According to Robert Sapolsky, human free will does not exist

[Jarhyn]

Compatibilists claim to be determinists

This sounds very much like DBT's attitude to compatibilists. It implies, rather uncharitably, that compatibilists may not be entirely honest when they "claim" to be determinists.

but the concept of free will must inherently clash with determinism, no matter how hard compatibilists try to define themselves out from under it.

This is straightforwardly wrong.

You, like DBT, start out with the assumption that any conception of 'free will' must necessarily entail a will that is not entirely the product of deterministic influences - this is a common conception but not one that is accepted universally and not compatibilism as it has been defended on this forum (see Marvin Edwards' excellent thread: Compatibilism: What's that About?).

Quite true. I do my work of defining a will as an algorithm: a series of heuristics and other contingent structures that defines, over a wide range of preconditions (possibly even an infinite or even complete set of preconditions) how the system will decide a future state.

When I say this, this future state can in fact be anywhere, either inside or outside of the system, though usually it does involve changing the outside via a change on the inside.

Freedoms in this paradigm are simply the various mappings of pre-condition to post-condition.

"Free will" however, is a misnomer. This is because a "free will" is not addressing generalized wills' degrees of freedom, but rather that a specific will, "the will that ones wills are the product of autonomous operations", is free.

I discuss this in the compatibilism thread and I would heavily lean on the discussion I made there.

I think the "factorio example" is best here, but it will potentially be obscure for people not familiar with such logistics games -- something I find ironic since I use games to explore metaphysics and philosophy as a branch of game theory, and I think anyone can learn more about group and set theory by examining applications of groups and sets in rich ways.

In the factorio example, you have a "belt", and this belt has two "sides", and if you load something onto the left side of the belt vs the right side of the belt, it stays there. If you were to be making products from two different places, two completely different belt lines feeding in, you could track where it came from simply by looking at which side of the belt it is on.

Instead of imagining these products as something simple, like bits of metal, as in the game, you can instead apply this concept of logistic provenance to something like "wills".

Now imagine the system itself manufactures wills from these wills, that it's wills all the way down, that wills from outside come from the "left side" contributor to the systems input belt, and wills from inside get fed back in on the "right side".

The system can easily and promptly identify a REAL property, the "left/right-ness on the belt" of a will as whether it is "coercive" or "free", and we see these words actually map to where they came from, based on locality... At least in the system of the example.

In maintaining a system's directives within its autonomous function (often merely the directive to continue to exist and "hoard" itself), this exercise has value and meaning, because it allows prioritization of wills that more directly align with such directives.

The system may even have a process of examining "left sided" wills and pulling them rightward, a process you could consider suitably analogous to (possibly identical to) "internalization", the system's claiming of an external will as its own.

Of course this abstraction is only so useful, but it serves as a proof that regulatory control over wills makes sense in a deterministic system.

As a result, people confuse this "special will to prefer one side of the belt" as per the metaphor, as if it were something applying the words more generally.

Clearly we can have a will that biases the system towards autonomous action.

In other applications or usages of the utterance "free will" instead we are asking "is the contingent mechanism such that it not-may-but-SHALL activate unto a post-condition", and these are easy to conflate since most people don't acknowledge this distinction. Instead it might be better to only specifically address such a question pedantically as "is the will free" rather than "do they have free will", and maintaining "free will" to discuss the origination points of wills and whether they are internalized -- the metaphorical "left-ness on the belt"

Of course I discussed this all ad nauseum in the other compatibilism threads, and I don't think there are really any more "elementary" proofs to the correctness of the math I use here.

 

[Jarhyn]

Compatibilists claim to be determinists

This sounds very much like DBT's attitude to compatibilists. It implies, rather uncharitably, that compatibilists may not be entirely honest when they "claim" to be determinists.

but the concept of free will must inherently clash with determinism, no matter how hard compatibilists try to define themselves out from under it.

This is straightforwardly wrong.

You, like DBT, start out with the assumption that any conception of 'free will' must necessarily entail a will that is not entirely the product of deterministic influences - this is a common conception but not one that is accepted universally and not compatibilism as it has been defended on this forum (see Marvin Edwards' excellent thread: Compatibilism: What's that About?).

Quite true. I do my work of defining a will as an algorithm: a series of heuristics and other contingent structures that defines, over a wide range of preconditions (possibly even an infinite or even complete set of preconditions) how the system will decide a future state.

When I say this, this future state can in fact be anywhere, either inside or outside of the system, though usually it does involve changing the outside via a change on the inside.

Freedoms in this paradigm are simply the various mappings of pre-condition to post-condition.

"Free will" however, is a misnomer. This is because a "free will" is not addressing generalized wills' degrees of freedom, but rather that a specific will, "the will that ones wills are the product of autonomous operations", is free.

I discuss this in the compatibilism thread and I would heavily lean on the discussion I made there.

I think the "factorio example" is best here, but it will potentially be obscure for people not familiar with such logistics games -- something I find ironic since I use games to explore metaphysics and philosophy as a branch of game theory, and I think anyone can learn more about group and set theory by examining applications of groups and sets in rich ways.

In the factorio example, you have a "belt", and this belt has two "sides", and if you load something onto the left side of the belt vs the right side of the belt, it stays there. If you were to be making products from two different places, two completely different belt lines feeding in, you could track where it came from simply by looking at which side of the belt it is on.

