According to Robert Sapolsky, human free will does not exist

[Jarhyn]

I wouldn't say IL breaks down so much. I'll also note that we have different usages of "natural language", insofar as I do not view spoken OL as "natural language". I view assembly and natural encoding as "natural language", because OL is anything but natural, whereas actual natural languages are languages that are only barely symbolic, assembly languages.

To me a "natural language" can be translated into an IL, and IL can be transliterated to an OL, but you can't really get from OL to natural language unless the OL is first "properly married" to a 1:1 correspondence with some process of IL.

Jarhyn, the term "natural language" is well-understood even in your own field of expertise--e.g. you have the subfield of AI called "Natural Language Processing". So it doesn't matter how you would like to use the term. If you don't want to use the term the way everyone else uses it, that is your prerogative, but don't use your private meaning to equivocate in a discussion with others.

As for your "properly married" idea, that doesn't work in practice, because you can never "properly marry" discourse propositions into mathematical logic, which is structurally context-free. Natural language represents a context-dependent signal. The meaning of an expression in mathematics does not change contextually. It is a function that always yields the same set of answers. OTOH, natural language expressions cannot be interpreted independently of the discourse that they are embedded in. To interpret the meaning of a sentence, you have to imagine a context in which it would make sense. That's where presuppositions come into play and why formal languages can't handle presuppositions.

It is difficult for me to explain all of this to you, because you simply don't have any background in theories of natural language or in the relevant philosophical literature. What you need is a graduate seminar on the subject. An informal social media discussion is not going to help very much. That's why I recommended Schank as a place to start, but that was only to get across the idea that the semantics of a natural language expression are not fully contained in the linguistic signal.

And it's a shit term that excludes an entire much more natural form of language.

I would specifically state you are wrong about being unable to marry mathematical usage to game theory, which is all aout discourse usage.

Regardless of what you think about whether "natural language" more appropriately applies to the definition you wish to make me use (which I will not), the thing I'm calling "natural language" is down to contextless phenomena.

If you want to try me, use my language and see if you find it in your own. You claim to be an industrial grade linguist, let's see you apply it.

As I've said, there is what I refer to as natural language, there is what you call IL, and then there is what you call OL, which is what you also call natural language.

IL specifically deals with certain things that construct out of primitive concepts, even such concepts as executive agents within a system regardless of systemic concept.

I think it's somewhere in the department of "cellular automata" of varying complexity, which is pretty general and arises purely out of the study of Turing machines and thus ultimately set theory.

"This is a thing that Turing machines of various types contain".

Once you have executive agents, things with quantifiable goals and algorithms executed unto those goals (whether they exist as an expression of cycle or goal orientation), you get into the IL discussion of ethics and deterministic systems and "responsibility" in those systems, without needing to really turn towards people or neurons.

I spent long hours looking at something that only made sense because of what levers within the system were pulled by charge patterns, and constricting from that high level sentences about what was happening like "make the decision to set this flag to send that message to tell that system to put on that output."

As I noted, this doesn't say what this decision is about or what that output is. This is where I already understand are the limits of IL. The marriage happens as soon as you say "that output is a fault light." There is an OL description of this, but that OL description MUST marry to the IL structure, or whatever OL solution proposed is wrong.

In this way the marriage is what provides sanity to OL, and as you say context to IL, but the discussion we are having about free will here exists purely in IL, as does the core theorem of evolution by modification of the instantiation process of self replicating amid a selective process within the system, as does the more specific group of "DNA-based chemical systems", which again see an IL treatment in the form of pure simulation.

But if the OL doesn't conform to the context less IL structure that actually describes the physical process, the OL is simply badly formed and wrong.

My challenge to you, if you wish to agree with me that free will is real, is to find its requirements in the IL pertaining to deterministic systems in general, not OL, because OL doesn't actually prove anything, it merely gives context to things that might need it for clarity sake. You can leave things which terminate as arbitrary tokens as arbitrary tokens in IL, but much like an obfuscated Minecraft binary, this will do you no favors on trying to find the "inventory" and select the "pickaxe". It will at best help you find the an "re" that contains a ring of 10 pointers to integers that map onto some ring that contains many object types, and select the one that has any object type between "aa" and "ad" as the "zd" with nearby ascii strings which map to "*p-i-c-k-a-x-e", for example, and then when you find the marriage between "*p-i-c-k-a-x-e" and "pickaxe"... A pickaxe by any other name still breaks rocks.

My point is that my perspective on this comes from something quite a bit less speculative than what you might be imagining and is quite solid, even if it's not exactly the OL you speak or the part of IL you studied.

If you can recognize my observations among any of the literature you mentioned, I would love to hear about how people who use a more conventional IL and OL would make those statements.

However as I said, I find free will purely in IL, as you must to convince me that I ought accept your statement that free will is "real" in deterministic systems, rather than "a made up thing that is purely subjective" or whatever DBT believes (to be fair, the accusations of "subjectivity of the concept of free will" came from FromDerInside).

