Did you believe the result would be different this time around?
Not really.
I had the unrealistic hope that this time round you just might actually respond directly and unambiguously to my questions and that we might have a useful exchange of views
I'm guessing that you really do think you're giving me direct and unambiguous answers but from my perspective it looks as though you're being evasive. Different styles I guess.
I have responded directly, clearly explaining the problems with a number of definitions of free will, including compatibilism.....which you merely ignore or dismiss, only to repeat ''you don't understand compatibilism'' without any attempt at further explanation.
So, on the contrary, it is you who does not engage in a reasonable manner. It is you who declines to explain or address the questions being asked of you.
You merely rinse and repeat versions of the above.
I didn't expect you to address what is being said. You have never done it before, so why would it be different this time around.
Meanwhile:
Why Compatibilism Is Mistaken.
here are some major difficulties in compatibilism, which I think damage it irreparably.
Take Hobbes’ claim, largely accepted by Hume, that freedom is to act at will while coercion is to be compelled to act by others. This does not give us a sure reason to choose this ‘freedom’.
Imagine that you were a free-floating spirit, equal to God in your capacity to choose. God gives you the unwelcome news that shortly you are to be placed on Earth, and that you will be endowed with a range of fundamental passions, chosen entirely at the caprice of God. Would you choose to be free, in Hobbes’sense of acting at will, or might you consent to being coerced?
It is very far from clear that you would automatically choose to be free. Much would depend on the nature of the coercion. If you did not know what your fundamental desires were going to be, you might well decide to hedge your bets and back the field. It might be far better to be coerced by others (perhaps most people are good) than to be free to pursue un-chosen but possibly dubious desires. A free-floating ethically-minded spirit that feared an imminent endowment of psychopathic desires would certainly wish for an alert constabulary and swift incarceration: this spirit would wish to be coerced.
This thought experiment makes it clear why coercion by others might be morally preferable to being caused to act upon one’s desires. It seems very odd, though, that we might have good reasons to choose what compatibilists define as coercion, and reject what they claim to be freedom.
Nor is it obvious that if we were on Earth with a range of un-chosen passions, we would choose to have the intellectual ability which Dennett thinks characterises human freedom, as opposed to the mindless behaviour of the Sphex wasp for instance. Imagine that, rather than for laying eggs, one had a disposition for random acts of extreme violence. Is one better off by having the wit to see that the .357 Magnum is overrated and that the 9mm is similarly effective, but with more shots? If one had the murderous impulses of an Eichmann or a Himmler, is one’s situation necessarily improved by being able to flexibly respond to the logistical problems of machine-gunning large numbers of people? Is the murderous intelligence involved in industrialising genocide ever a gain? Similarly, if we knew that we were going to have passions that we have not chosen, is it obvious that we would ask for the ability to pursue these passions flexibly and imaginatively? Perhaps if we knew that we were to have unknown passions and be held responsible for our actions, we would choose to be incompetent. Perhaps the priority would be first to do no harm: one could not risk being good at being bad.
It is not obvious then that we would choose to be caused by our own desires rather than coerced by others; and nor is it obvious that we would choose to be able to successfully pursue our desires if we did not know what those desires were to be.
As to Dennett’s claim that the planet has evolved ‘evitability’, it seems obvious that if strict determinism is true then human evolution is also one event after another, and the destruction of asteroids by humans follows inevitably from cause and effect, given the first composition of the universe. If we destroy an asteroid, for the strict determinist it was inevitable that we would. Indeed it is quite conceivable that humans are minor characters in a game played by the gods, involving striking planets with asteroids. Perhaps one of the moves in the game is to seed a target planet with humans to prevent your opponent successfully striking it with his asteroid. It is hard to think of an absolute reason why determinism might not be our lot. There seems to be no meaningful distinction to be drawn between what happens and what might have happened, on which we can hang some third theory of human existence to sit alongside determinism and libertarianism.
It seems that we are either caused, and our actions are caused events, or we are free. The middle, compatibilism, is excluded''