Instead of imagining these products as something simple, like bits of metal, as in the game, you can instead apply this concept of logistic provenance to something like "wills".

Now imagine the system itself manufactures wills from these wills, that it's wills all the way down, that wills from outside come from the "left side" contributor to the systems input belt, and wills from inside get fed back in on the "right side".

The system can easily and promptly identify a REAL property, the "left/right-ness on the belt" of a will as whether it is "coercive" or "free", and we see these words actually map to where they came from, based on locality... At least in the system of the example.

In maintaining a system's directives within its autonomous function (often merely the directive to continue to exist and "hoard" itself), this exercise has value and meaning, because it allows prioritization of wills that more directly align with such directives.

The system may even have a process of examining "left sided" wills and pulling them rightward, a process you could consider suitably analogous to (possibly identical to) "internalization", the system's claiming of an external will as its own.

Of course this abstraction is only so useful, but it serves as a proof that regulatory control over wills makes sense in a deterministic system.

As a result, people confuse this "special will to prefer one side of the belt" as per the metaphor, as if it were something applying the words more generally.

Clearly we can have a will that biases the system towards autonomous action.

In other applications or usages of the utterance "free will" instead we are asking "is the contingent mechanism such that it not-may-but-SHALL activate unto a post-condition", and these are easy to conflate since most people don't acknowledge this distinction. Instead it might be better to only specifically address such a question pedantically as "is the will free" rather than "do they have free will", and maintaining "free will" to discuss the origination points of wills and whether they are internalized -- the metaphorical "left-ness on the belt"

Of course I discussed this all ad nauseum in the other compatibilism threads, and I don't think there are really any more "elementary" proofs to the correctness of the math I use here.

Reading the post again, I think I need to reiterate that "free" in terms of "not may, but shall", in terms of "has multiple degrees of freedom available to the heuristic of selection", and in terms of "inside/outside" quality are all completely different usages.

If someone is claiming any of these aren't real somehow, it is up to them to make sure they keep these concepts distinct and shown their work.

For @Janice Rael, this is one of the discussions I was referencing, with respect to identifying generalized structures that are imminently emergent from nature, things which reflects something "deeper in nature than mere names we give them"; these are terms of math associating with the structure of counting things and how counting relates to other sorts of sequential processes.

Contrast this with such other arguments as to whether a hotdog is a sandwich, which is based on the social construct of whether a "sandwich" requires at minimum two topological entities or three. Both such "sandwich-like" constructions have some way of defining them, but which definition belongs to "sandwich" is entirely arbitrary for the time being (although I am on team "hotdog is a sandwich", and assign it to the field of geometric interaction rather than pure topology).

 

[Copernicus]

Compatibilists claim to be determinists

This sounds very much like DBT's attitude to compatibilists. It implies, rather uncharitably, that compatibilists may not be entirely honest when they "claim" to be determinists.

Antichris, you snipped this out of context and made it look like I was saying this. In the original context, I was representing the way a hard determinist incompatibilist like DBT perceives compatibilists. Here is the entire paragraph with your snippet in boldface:

"Hard determinists are non-libertarian incompatibilists. That is, they simply deny free will, whereas libertarian incompatibilists deny causal determinism in connection with agents. I think that @DBT is arguing most of the time that compatibilists are really libertarian incompatibilists, but they just don't know it. At least that is the impression I get from what I read in this thread. Compatibilists claim to be determinists, but the concept of free will must inherently clash with determinism, no matter how hard compatibilists try to define themselves out from under it."

In point of fact, I am a compatibilist, and I claim to be a determinist. You should know this from reading my previous posts in this thread. Since several people liked your post, they then accepted your misleading snippet as a claim that I was supporting DBT rather than merely trying to represent his argument from his perspective as I understood it. You owe me an apology.

but the concept of free will must inherently clash with determinism, no matter how hard compatibilists try to define themselves out from under it.

This is straightforwardly wrong.

You, like DBT, start out with the assumption that any conception of 'free will' must necessarily entail a will that is not entirely the product of deterministic influences - this is a common conception but not one that is accepted universally and not compatibilism as it has been defended on this forum (see Marvin Edwards' excellent thread: Compatibilism: What's that About?).

This snippet is not just from the same quote above (in orange), but it is from the same sentence. Again, you isolate it from the context and portray it as something I believe rather than my continued characterization of what hard determinists believe. The assumption that you erroneously attribute to me is not an assumption that I start out with. In the context of that paragraph, it was an assumption I was attributing to hard determinists. That is why it looks like what DBT has been saying!!!! You then completely ignored the following paragraph, which stated my actual compatibilist view of free will. Here it is again, for your edification:

"As I've said before, Patricia Churchland struck the right note when she said it is all about degrees of control. Compulsion is about losing freedom of control, and it is under compulsion of that sort that one's will is thwarted or compelled. I haven't read enough of Churchland to understand how she might go about defining free will, and I'm not sure that she ever does. However, languages have an enormous range of expressions to describe events and causation, many of which have to do with how much control an agent has over an action. For example, English has causal verbs like cause, make, force, let, permit, allow, help, enable, prevent, etc. The verb cause is the most neutral in terms of control, but all of the others express varying degrees of control. The concept of control is important in the definition of free will, because it is the basis that human beings use to define standards of responsible behavior. Philosophers talk about "moral responsibility", but I would broaden that to refer to any kind of responsible role in a causal chain of events. Our will is free to the extent that it allows us to satisfy our desires and goals, but it gets complicated when one realizes that individuals have all sorts of conflicting desires and goals. How we prioritize them is important when it comes to assigning a role of agentive responsibility in a causal chain."