That's part of what you, and everyone who wants to accept compatibilism, must accept: that there is a compatibility between OL and IL here with regards to free will. I'm not arguing that this compatibility does not exist; I argue emphatically that it does, and I have stated it repeatedly in this thread, and will continue to do so. BUT...

If you can't find the compatibility here and defend the IL of it, I would say DBT is right to question your own understanding of it because OL is incapable of proving isomorphism to the "natural language", the contextless stuff, "the stuff IL hopes to model", whatever tickles your pickle. This, just as much as your questioning of his understanding of compatibilism (which is, as you mentioned, not-even-wrong)

 

[Copernicus]

I wouldn't say IL breaks down so much. I'll also note that we have different usages of "natural language", insofar as I do not view spoken OL as "natural language". I view assembly and natural encoding as "natural language", because OL is anything but natural, whereas actual natural languages are languages that are only barely symbolic, assembly languages.

To me a "natural language" can be translated into an IL, and IL can be transliterated to an OL, but you can't really get from OL to natural language unless the OL is first "properly married" to a 1:1 correspondence with some process of IL.

Jarhyn, the term "natural language" is well-understood even in your own field of expertise--e.g. you have the subfield of AI called "Natural Language Processing". So it doesn't matter how you would like to use the term. If you don't want to use the term the way everyone else uses it, that is your prerogative, but don't use your private meaning to equivocate in a discussion with others.

As for your "properly married" idea, that doesn't work in practice, because you can never "properly marry" discourse propositions into mathematical logic, which is structurally context-free. Natural language represents a context-dependent signal. The meaning of an expression in mathematics does not change contextually. It is a function that always yields the same set of answers. OTOH, natural language expressions cannot be interpreted independently of the discourse that they are embedded in. To interpret the meaning of a sentence, you have to imagine a context in which it would make sense. That's where presuppositions come into play and why formal languages can't handle presuppositions.

It is difficult for me to explain all of this to you, because you simply don't have any background in theories of natural language or in the relevant philosophical literature. What you need is a graduate seminar on the subject. An informal social media discussion is not going to help very much. That's why I recommended Schank as a place to start, but that was only to get across the idea that the semantics of a natural language expression are not fully contained in the linguistic signal.

And it's a shit term that excludes an entire much more natural form of language.

I would specifically state you are wrong about being unable to marry mathematical usage to game theory, which is all aout discourse usage.

Regardless of what you think about whether "natural language" more appropriately applies to the definition you wish to make me use (which I will not), the thing I'm calling "natural language" is down to contextless phenomena.

If you want to try me, use my language and see if you find it in your own. You claim to be an industrial grade linguist, let's see you apply it.

As I've said, there is what I refer to as natural language, there is what you call IL, and then there is what you call OL, which is what you also call natural language.

IL specifically deals with certain things that construct out of primitive concepts, even such concepts as executive agents within a system regardless of systemic concept.

I think it's somewhere in the department of "cellular automata" of varying complexity, which is pretty general and arises purely out of the study of Turing machines and thus ultimately set theory.

"This is a thing that Turing machines of various types contain".

Once you have executive agents, things with quantifiable goals and algorithms executed unto those goals (whether they exist as an expression of cycle or goal orientation), you get into the IL discussion of ethics and deterministic systems and "responsibility" in those systems, without needing to really turn towards people or neurons.

I spent long hours looking at something that only made sense because of what levers within the system were pulled by charge patterns, and constricting from that high level sentences about what was happening like "make the decision to set this flag to send that message to tell that system to put on that output."

As I noted, this doesn't say what this decision is about or what that output is. This is where I already understand are the limits of IL. The marriage happens as soon as you say "that output is a fault light." There is an OL description of this, but that OL description MUST marry to the IL structure, or whatever OL solution proposed is wrong.

In this way the marriage is what provides sanity to OL, and as you say context to IL, but the discussion we are having about free will here exists purely in IL, as does the core theorem of evolution by modification of the instantiation process of self replicating amid a selective process within the system, as does the more specific group of "DNA-based chemical systems", which again see an IL treatment in the form of pure simulation.

But if the OL doesn't conform to the context less IL structure that actually describes the physical process, the OL is simply badly formed and wrong.

My challenge to you, if you wish to agree with me that free will is real, is to find its requirements in the IL pertaining to deterministic systems in general, not OL, because OL doesn't actually prove anything, it merely gives context to things that might need it for clarity sake. You can leave things which terminate as arbitrary tokens as arbitrary tokens in IL, but much like an obfuscated Minecraft binary, this will do you no favors on trying to find the "inventory" and select the "pickaxe". It will at best help you find the an "re" that contains a ring of 10 pointers to integers that map onto some ring that contains many object types, and select the one that has any object type between "aa" and "ad" as the "zd" with nearby ascii strings which map to "*p-i-c-k-a-x-e", for example, and then when you find the marriage between "*p-i-c-k-a-x-e" and "pickaxe"... A pickaxe by any other name still breaks rocks.

My point is that my perspective on this comes from something quite a bit less speculative than what you might be imagining and is quite solid, even if it's not exactly the OL you speak or the part of IL you studied.

