Morality can be described as pertaining to the principles or rules of right conduct (right or wrong), however if determinism were to be true you would be pertaining to the causality of the universe rather than the rules of right or wrong.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Morality can be described as pertaining to the principles or rules of right conduct (right or wrong),

What determines the rules of right conduct?

 

[mookid]

What determines the rules of right conduct?

I'm saying those rules don't exist, in our current society (where people believe they have 'free will') the media does

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Mookid, perhaps we are talking at cross purposes? I took your statement that morality can exist only if free will exists as the way that statement is usually offered. It generally relies on viewing morality from a God's eye view -- that if morality is not an absolute, then it can't be morality.

"Morality", however, is a word. It gets its meaning from its use and its relation to other words. So, from that perspective, it is perfectly meaningful within a deterministic universe. Morality from a God's eye view or morality that God could use to judge humans for entrance into heaven or hell is meaningless in a deterministic universe, ageed.

But I don't think that means that there is no morality. It only means that the word "morality" means something different than it seemed to when folks looked at it from the God's eye view.

 

[mookid]

Mookid, perhaps we are talking at cross purposes? I took your statement that morality can exist only if free will exists as the way that statement is usually offered. It generally relies on viewing morality from a God's eye view -- that if morality is not an absolute, then it can't be morality.

"Morality", however, is a word. It gets its meaning from its use and its relation to other words. So, from that perspective, it is perfectly meaningful within a deterministic universe. Morality from a God's eye view or morality that God could use to judge humans for entrance into heaven or hell is meaningless in a deterministic universe, ageed.

But I don't think that means that there is no morality. It only means that the word "morality" means something different than it seemed to when folks looked at it from the God's eye view.

It's got nothing to do with a "God's eye" view.

If everyone in the world was to convert to a deterministic philosophy then the entire concept of morality would cease to exist because, as you said, the human concept of morality with respect to deliberate human action implies a deliberate choice between acting in a moral or immoral way; determinism implies that you have no choice.. you just 'chose' what you are conditioned to chose.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

But choice in this sense does not mean "free from dterministic factors", but free from external constraints.

The whole idea of compatibilist "free will" is a means of allowing us to still discuss morality while admitting that there is no such thing as freedom. Compatibilism is a sham as far as the free will issue is concerned, but it is not a sham as far as the morality thing is concerned. This is, in part, true because one consequence of it is that the idea of "self" is simply wrong.

 

[mookid]

OK.. but my point originally was in response to the comment "Morality is the number one reason why free will is defended."

First of all; implying that something is being 'defended' is a suspect statement in and of itself, especially in the context of philosophical discussion (I know that wasn't you that said that!).

Secondly; If this is the reason that compatibalism "makes more sense", then perhaps it is because one is viewing and judging the effects of the implications of determinism from a free will perspective?

 

[burnvictim77]

Sorry, there, BV--I thought your question rhetorical.

IMO, the only Free Will that does not fall victim to the "that's just an illusion" charge is Libertarian Free Will. Compatibalist versions are basically "it feels free, so it is", and that is rubbish. If I can force you to want to do something, it does not matter whether it feels like you want to; you are being controlled. They also fall victim to parsimony; we can explain any compatibalist choice without the "free will" portion, so why add that superfluous bit? "Compatibalist free will" is nothing more than determinism in a dress.

I don't think parsimony is applicable, but I think it is akin to a category mistake. "Free will" in this variety of compatibilism is not an entity, nor does it defy the experience that Free Willers attribute to Free Will, nor does it defy the confines of determinism. Everybody is happy once the Free Willers realize that the idea they are trying to defend, a will free from causality that violates the laws of the universe, is useless and nonsensical and, most of all, not appealing.

It's no more nonparsimonious than speaking of the mind as a materialist and causal determinist, as we recognize the mind as existent, not as an entity, but as a process.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

OK.. but my point originally was in response to the comment "Morality is the number one reason why free will is defended."

First of all; implying that something is being 'defended' is a suspect statement in and of itself, especially in the context of philosophical discussion (I know that wasn't you that said that!).

Sorry, that was my fault, then. I wasn't taking your whole perspective into account because I didn't see exactly where you were coming from and made an assumption.

Secondly; If this is the reason that compatibalism "makes more sense", then perhaps it is because one is viewing and judging the effects of the implications of determinism from a free will perspective?

Why, yes, I think you are correct. That's why, I think, Freddy brought in the the whole van Inwagen argument -- to show some up of the silliness of the compatibilist position. We have a truly hard time thinking from any perspective but the free will outlook. This may be, in part, because of the way that it is built into our language, but I think it goes deeper than that. We seem to need it, like a drug.