Just to repeat. I am a compatibilist, and I have repeatedly taken a position that rejects DBT's hard determinism. You have made it look like I take the opposite position by selectively snipping and replying to a single sentence embedded in a paragraph that lays out how a hard determinist views compatibilism in a post that was responding not to you, but to pood.

 

[Copernicus]

Compatibilists claim to be determinists

This sounds very much like DBT's attitude to compatibilists. It implies, rather uncharitably, that compatibilists may not be entirely honest when they "claim" to be determinists.

but the concept of free will must inherently clash with determinism, no matter how hard compatibilists try to define themselves out from under it.

This is straightforwardly wrong.

You, like DBT, start out with the assumption that any conception of 'free will' must necessarily entail a will that is not entirely the product of deterministic influences - this is a common conception but not one that is accepted universally and not compatibilism as it has been defended on this forum (see Marvin Edwards' excellent thread: Compatibilism: What's that About?).

Quite true. I do my work of defining a will as an algorithm: a series of heuristics and other contingent structures that defines, over a wide range of preconditions (possibly even an infinite or even complete set of preconditions) how the system will decide a future state.

When I say this, this future state can in fact be anywhere, either inside or outside of the system, though usually it does involve changing the outside via a change on the inside.

Freedoms in this paradigm are simply the various mappings of pre-condition to post-condition.

"Free will" however, is a misnomer. This is because a "free will" is not addressing generalized wills' degrees of freedom, but rather that a specific will, "the will that ones wills are the product of autonomous operations", is free.

I discuss this in the compatibilism thread and I would heavily lean on the discussion I made there.

I think the "factorio example" is best here, but it will potentially be obscure for people not familiar with such logistics games -- something I find ironic since I use games to explore metaphysics and philosophy as a branch of game theory, and I think anyone can learn more about group and set theory by examining applications of groups and sets in rich ways.

In the factorio example, you have a "belt", and this belt has two "sides", and if you load something onto the left side of the belt vs the right side of the belt, it stays there. If you were to be making products from two different places, two completely different belt lines feeding in, you could track where it came from simply by looking at which side of the belt it is on.

Instead of imagining these products as something simple, like bits of metal, as in the game, you can instead apply this concept of logistic provenance to something like "wills".

Now imagine the system itself manufactures wills from these wills, that it's wills all the way down, that wills from outside come from the "left side" contributor to the systems input belt, and wills from inside get fed back in on the "right side".

The system can easily and promptly identify a REAL property, the "left/right-ness on the belt" of a will as whether it is "coercive" or "free", and we see these words actually map to where they came from, based on locality... At least in the system of the example.

In maintaining a system's directives within its autonomous function (often merely the directive to continue to exist and "hoard" itself), this exercise has value and meaning, because it allows prioritization of wills that more directly align with such directives.

The system may even have a process of examining "left sided" wills and pulling them rightward, a process you could consider suitably analogous to (possibly identical to) "internalization", the system's claiming of an external will as its own.

Of course this abstraction is only so useful, but it serves as a proof that regulatory control over wills makes sense in a deterministic system.

As a result, people confuse this "special will to prefer one side of the belt" as per the metaphor, as if it were something applying the words more generally.

Clearly we can have a will that biases the system towards autonomous action.

In other applications or usages of the utterance "free will" instead we are asking "is the contingent mechanism such that it not-may-but-SHALL activate unto a post-condition", and these are easy to conflate since most people don't acknowledge this distinction. Instead it might be better to only specifically address such a question pedantically as "is the will free" rather than "do they have free will", and maintaining "free will" to discuss the origination points of wills and whether they are internalized -- the metaphorical "left-ness on the belt"

Of course I discussed this all ad nauseum in the other compatibilism threads, and I don't think there are really any more "elementary" proofs to the correctness of the math I use here.

You are replying to Antichris's post, which completely misrepresented my position on compatibilism. See my previous reply to him.

 

[The AntiChris]

I was representing the way a hard determinist incompatibilist like DBT perceives compatibilists.

Apologies. Having reread your post I can see now that was what you must have intended.

In my defense it was a longish and quite dense post and I made the mistake of skim-reading and that single sentence popped out at me.

 

[Copernicus]

I was representing the way a hard determinist incompatibilist like DBT perceives compatibilists.

Apologies. Having reread your post I can see now that was what you must have intended.

In my defense it was a longish and quite dense post and I made the mistake of skim-reading and that single sentence popped out at me.

No problems, then. Apology accepted. I can be very wordy, unfortunately.

 

[Jarhyn]

Compatibilists claim to be determinists

This sounds very much like DBT's attitude to compatibilists. It implies, rather uncharitably, that compatibilists may not be entirely honest when they "claim" to be determinists.

but the concept of free will must inherently clash with determinism, no matter how hard compatibilists try to define themselves out from under it.

This is straightforwardly wrong.

You, like DBT, start out with the assumption that any conception of 'free will' must necessarily entail a will that is not entirely the product of deterministic influences - this is a common conception but not one that is accepted universally and not compatibilism as it has been defended on this forum (see Marvin Edwards' excellent thread: Compatibilism: What's that About?).