If you can recognize my observations among any of the literature you mentioned, I would love to hear about how people who use a more conventional IL and OL would make those statements.

However as I said, I find free will purely in IL, as you must to convince me that I ought accept your statement that free will is "real" in deterministic systems, rather than "a made up thing that is purely subjective" or whatever DBT believes (to be fair, the accusations of "subjectivity of the concept of free will" came from FromDerInside).

That's part of what you, and everyone who wants to accept compatibilism, must accept: that there is a compatibility between OL and IL here with regards to free will. I'm not arguing that this compatibility does not exist; I argue emphatically that it does, and I have stated it repeatedly in this thread, and will continue to do so. BUT...

If you can't find the compatibility here and defend the IL of it, I would say DBT is right to question your own understanding of it because OL is incapable of proving isomorphism to the "natural language", the contextless stuff, "the stuff IL hopes to model", whatever tickles your pickle. This, just as much as your questioning of his understanding of compatibilism (which is, as you mentioned, not-even-wrong)

OK, I'm not going to argue with you over what "natural language" means. I'm a linguist with over half a century of professional experience, but what would I know?

 

[Jarhyn]

I wouldn't say IL breaks down so much. I'll also note that we have different usages of "natural language", insofar as I do not view spoken OL as "natural language". I view assembly and natural encoding as "natural language", because OL is anything but natural, whereas actual natural languages are languages that are only barely symbolic, assembly languages.

To me a "natural language" can be translated into an IL, and IL can be transliterated to an OL, but you can't really get from OL to natural language unless the OL is first "properly married" to a 1:1 correspondence with some process of IL.

Jarhyn, the term "natural language" is well-understood even in your own field of expertise--e.g. you have the subfield of AI called "Natural Language Processing". So it doesn't matter how you would like to use the term. If you don't want to use the term the way everyone else uses it, that is your prerogative, but don't use your private meaning to equivocate in a discussion with others.

As for your "properly married" idea, that doesn't work in practice, because you can never "properly marry" discourse propositions into mathematical logic, which is structurally context-free. Natural language represents a context-dependent signal. The meaning of an expression in mathematics does not change contextually. It is a function that always yields the same set of answers. OTOH, natural language expressions cannot be interpreted independently of the discourse that they are embedded in. To interpret the meaning of a sentence, you have to imagine a context in which it would make sense. That's where presuppositions come into play and why formal languages can't handle presuppositions.

It is difficult for me to explain all of this to you, because you simply don't have any background in theories of natural language or in the relevant philosophical literature. What you need is a graduate seminar on the subject. An informal social media discussion is not going to help very much. That's why I recommended Schank as a place to start, but that was only to get across the idea that the semantics of a natural language expression are not fully contained in the linguistic signal.

And it's a shit term that excludes an entire much more natural form of language.

I would specifically state you are wrong about being unable to marry mathematical usage to game theory, which is all aout discourse usage.

Regardless of what you think about whether "natural language" more appropriately applies to the definition you wish to make me use (which I will not), the thing I'm calling "natural language" is down to contextless phenomena.

If you want to try me, use my language and see if you find it in your own. You claim to be an industrial grade linguist, let's see you apply it.

As I've said, there is what I refer to as natural language, there is what you call IL, and then there is what you call OL, which is what you also call natural language.

IL specifically deals with certain things that construct out of primitive concepts, even such concepts as executive agents within a system regardless of systemic concept.

I think it's somewhere in the department of "cellular automata" of varying complexity, which is pretty general and arises purely out of the study of Turing machines and thus ultimately set theory.

"This is a thing that Turing machines of various types contain".

Once you have executive agents, things with quantifiable goals and algorithms executed unto those goals (whether they exist as an expression of cycle or goal orientation), you get into the IL discussion of ethics and deterministic systems and "responsibility" in those systems, without needing to really turn towards people or neurons.

I spent long hours looking at something that only made sense because of what levers within the system were pulled by charge patterns, and constricting from that high level sentences about what was happening like "make the decision to set this flag to send that message to tell that system to put on that output."

As I noted, this doesn't say what this decision is about or what that output is. This is where I already understand are the limits of IL. The marriage happens as soon as you say "that output is a fault light." There is an OL description of this, but that OL description MUST marry to the IL structure, or whatever OL solution proposed is wrong.

In this way the marriage is what provides sanity to OL, and as you say context to IL, but the discussion we are having about free will here exists purely in IL, as does the core theorem of evolution by modification of the instantiation process of self replicating amid a selective process within the system, as does the more specific group of "DNA-based chemical systems", which again see an IL treatment in the form of pure simulation.

But if the OL doesn't conform to the context less IL structure that actually describes the physical process, the OL is simply badly formed and wrong.