Quite true. I do my work of defining a will as an algorithm: a series of heuristics and other contingent structures that defines, over a wide range of preconditions (possibly even an infinite or even complete set of preconditions) how the system will decide a future state.

When I say this, this future state can in fact be anywhere, either inside or outside of the system, though usually it does involve changing the outside via a change on the inside.

Freedoms in this paradigm are simply the various mappings of pre-condition to post-condition.

"Free will" however, is a misnomer. This is because a "free will" is not addressing generalized wills' degrees of freedom, but rather that a specific will, "the will that ones wills are the product of autonomous operations", is free.

I discuss this in the compatibilism thread and I would heavily lean on the discussion I made there.

I think the "factorio example" is best here, but it will potentially be obscure for people not familiar with such logistics games -- something I find ironic since I use games to explore metaphysics and philosophy as a branch of game theory, and I think anyone can learn more about group and set theory by examining applications of groups and sets in rich ways.

In the factorio example, you have a "belt", and this belt has two "sides", and if you load something onto the left side of the belt vs the right side of the belt, it stays there. If you were to be making products from two different places, two completely different belt lines feeding in, you could track where it came from simply by looking at which side of the belt it is on.

Instead of imagining these products as something simple, like bits of metal, as in the game, you can instead apply this concept of logistic provenance to something like "wills".

Now imagine the system itself manufactures wills from these wills, that it's wills all the way down, that wills from outside come from the "left side" contributor to the systems input belt, and wills from inside get fed back in on the "right side".

The system can easily and promptly identify a REAL property, the "left/right-ness on the belt" of a will as whether it is "coercive" or "free", and we see these words actually map to where they came from, based on locality... At least in the system of the example.

In maintaining a system's directives within its autonomous function (often merely the directive to continue to exist and "hoard" itself), this exercise has value and meaning, because it allows prioritization of wills that more directly align with such directives.

The system may even have a process of examining "left sided" wills and pulling them rightward, a process you could consider suitably analogous to (possibly identical to) "internalization", the system's claiming of an external will as its own.

Of course this abstraction is only so useful, but it serves as a proof that regulatory control over wills makes sense in a deterministic system.

As a result, people confuse this "special will to prefer one side of the belt" as per the metaphor, as if it were something applying the words more generally.

Clearly we can have a will that biases the system towards autonomous action.

In other applications or usages of the utterance "free will" instead we are asking "is the contingent mechanism such that it not-may-but-SHALL activate unto a post-condition", and these are easy to conflate since most people don't acknowledge this distinction. Instead it might be better to only specifically address such a question pedantically as "is the will free" rather than "do they have free will", and maintaining "free will" to discuss the origination points of wills and whether they are internalized -- the metaphorical "left-ness on the belt"

Of course I discussed this all ad nauseum in the other compatibilism threads, and I don't think there are really any more "elementary" proofs to the correctness of the math I use here.

You are replying to Antichris's post, which completely misrepresented my position on compatibilism. See my previous reply to him.

This doesn't change the fact that AntiChris was right about what he said, even if not about the need to say it, nor did I say anything incorrect on the subject either.

 

[Copernicus]

This doesn't change the fact that AntiChris was right about what he said, even if not about the need to say it, nor did I say anything incorrect on the subject either.

What you said about the post was not my concern. It was the fact that you "liked" and also reposted a misreading of my position on compatibilism. We've had enough interaction before that you had more reason to realize that than Antichris did. In any case, I'm satisfied that the matter was cleared up.

 

[steve_bank]

Let me think...yes I've got it now!

I am conscious because I have consciousness. End of debate.

I an aware because I have awareness!

Awareness is the state of being aware! Being aware is the result of having awareness!

I missed my calling, I should have been a philosopher.

 

[DBT]

Compatibilists claim to be determinists

This sounds very much like DBT's attitude to compatibilists. It implies, rather uncharitably, that compatibilists may not be entirely honest when they "claim" to be determinists.

Antichris, you snipped this out of context and made it look like I was saying this. In the original context, I was representing the way a hard determinist incompatibilist like DBT perceives compatibilists. Here is the entire paragraph with your snippet in boldface:

"Hard determinists are non-libertarian incompatibilists. That is, they simply deny free will, whereas libertarian incompatibilists deny causal determinism in connection with agents. I think that @DBT is arguing most of the time that compatibilists are really libertarian incompatibilists, but they just don't know it. At least that is the impression I get from what I read in this thread. Compatibilists claim to be determinists, but the concept of free will must inherently clash with determinism, no matter how hard compatibilists try to define themselves out from under it."

In point of fact, I am a compatibilist, and I claim to be a determinist. You should know this from reading my previous posts in this thread. Since several people liked your post, they then accepted your misleading snippet as a claim that I was supporting DBT rather than merely trying to represent his argument from his perspective as I understood it. You owe me an apology.

but the concept of free will must inherently clash with determinism, no matter how hard compatibilists try to define themselves out from under it.

This is straightforwardly wrong.

You, like DBT, start out with the assumption that any conception of 'free will' must necessarily entail a will that is not entirely the product of deterministic influences - this is a common conception but not one that is accepted universally and not compatibilism as it has been defended on this forum (see Marvin Edwards' excellent thread: Compatibilism: What's that About?).