My challenge to you, if you wish to agree with me that free will is real, is to find its requirements in the IL pertaining to deterministic systems in general, not OL, because OL doesn't actually prove anything, it merely gives context to things that might need it for clarity sake. You can leave things which terminate as arbitrary tokens as arbitrary tokens in IL, but much like an obfuscated Minecraft binary, this will do you no favors on trying to find the "inventory" and select the "pickaxe". It will at best help you find the an "re" that contains a ring of 10 pointers to integers that map onto some ring that contains many object types, and select the one that has any object type between "aa" and "ad" as the "zd" with nearby ascii strings which map to "*p-i-c-k-a-x-e", for example, and then when you find the marriage between "*p-i-c-k-a-x-e" and "pickaxe"... A pickaxe by any other name still breaks rocks.

My point is that my perspective on this comes from something quite a bit less speculative than what you might be imagining and is quite solid, even if it's not exactly the OL you speak or the part of IL you studied.

If you can recognize my observations among any of the literature you mentioned, I would love to hear about how people who use a more conventional IL and OL would make those statements.

However as I said, I find free will purely in IL, as you must to convince me that I ought accept your statement that free will is "real" in deterministic systems, rather than "a made up thing that is purely subjective" or whatever DBT believes (to be fair, the accusations of "subjectivity of the concept of free will" came from FromDerInside).

That's part of what you, and everyone who wants to accept compatibilism, must accept: that there is a compatibility between OL and IL here with regards to free will. I'm not arguing that this compatibility does not exist; I argue emphatically that it does, and I have stated it repeatedly in this thread, and will continue to do so. BUT...

If you can't find the compatibility here and defend the IL of it, I would say DBT is right to question your own understanding of it because OL is incapable of proving isomorphism to the "natural language", the contextless stuff, "the stuff IL hopes to model", whatever tickles your pickle. This, just as much as your questioning of his understanding of compatibilism (which is, as you mentioned, not-even-wrong)

OK, I'm not going to argue with you over what "natural language" means. I'm a linguist with over half a century of professional experience, but what would I know?

I think the point here is that you are arguing over which language we are using to discuss things rather than discussing the things. I didn't ask for an argument over the interpretation of "natural language", but you have given me an argument twice now despite saying you don't want to argue!

I asked, rather, for a discussion about the underlying logic of all those other statements I made. Having that discussion is up to you at this point. YOU understand at this point what I mean, and the vast majority used IL and OL, OL being sufficient here to handle that "fart by another name, still as smelly".

It's up to you whether you want to move forward from there rather than complain that autistic folks gonna autism.

As I said, if you are a linguist with so much experience, this should not trouble you. You should be capable of understanding, translating, and finding isomorphism of use.

I could call it a "dinosaur" at this point or a "gronk". That's the point of OL: it is a system of coordinating contextual tokens so that things like "ring of 10 with a selector variable" can be handled by contextless natural languages, "real syntaxes", whatever you would call them rather than having to expose their IL construction since most people don't have the ability to translate that into "inventory".

As I said, "a pickaxe by any other name still breaks rocks".

I would like to see if the understanding I developed in a vacuum mirrors the understanding of people you respect greatly by doting on their words and seem to think I am not the equal of.

The discussion was not over "whether natural language is an appropriate token for this or that", but about the basic limits of IL that you seem to think I'm not familiar with for some reason (on account of the fact that I like figuring such things out for myself; if I do not learn such things in a vacuum, I both neglect the skill for figuring such things out, and risk incomplete understanding).

Regardless, "natural language" in your usage is a misnomer, when both "natural" and "language" are IL terms. Appropriating them to discuss something as far from the IL interpretation as "natural" is kinda trash and shame on everyone who adopted that convention!

So can we get back to the nuts and bolts of whether IL is sufficient in your estimation to handle Free Will, or whether you actually think DBT is right in his fundamental assessment that Free Will is an arbitrary discussion only possible on OL, and thus nonsensical?

 

[DBT]

...

Again;

If you accept regulative control as a necessary part of free will, it seems impossible either way:
1. Free will requires that given an act A, the agent could have acted otherwise
2. Indeterminate actions happens randomly and without intent or control
3. Therefore indeterminism and free will are incompatible
4. Determinate actions are fixed and unchangeable
5. Therefore determinism is incompatible with free will

There goes any notion of free will regardless of determinism or indeterminism, compatibilist or Libertarian.

(1) fails, because it describes free will in the past tense, and you can't change the past. There may also be some ambiguity in the use of the modal, as well. Free will is about the imagined future from the perspective of an agent, not a past action. So "could have" only refers to what was in the mind of the agent at the time, not what transpired subsequently. From that perspective, agents choose to act according to how they imagine the future.

It's not free will in the past tense, not at all. As explained, and as determinism is defined, prior states of the system determine current states of the system which in turn determine future states of the system as it evolves.

Look, the expression "could have acted otherwise" is literally in the past tense. Could is the past tense of the modal auxiliary verb can in its epistemic (not deontic or dynamic) sense. That is, could refers to speculation about the future at a time in the past. Let's just get the semantics straight once and for all. In defining free will in (1), you are referring to the state of mind that a past agent had about future outcomes, not the real future that actually played out in reality.

'Could have done otherwise' essentially means being able to choose any one of a number of realizable options at any given instance of decision making, which also means here and now.

That if you are presented with multiple options, here and now, at this very point in time (or any point in time), you can freely choose any one of a number of options.

Given determinism as it is defined, that is clearly cannot the case. What is decided is fixed by antecedents, where only one fixed option/ action can be taken in any given point in time: could not have done otherwise in the past, cannot do otherwise here and now, cannot do otherwise at any point in the future.

(2) refers to "indeterminate actions", and I have no idea what those are. Random actions? There is nothing random about free will. The agent faces an indeterminate imaginary future and an array of actions to choose from. I suspect this is where you mix up compatibilist free will with libertarian free will, which has to do with indeterminism.

Some use indeterminism to support their version of free will, that any option can be taken at any point in time, etc.
That of course is not Compatibilism.

I can make little sense of your response, but, like I said, you mix up compatibilism and libertarian free will. That would explain why you can't seem to understand the compatibilist position on free will. We both disagree with indeterminism, but you still keep throwing it into the discussion as if it were relevant to compatibilism.

(3) is probably misstated, because you were fixated on the words "indeterminate actions" from (2). You seem to have forgotten that compatibilism is about determinism and free will, not "indeterminism" (whatever that is) and free will.

The syllogism is dealing with the notion of 'free will' in general, not just compatibalism

It's not a real syllogism, although it is constructed to resemble one. We are only discussing compatibilism here, so steps (2) and (3) are basically irrelevant. (5) does not logically follow from (1) and (4). As I've already pointed out, you have clearly misconstrued (1) and the compatibilist concept of free will along with it. Step (4) alone is accepted by everyone, and it doesn't get you (5).

It's a rough outline of why the notion free will is incompatible with determinism, indeterminism, probability or random events.

(5) does not follow logically because of the flaws in your premises. You apparently confuse the "free" in "free will" to refer to freedom from determinacy rather than freedom to choose an action that leads to the most desirable outcome.

It follows if you take the notion of free will to mean the ability to have regulative control and make choices.

The opening remark being; ''If you accept regulative control as a necessary part of free will, it seems impossible either way:''

The Princeton PDF you linked regulative control to churns and times out on my computer, so I couldn't review the document or figure out why you believe that.

Regulative control is generally assumed and implied when someone says, ''he did it of his own free will,'' implying that the culprit had the regulative control to avoid taking the action in question, that he need not have taken that action in that moment.

Of course, nobody chooses to mess up. It's only later that you realize what you should have done, but it's too late, you didn't know then what you know now and there is no going back.

Responsibility is something of a litmus test for free will--a deliberate, unimpeded action by an agent. If an agent thinks his or her action was not unduly impeded--that it was the result of free will--then the agent takes responsibility for that action. If it was felt to be impeded by circumstance, forces beyond the agent's control, or psychological compulsion, then that throws the agent's responsibility for the outcome of the action into question. That is what makes the concept of free will psychologically and socially useful. That is why the expression exists. It in no way conflicts with the fact that we live in a deterministic reality and that every aspect of our character is the result of physical causality. Agents are, after all, physical beings. Mental events supervene on physical events. Nobody but perhaps those who support libertarian free will disputes that.

If an action is determined, it must happen as determined. Not only is it not impeded, it is necessarily performed without restriction or hinderance.

''Wanting to do X is fully determined by these prior causes. Now that the desire to do X is being felt, there are no other constraints that keep the person from doing what he wants, namely X.'' - Cold Comfort in Compatibilism.

If determined, not only are there no constraints that keep the person from doing what he wants, there is no option but to do what he wants.

To paraphrase Wolfgang Pauli, that's not even wrong. Your text does not address my point about responsibility, so it is hard to see where the conversation goes after that. Do you believe that people are responsible for their actions in the sense that they can be praised or blamed for those actions?

A person is responsible for their actions in the sense that it indeed they who act, it is they - as a brain/mind/body - who performed the action.

But of course, for the given reasons, it isn't as simple as saying 'of their own free will'

An antiquated concept
... Our contention is not that neuroscience does (or will) disprove free will; rather, we contend that free will is an antiquated concept that impairs our understanding of human behavior and thereby clouds our thinking about ethics. ...

''We ought to think about decision making in terms of neurological control, not because this is some sort of eternal absolute truth, but because among the options on the table currently, it shows the most promise of coherently unifying the scientific, ethical, judicial, and personal realms of our experience, and because it has the best chance of improving our understanding of ourselves and one another. Research in neuroscience is already well underway, and we can manipulate control across species using conditioning, drugs, and lesions. 4
Just as we have learned to consider our decisions as “free choices,” we can shift our introspection toward our varying levels of control. A man forced to choose between a hamburger and heroin might be acutely aware that his control is being compromised by an addiction. Insisting that he has (or lacks) free will ads nothing to our understanding of his behavior. Nor does it provide any useful suggestions of what we as a society ought do with him legally. An understanding of the problems that opiate addiction creates for one's self-control and how best to treat these difficulties, along with a knowledge of the user's history, would help a judge or jury make informed decisions based on the likely outcomes of various incarceration and rehabilitation programs.''