This snippet is not just from the same quote above (in orange), but it is from the same sentence. Again, you isolate it from the context and portray it as something I believe rather than my continued characterization of what hard determinists believe. The assumption that you erroneously attribute to me is not an assumption that I start out with. In the context of that paragraph, it was an assumption I was attributing to hard determinists. That is why it looks like what DBT has been saying!!!! You then completely ignored the following paragraph, which stated my actual compatibilist view of free will. Here it is again, for your edification:

"As I've said before, Patricia Churchland struck the right note when she said it is all about degrees of control. Compulsion is about losing freedom of control, and it is under compulsion of that sort that one's will is thwarted or compelled. I haven't read enough of Churchland to understand how she might go about defining free will, and I'm not sure that she ever does. However, languages have an enormous range of expressions to describe events and causation, many of which have to do with how much control an agent has over an action. For example, English has causal verbs like cause, make, force, let, permit, allow, help, enable, prevent, etc. The verb cause is the most neutral in terms of control, but all of the others express varying degrees of control. The concept of control is important in the definition of free will, because it is the basis that human beings use to define standards of responsible behavior. Philosophers talk about "moral responsibility", but I would broaden that to refer to any kind of responsible role in a causal chain of events. Our will is free to the extent that it allows us to satisfy our desires and goals, but it gets complicated when one realizes that individuals have all sorts of conflicting desires and goals. How we prioritize them is important when it comes to assigning a role of agentive responsibility in a causal chain."


Just to repeat. I am a compatibilist, and I have repeatedly taken a position that rejects DBT's hard determinism. You have made it look like I take the opposite position by selectively snipping and replying to a single sentence embedded in a paragraph that lays out how a hard determinist views compatibilism in a post that was responding not to you, but to pood.

The terms and conditions of Determinism is the same for both the compatibilists and incompatibilists, which makes term 'hard determinism somewhat misleading.

I as an incompatibilist agree with the compatibilist definition of determinism, just not - for the reasons already described - the compatibilist definition of free will.

Determinism is not the point of contention.

It is the compatibilist definition of free will that fails to account for its own definition of free will when it defines free will as acting according to one's will without external force, coercion or undue influence, yet ignores the greater restriction on freedom of will, which is inner necessitation.

 

[Jarhyn]

Compatibilists claim to be determinists

This sounds very much like DBT's attitude to compatibilists. It implies, rather uncharitably, that compatibilists may not be entirely honest when they "claim" to be determinists.

Antichris, you snipped this out of context and made it look like I was saying this. In the original context, I was representing the way a hard determinist incompatibilist like DBT perceives compatibilists. Here is the entire paragraph with your snippet in boldface:

"Hard determinists are non-libertarian incompatibilists. That is, they simply deny free will, whereas libertarian incompatibilists deny causal determinism in connection with agents. I think that @DBT is arguing most of the time that compatibilists are really libertarian incompatibilists, but they just don't know it. At least that is the impression I get from what I read in this thread. Compatibilists claim to be determinists, but the concept of free will must inherently clash with determinism, no matter how hard compatibilists try to define themselves out from under it."

In point of fact, I am a compatibilist, and I claim to be a determinist. You should know this from reading my previous posts in this thread. Since several people liked your post, they then accepted your misleading snippet as a claim that I was supporting DBT rather than merely trying to represent his argument from his perspective as I understood it. You owe me an apology.

but the concept of free will must inherently clash with determinism, no matter how hard compatibilists try to define themselves out from under it.

This is straightforwardly wrong.

You, like DBT, start out with the assumption that any conception of 'free will' must necessarily entail a will that is not entirely the product of deterministic influences - this is a common conception but not one that is accepted universally and not compatibilism as it has been defended on this forum (see Marvin Edwards' excellent thread: Compatibilism: What's that About?).

This snippet is not just from the same quote above (in orange), but it is from the same sentence. Again, you isolate it from the context and portray it as something I believe rather than my continued characterization of what hard determinists believe. The assumption that you erroneously attribute to me is not an assumption that I start out with. In the context of that paragraph, it was an assumption I was attributing to hard determinists. That is why it looks like what DBT has been saying!!!! You then completely ignored the following paragraph, which stated my actual compatibilist view of free will. Here it is again, for your edification:

"As I've said before, Patricia Churchland struck the right note when she said it is all about degrees of control. Compulsion is about losing freedom of control, and it is under compulsion of that sort that one's will is thwarted or compelled. I haven't read enough of Churchland to understand how she might go about defining free will, and I'm not sure that she ever does. However, languages have an enormous range of expressions to describe events and causation, many of which have to do with how much control an agent has over an action. For example, English has causal verbs like cause, make, force, let, permit, allow, help, enable, prevent, etc. The verb cause is the most neutral in terms of control, but all of the others express varying degrees of control. The concept of control is important in the definition of free will, because it is the basis that human beings use to define standards of responsible behavior. Philosophers talk about "moral responsibility", but I would broaden that to refer to any kind of responsible role in a causal chain of events. Our will is free to the extent that it allows us to satisfy our desires and goals, but it gets complicated when one realizes that individuals have all sorts of conflicting desires and goals. How we prioritize them is important when it comes to assigning a role of agentive responsibility in a causal chain."


Just to repeat. I am a compatibilist, and I have repeatedly taken a position that rejects DBT's hard determinism. You have made it look like I take the opposite position by selectively snipping and replying to a single sentence embedded in a paragraph that lays out how a hard determinist views compatibilism in a post that was responding not to you, but to pood.

The terms and conditions of Determinism is the same for both the compatibilists and incompatibilists, which makes term 'hard determinism somewhat misleading.

I as an incompatibilist agree with the compatibilist definition of determinism, just not - for the reasons already described - the compatibilist definition of free will.

Determinism is not the point of contention.

It is the compatibilist definition of free will that fails to account for its own definition of free will when it defines free will as acting according to one's will without external force, coercion or undue influence, yet ignores the greater restriction on freedom of will, which is inner necessitation.

Your post is full of word salad and circularity.

Moreover, the fact is that the majority of academic (and academic level) philosophers are compatibilists at this point.

You are that guy standing against the crowd saying "you're all wrong", and you stand there saying it despite the clear fact that this is the result of a slow migration AWAY from your position, generally caused by the prevalence of evidence.

I outright PROVED my definitions of "free will" as compatible with (in fact reliant on the mechanics of) deterministic systems using mathematical structures: if you accept the axioms of math by which determinism is defined, you are obligated by logic to acknowledge the reality of "freedoms", "wills" and "free will" that I discussed.

If you fail to recognize this, it indicates merely that you are failing at applying logic somewhere.

Clearly, you are bringing in an unnecessary aspect of definition into the mix, namely the assumption that because something "won't" that something "can't". You invent that into your definition of determinism.

 

[Copernicus]

...

The terms and conditions of Determinism is the same for both the compatibilists and incompatibilists, which makes term 'hard determinism somewhat misleading.

I as an incompatibilist agree with the compatibilist definition of determinism, just not - for the reasons already described - the compatibilist definition of free will.

Determinism is not the point of contention.

AFAICT, we are in perfect agreement on this point. There is no difference between the way a compatibilist or incompatibilist would define determinism. The difference is really over how one defines free will. As a compatibilist, I would say that the chief difference there is in whether one thinks free will means freedom from causation. Libertarian incompatibilists seem to take the position that it does mean that kind of freedom in some sense. Compatibilists do not. Choice can be defined in a way that is logically compatible with determinism.

It is the compatibilist definition of free will that fails to account for its own definition of free will when it defines free will as acting according to one's will without external force, coercion or undue influence, yet ignores the greater restriction on freedom of will, which is inner necessitation.

Here we disagree. Compatibilists do not ignore those greater restrictions on freedom of will. They just maintain that freedom from those restrictions is not part of the definition of free will. Therein lies the point of contention. You want to maintain that free will is about freedom from all restrictions, ignoring the fact that people don't use the expression "free will" in connection with those other types of restrictions, which are only relevant to how we judge moral responsibility (or responsibility in general). If someone holds a gun to a bank manager's head and demands that he or she open the bank vault, we would say that that person was not really opening the vault of their own free will. They were acting under undue influence. Nevertheless, they had the option of not opening the vault. What they lacked was a priority to forfeit their life in exchange for the act. That is, their greater desire to live constrained their will and compelled their action. So free will cannot, and should not, be defined as freedom from causal determinism. It is always a fully determined process.

 

[pood]

I often think DBT and I are in agreement on most things. It is our interpretation of those things that differs.

 

[DBT]

It is the compatibilist definition of free will that fails to account for its own definition of free will when it defines free will as acting according to one's will without external force, coercion or undue influence, yet ignores the greater restriction on freedom of will, which is inner necessitation.

Here we disagree. Compatibilists do not ignore those greater restrictions on freedom of will.

If that was the case, the compatibilist should see that 'an action’s production by a deterministic process presents no less of a challenge to basic-desert responsibility than does deterministic manipulation by other agent,'' and acknowledge that this presents a flaw in their definition of free will, and of course a problem for compatibilism as an argument

They just maintain that freedom from those restrictions is not part of the definition of free will.

Sure, that is the very point where compatibilism goes wrong.

Therein lies the point of contention.

It does.

You want to maintain that free will is about freedom from all restrictions, ignoring the fact that people don't use the expression "free will" in connection with those other types of restrictions, which are only relevant to how we judge moral responsibility (or responsibility in general). If someone holds a gun to a bank manager's head and demands that he or she open the bank vault, we would say that that person was not really opening the vault of their own free will. They were acting under undue influence. Nevertheless, they had the option of not opening the vault. What they lacked was a priority to forfeit their life in exchange for the act. That is, their greater desire to live constrained their will and compelled their action. So free will cannot, and should not, be defined as freedom from causal determinism. It is always a fully determined process.

If will is to be described as being free, not simply words or common references - ''he acted on his own free will'' - will must in fact be free.

If will is shaped and formed by deterministic processes that are beyond its means or ability to regulate, where the state of the system determines the actions that are 'willed,' will cannot be defined as being free. It is simply 'will.'

We have will, we have intelligence, we have the ability to respond and act. We have a rational brain that generates conscious mind, the ability to imagine, plan and act, but these abilities - for the given reasons - have nothing to do with free will......used in common language, yet 'not very sensible concept'

''I don't think "free will" is a very sensible concept, and you don't need neuroscience to reject it -- any mechanistic view of the world is good enough, and indeed you could even argue on purely conceptual grounds that the opposite of determinism is randomness, not free will! Most thoughtful neuroscientists I know have replaced the concept of free will with the concept of rationality -- that we select our actions based on a kind of practical reasoning. And there is no conflict between rationality and the mind as a physical system -- After all, computers are rational physical systems!'' - Martha Farah, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and a prominent neuroethicist.