Free Will as a Matter of Law
''This chapter confronts the issue of free will in neurolaw, rejecting one of the leading views of the relationship between free will and legal responsibility on the ground that the current system of legal responsibility likely emerged from outdated views about the mind, mental states, and free will. It challenges the compatibilist approach to law (in which free will and causal determinism can coexist). The chapter argues that those who initially developed the criminal law endorsed or presupposed views about mind and free will that modern neuroscience will aid in revealing as false. It then argues for the relevance of false presuppositions embedded in the original development of the criminal law in judging whether to revise or maintain the current system. In doing so, the chapter shares the view that neuroscientific developments will change the way we think about criminal responsibility.''

 

[Jarhyn]

'Could have done otherwise' essentially means being able to choose any one of a number of realizable options at any given instance of decision making, which also means here and now

No, it does not.

It specifically means "had a valid option for which the deciding factor on the contingent mechanism was selected by a particular process of contingent mechanism and not some other process external to it."

It is about the set of objects of the input space to the responsible agent.

Further, it does not extend past the moment of the choice. Often it CAN, but there is no requirement that it must.

I do not need the power to go back in time and instead choose the other in some alternality for it to be a valid "option".

The thing that makes it a valid option is that I have the delta-V available to me to option it, that there is a physical path, and the deciding element of whether to go there to take it is me making a statement "I want the steak"

What would make it not-an-option would be someone saying "oops, no steaks left", in which case it was removed from the output space via removal from the input space and no delta-V I expend will get me to such a location.

 

[Copernicus]

...Regardless, "natural language" in your usage is a misnomer, when both "natural" and "language" are IL terms. Appropriating them to discuss something as far from the IL interpretation as "natural" is kinda trash and shame on everyone who adopted that convention!

So can we get back to the nuts and bolts of whether IL is sufficient in your estimation to handle Free Will, or whether you actually think DBT is right in his fundamental assessment that Free Will is an arbitrary discussion only possible on OL, and thus nonsensical?

Jarhyn, there was nothing in that long post that really made me think we could have a profitable discussion on this subject. We seem to be operating on totally different wavelengths, and I simply do not agree to abandon the conventional usage of the term "natural language". You have obviously never formally studied linguistic philosophy, and a debate over the relative merits of the OL and IL approaches to natural language is not going to be a productive use of my limited time. Let's just get back to a discussion of free will, which, after all, is what the thread is about.

 

[Copernicus]

...
Look, the expression "could have acted otherwise" is literally in the past tense. Could is the past tense of the modal auxiliary verb can in its epistemic (not deontic or dynamic) sense. That is, could refers to speculation about the future at a time in the past. Let's just get the semantics straight once and for all. In defining free will in (1), you are referring to the state of mind that a past agent had about future outcomes, not the real future that actually played out in reality.

'Could have done otherwise' essentially means being able to choose any one of a number of realizable options at any given instance of decision making, which also means here and now.

That if you are presented with multiple options, here and now, at this very point in time (or any point in time), you can freely choose any one of a number of options.

Given determinism as it is defined, that is clearly cannot the case. What is decided is fixed by antecedents, where only one fixed option/ action can be taken in any given point in time: could not have done otherwise in the past, cannot do otherwise here and now, cannot do otherwise at any point in the future.

I feel like I am in a debate with a bot caught in an endless loop. You just keep repeating the same misunderstandings of my position on free will without really directly addressing anything I say in response to those misunderstandings. It is not just about optional volitional actions that an agent has to select. It is about an imaginary model of a future in which the different imagined actions lead to different imagined outcomes. The point is that the future is irrealis to an agent. IOW, it is indeterminate prior to the volitional act. The "free" in free will is totally subjective. It depends on how the agents judge the extent of their control over their actions. If that control is felt to be unduly impeded, then they feel that they lacked reasonable control over their past behavior. That could lead them to believe that their action was not an execution of free will. I am trying to make this clear to you, but I see no evidence, as of yet, that you get what my point is or that you are willing to consider the possibility that I have made a reasonable point.

...
It's not a real syllogism, although it is constructed to resemble one. We are only discussing compatibilism here, so steps (2) and (3) are basically irrelevant. (5) does not logically follow from (1) and (4). As I've already pointed out, you have clearly misconstrued (1) and the compatibilist concept of free will along with it. Step (4) alone is accepted by everyone, and it doesn't get you (5).

It's a rough outline of why the notion free will is incompatible with determinism, indeterminism, probability or random events.

I just disagree. It is a failed attempt at a syllogism that mixes up indeterminism and determinism, leading you to confuse libertarian free will with compatibilist free will. I don't know how to get you to stop doing that, but maybe I would need to get you to abandon your "syllogism" first. Frankly, I am not optimistic that I can get you to do that.

...
The Princeton PDF you linked regulative control to churns and times out on my computer, so I couldn't review the document or figure out why you believe that.

Regulative control is generally assumed and implied when someone says, ''he did it of his own free will,'' implying that the culprit had the regulative control to avoid taking the action in question, that he need not have taken that action in that moment.

Of course, nobody chooses to mess up. It's only later that you realize what you should have done, but it's too late, you didn't know then what you know now and there is no going back.

I have no problem with your description, but I call your attention to the fact that your description of the event is in the past tense: "He did it of his own free will". The agent is looking at a past event in which the agent had those imaginary choices before him and reimagining the event as if he were making the same choice with knowledge of the actual, as opposed to imagined, outcome. If the outcome was not as he imagined it would turn out, then he can imagine to have freely chosen a different path in the past. In fact, this is part of the learning process that allows people to adapt behavior to similar conditions when future choices become necessary. That is why free will is such an important concept. It is necessary for us to be able to learn from experience and adjust our behavior over the course of time. This characterization of free will in no way contradicts determinism. Everything an agent does is determined by circumstantial events and events of neurological activity that causally result in an agent's actions.

...
To paraphrase Wolfgang Pauli, that's not even wrong. Your text does not address my point about responsibility, so it is hard to see where the conversation goes after that. Do you believe that people are responsible for their actions in the sense that they can be praised or blamed for those actions?

A person is responsible for their actions in the sense that it indeed they who act, it is they - as a brain/mind/body - who performed the action.

Of their own free will. You don't include that expression, but it fits with what you said in response to my request. Free will, as that expression is normally used, is important to our understanding of responsibility. We can still blame criminals for their transgressions of the law and award medals to people who behave meritoriously.

But of course, for the given reasons, it isn't as simple as saying 'of their own free will'

An antiquated concept
... Our contention is not that neuroscience does (or will) disprove free will; rather, we contend that free will is an antiquated concept that impairs our understanding of human behavior and thereby clouds our thinking about ethics. ...

''We ought to think about decision making in terms of neurological control, not because this is some sort of eternal absolute truth, but because among the options on the table currently, it shows the most promise of coherently unifying the scientific, ethical, judicial, and personal realms of our experience, and because it has the best chance of improving our understanding of ourselves and one another. Research in neuroscience is already well underway, and we can manipulate control across species using conditioning, drugs, and lesions. 4
Just as we have learned to consider our decisions as “free choices,” we can shift our introspection toward our varying levels of control. A man forced to choose between a hamburger and heroin might be acutely aware that his control is being compromised by an addiction. Insisting that he has (or lacks) free will ads nothing to our understanding of his behavior. Nor does it provide any useful suggestions of what we as a society ought do with him legally. An understanding of the problems that opiate addiction creates for one's self-control and how best to treat these difficulties, along with a knowledge of the user's history, would help a judge or jury make informed decisions based on the likely outcomes of various incarceration and rehabilitation programs.''


Free Will as a Matter of Law
''This chapter confronts the issue of free will in neurolaw, rejecting one of the leading views of the relationship between free will and legal responsibility on the ground that the current system of legal responsibility likely emerged from outdated views about the mind, mental states, and free will. It challenges the compatibilist approach to law (in which free will and causal determinism can coexist). The chapter argues that those who initially developed the criminal law endorsed or presupposed views about mind and free will that modern neuroscience will aid in revealing as false. It then argues for the relevance of false presuppositions embedded in the original development of the criminal law in judging whether to revise or maintain the current system. In doing so, the chapter shares the view that neuroscientific developments will change the way we think about criminal responsibility.''

Unfortunately, that article is behind a prohibitively expensive paywall, but it would be freely available to me, if I still had an affiliation with an academic institution or library. There are lots of articles pro and con regarding free will and compatibilism, so I don't want to dismiss it out of hand. I would read the article, searching for explanations of precisely how the authors believe neuroscience would contribute to the solutions to social problems like drug addiction. The above text hints at the possibility of such contributions, but I would need to see how their solutions would differ from ones already being debated in the public domain. Drug addiction is important, because it is a case of what a compatibilist would describe as undue compulsion that leads people to make choices that they later regret and wish they hadn't made. I can see where neuroscience has a lot to contribute to mitigating or curing those compulsions, but I'm not as sure that it has as much of significance to contribute to how laws deal with those who commit crimes under the influence of drugs. After all, understanding the neural mechanisms of addictive behaviors is not the same as producing a cure or dealing with the consequences of actions taken while under the influence. So I'm not buying the authors' claim that free will is an antiquated concept. It may just be a concept that doesn't have much bearing on their research focus as neuroscientists.

 

[Jarhyn]

...Regardless, "natural language" in your usage is a misnomer, when both "natural" and "language" are IL terms. Appropriating them to discuss something as far from the IL interpretation as "natural" is kinda trash and shame on everyone who adopted that convention!

So can we get back to the nuts and bolts of whether IL is sufficient in your estimation to handle Free Will, or whether you actually think DBT is right in his fundamental assessment that Free Will is an arbitrary discussion only possible on OL, and thus nonsensical?

Jarhyn, there was nothing in that long post that really made me think we could have a profitable discussion on this subject. We seem to be operating on totally different wavelengths, and I simply do not agree to abandon the conventional usage of the term "natural language". You have obviously never formally studied linguistic philosophy, and a debate over the relative merits of the OL and IL approaches to natural language is not going to be a productive use of my limited time. Let's just get back to a discussion of free will, which, after all, is what the thread is about.