 

[Jarhyn]

an action’s production by a deterministic process presents no less of a challenge to basic-desert responsibility than does deterministic manipulation by other agent,

An action's production by a deterministic process doesn't provide any challenge at all to responsibility, nor does deterministic manipulation by another agent.

The key here is in your erroneous interpretation of the concept of "challenge" here.

Deterministic manipulation does not "challenge" responsibility. It creates a responsibility held by the manipulator, but the manipulated agent still has responsibilities and so this does not "challenge" responsibility in terms of invalidating the concept.

After all your usage here of "challenge" is in terms of invalidating the concept.

Likewise, an action's production as a result of some deterministic process means that the production of those actions by process creates responsibilities owing to those processes but yet again this does not eliminate the responsibility of the agent themselves.

Responsibility is not "zero sum", and I actually addressed this with the "murder bot" discussion in the Compatibilism thread.

YOU are just as responsible for being as you are (ie, YOU can be responded to to change YOU) as other situations are responsible for making you (ie, timely response rendered to any of those situations would have prevented the making of you).

Responsibility is ubiquitous and layered, not absent.

 

[Copernicus]

You want to maintain that free will is about freedom from all restrictions, ignoring the fact that people don't use the expression "free will" in connection with those other types of restrictions, which are only relevant to how we judge moral responsibility (or responsibility in general). If someone holds a gun to a bank manager's head and demands that he or she open the bank vault, we would say that that person was not really opening the vault of their own free will. They were acting under undue influence. Nevertheless, they had the option of not opening the vault. What they lacked was a priority to forfeit their life in exchange for the act. That is, their greater desire to live constrained their will and compelled their action. So free will cannot, and should not, be defined as freedom from causal determinism. It is always a fully determined process.

If will is to be described as being free, not simply words or common references - ''he acted on his own free will'' - will must in fact be free.

Free in what sense? Freedom from desire? Free will to a human agent is just freedom from compulsions or undue influences that prevent them from making choices that they want to make. Since they are often faced with conflicting desires, that isn't always a trivial thing to manage. Responsibility and blame are factors that regulate behavior in the future based on outcomes of past actions. Causally regulated flexible (free) choice is essential to making that process work. It allows human agents to operate under conditions of uncertainty. It is not about freedom from causation. It is about the ability of a human body to adapt and survive in chaotic situations. The need to make responsible choices is also why roboticists are trying to design machines that can operate under the same types of chaotic conditions. Hence, they need to mimic the kind of behavior that autonomous biological machines are capable of. It is a bad idea to build robots that do nothing but run amok.

If will is shaped and formed by deterministic processes that are beyond its means or ability to regulate, where the state of the system determines the actions that are 'willed,' will cannot be defined as being free. It is simply 'will.'

No, it isn't simply will. It is will that satisfies needs, wants, and goals. If an agent can't do what it wants to do in an unconflicted manner, then choice isn't free. There is a difference between jail and freedom. You are ignoring the essential role of responsibility in resolving goal conflicts over time. Intelligent agents adapt to changing circumstances in a way that resolves those conflicts. They change strategies to improve outcomes over time. Autonomous freedom of choice provides the flexibility to learn and adapt.

We have will, we have intelligence, we have the ability to respond and act. We have a rational brain that generates conscious mind, the ability to imagine, plan and act, but these abilities - for the given reasons - have nothing to do with free will......used in common language, yet 'not very sensible concept'

You keep insisting that free will is freedom from any causal influence, not just those that impede our desires. That is where you go wrong. You see desire itself as an impediment, but that makes absolutely no sense at all. Unimpeded desire is essential to the definition of free will.

''I don't think "free will" is a very sensible concept, and you don't need neuroscience to reject it -- any mechanistic view of the world is good enough, and indeed you could even argue on purely conceptual grounds that the opposite of determinism is randomness, not free will! Most thoughtful neuroscientists I know have replaced the concept of free will with the concept of rationality -- that we select our actions based on a kind of practical reasoning. And there is no conflict between rationality and the mind as a physical system -- After all, computers are rational physical systems!'' - Martha Farah, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and a prominent neuroethicist.

Like you, she completely misunderstand what people ordinarily mean when they talk about free will. The concept of free will does not require one to reject a mechanistic view of the world. It is essential to an understanding of how autonomous behavior works in biological machines with brains that regulate behavior. Those machines are constantly adjusting and adapting behavior on the basis of experienced outcomes. They depend on causal predictability to achieve the outcomes they desire. Desire can be modified in the course of time, but it doesn't make sense for it to be under control at the time a choice is made. That is putting the cart before the horse. Desire is the horse that pulls the cart.

 

[steve_bank]

Does free will equate to freedom of choice?

 

[DBT]

Does free will equate to freedom of choice?

Compatibilists generally recognize that determinism does not permit alternate actions, that the decision you make in any given instance is determined....which is why compatibilist free will is defined as acting without being forced, coerced or unduly influenced by others, that you are acting of your own accord, yet no alternate actions are possible in any given moment of decision making.

 

[Jarhyn]

Compatibilists generally recognize that determinism does not permit alternate actions

That's fine, though, because compatibilists don't feel any need for alternate actions, just alternative choices. It is alternative choices, not alternative actions, that give us the freedom to choose the one action we will take.

In that moment when a choice is made, those choices are still "possible", and they will have always been "possible" in that moment from the perfectly valid perspective of the agent doing the choosing. Afterwards they will have been "possible, but decided against".

It is the difference between being served 8 rotting plates and a fresh plate (only one is possible to eat safely) and being served 9 plates of fresh food (all 9 were possible) and throwing 8 of them in the trash (or just leaving them hale and leaving them as alternatives for future choosing).

In one of these, there is no agentic control of the state of the alternatives, and in the other, there is full agentic control.

Again is this bait-and-switch wherein you try to force a modal fallacy on others which we will laughing reject.

 

[DBT]

You want to maintain that free will is about freedom from all restrictions, ignoring the fact that people don't use the expression "free will" in connection with those other types of restrictions, which are only relevant to how we judge moral responsibility (or responsibility in general). If someone holds a gun to a bank manager's head and demands that he or she open the bank vault, we would say that that person was not really opening the vault of their own free will. They were acting under undue influence. Nevertheless, they had the option of not opening the vault. What they lacked was a priority to forfeit their life in exchange for the act. That is, their greater desire to live constrained their will and compelled their action. So free will cannot, and should not, be defined as freedom from causal determinism. It is always a fully determined process.

If will is to be described as being free, not simply words or common references - ''he acted on his own free will'' - will must in fact be free.

Free in what sense? Freedom from desire? Free will to a human agent is just freedom from compulsions or undue influences that prevent them from making choices that they want to make. Since they are often faced with conflicting desires, that isn't always a trivial thing to manage. Responsibility and blame are factors that regulate behavior in the future based on outcomes of past actions. Causally regulated flexible (free) choice is essential to making that process work. It allows human agents to operate under conditions of uncertainty. It is not about freedom from causation. It is about the ability of a human body to adapt and survive in chaotic situations. The need to make responsible choices is also why roboticists are trying to design machines that can operate under the same types of chaotic conditions. Hence, they need to mimic the kind of behavior that autonomous biological machines are capable of. It is a bad idea to build robots that do nothing but run amok.

If will is shaped and formed by deterministic processes that are beyond its means or ability to regulate, where the state of the system determines the actions that are 'willed,' will cannot be defined as being free. It is simply 'will.'

No, it isn't simply will. It is will that satisfies needs, wants, and goals. If an agent can't do what it wants to do in an unconflicted manner, then choice isn't free. There is a difference between jail and freedom. You are ignoring the essential role of responsibility in resolving goal conflicts over time. Intelligent agents adapt to changing circumstances in a way that resolves those conflicts. They change strategies to improve outcomes over time. Autonomous freedom of choice provides the flexibility to learn and adapt.

Will is an inevitable expression of the deterministic processes that prompt or urge to us act conscious. Will is a part of the process of volition, not its driver.

The motor action, signals to muscle groups, etc, is already underway before we experience thought and deliberation.....you leap out of the path of a car without thought, the feeling come later, and so on.

We have will, we have intelligence, we have the ability to respond and act. We have a rational brain that generates conscious mind, the ability to imagine, plan and act, but these abilities - for the given reasons - have nothing to do with free will......used in common language, yet 'not very sensible concept'

You keep insisting that free will is freedom from any causal influence, not just those that impede our desires. That is where you go wrong. You see desire itself as an impediment, but that makes absolutely no sense at all. Unimpeded desire is essential to the definition of free will.

Where do I insist that? I don't know why I would do that. The claim here is that free will as defined by compatibilists fails to make a case because the compatibilist acknowledges that force, coercion and undue influence is a constraint on the idea of free will, yet brush aside inner necessity - which poses just as much of constraint on freedom of will as external agents

''I don't think "free will" is a very sensible concept, and you don't need neuroscience to reject it -- any mechanistic view of the world is good enough, and indeed you could even argue on purely conceptual grounds that the opposite of determinism is randomness, not free will! Most thoughtful neuroscientists I know have replaced the concept of free will with the concept of rationality -- that we select our actions based on a kind of practical reasoning. And there is no conflict between rationality and the mind as a physical system -- After all, computers are rational physical systems!'' - Martha Farah, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and a prominent neuroethicist.

Like you, she completely misunderstand what people ordinarily mean when they talk about free will. The concept of free will does not require one to reject a mechanistic view of the world. It is essential to an understanding of how autonomous behavior works in biological machines with brains that regulate behavior. Those machines are constantly adjusting and adapting behavior on the basis of experienced outcomes. They depend on causal predictability to achieve the outcomes they desire. Desire can be modified in the course of time, but it doesn't make sense for it to be under control at the time a choice is made. That is putting the cart before the horse. Desire is the horse that pulls the cart.

No she doesn't misunderstand. We know how compatibilists define free will, we know how Libertarians define free will, we know how it is defined in Law and how the term is used in general language.

At this time we are arguing over the validity of the compatibilist definition of free will, where the nature of the brain as a parallel information processor must be considered.

And as Martha Farah said, when you consider how the brain functions, its networks, regions and lobes, how it makes decisions, etc, the notion of free will is just not very sensible. Not compatibilist, not Libertarian or as the term is used in common language....where it may be fine to say 'he wasn't forced, he acted on his own free will,' but doesn't stack up if you dig deeper....where if it was that simple the debate on free will would not have been ongoing for centuries.