As I said, free will specifically depends on whether it can be handled free of human contexts via language that is isomorphic to the foundations of math, or whether it cannot and is only valid in the realm of arbitrary human constructs (and is this as made up as anything can be).

Either you can handle it in IL or you can't.

If it cannot be handled in IL as a concept, it's not real.

'compatibilism' does depend on compatibility between IL and OL here.

 

[DBT]

...
Look, the expression "could have acted otherwise" is literally in the past tense. Could is the past tense of the modal auxiliary verb can in its epistemic (not deontic or dynamic) sense. That is, could refers to speculation about the future at a time in the past. Let's just get the semantics straight once and for all. In defining free will in (1), you are referring to the state of mind that a past agent had about future outcomes, not the real future that actually played out in reality.

'Could have done otherwise' essentially means being able to choose any one of a number of realizable options at any given instance of decision making, which also means here and now.

That if you are presented with multiple options, here and now, at this very point in time (or any point in time), you can freely choose any one of a number of options.

Given determinism as it is defined, that is clearly cannot the case. What is decided is fixed by antecedents, where only one fixed option/ action can be taken in any given point in time: could not have done otherwise in the past, cannot do otherwise here and now, cannot do otherwise at any point in the future.

I feel like I am in a debate with a bot caught in an endless loop.

You are not the only one. I have been caught in that loop for a number of years. That we are both caught in this loop appears to prove my case.

You just keep repeating the same misunderstandings of my position on free will without really directly addressing anything I say in response to those misunderstandings. It is not just about optional volitional actions that an agent has to select. It is about an imaginary model of a future in which the different imagined actions lead to different imagined outcomes. The point is that the future is irrealis to an agent. IOW, it is indeterminate prior to the volitional act. The "free" in free will is totally subjective. It depends on how the agents judge the extent of their control over their actions. If that control is felt to be unduly impeded, then they feel that they lacked reasonable control over their past behavior. That could lead them to believe that their action was not an execution of free will. I am trying to make this clear to you, but I see no evidence, as of yet, that you get what my point is or that you are willing to consider the possibility that I have made a reasonable point.

I keep repeating because the same erroneous objections keep being invoked. The issue of the failure of compatibilism has been addressed countless times.

It is not complicated.

To repeat: if external elements, force, coercion, etc, are acknowledge to be restraints on freedom of will, so must production by determistic processes that fix the article of will, what you think and want, without awareness or choice.

Where if the former negates free will, so does the latter.

Therefore compatibilism fails as an argument for free will within a deterministic system.

There is no rebuttal, the notion of free will is not compatible with a system that determines how events - the world, society, brains/minds - unfold or evolve.

A fixed progression of events does not involve free will, where acting according to one's will is not freely chosen, but fixed by antecedents.

I'll leave the rest for the sake of not having to repeat the relevant points over and over.

Unfortunately, that article is behind a prohibitively expensive paywall, but it would be freely available to me, if I still had an affiliation with an academic institution or library. There are lots of articles pro and con regarding free will and compatibilism, so I don't want to dismiss it out of hand. I would read the article, searching for explanations of precisely how the authors believe neuroscience would contribute to the solutions to social problems like drug addiction. The above text hints at the possibility of such contributions, but I would need to see how their solutions would differ from ones already being debated in the public domain. Drug addiction is important, because it is a case of what a compatibilist would describe as undue compulsion that leads people to make choices that they later regret and wish they hadn't made. I can see where neuroscience has a lot to contribute to mitigating or curing those compulsions, but I'm not as sure that it has as much of significance to contribute to how laws deal with those who commit crimes under the influence of drugs. After all, understanding the neural mechanisms of addictive behaviors is not the same as producing a cure or dealing with the consequences of actions taken while under the influence. So I'm not buying the authors' claim that free will is an antiquated concept. It may just be a concept that doesn't have much bearing on their research focus as neuroscientists.

Just to add. The source of article isn't an issue. The information is readily available on any website that deals with neuroscience and the law, neuroscience and volition, brain function in relation to behaviour, the effects of brain trauma, lesions, chemical imbalance on behaviour and decision making, etcetera, where it is clear that the non-chosen state of the brain is the state of you, where the notion of free will plays no part.

A parietal-premotor network for movement intention and motor awareness
''It is commonly assumed that we are conscious of our movements mainly because we can sense ourselves moving as ongoing peripheral information coming from our muscles and retina reaches the brain. Recent evidence, however, suggests that, contrary to common beliefs, conscious intention to move is independent of movement execution per se. We propose that during movement execution it is our initial intentions that we are mainly aware of. Furthermore, the experience of moving as a conscious act is associated with increased activity in a specific brain region: the posterior parietal cortex. We speculate that movement intention and awareness are generated and monitored in this region. We put forward a general framework of the cognitive and neural processes involved in movement intention and motor awareness.''


If for some reason someone wants to believe in free will, fine.

 

[Copernicus]

...
As I said, free will specifically depends on whether it can be handled free of human contexts via language that is isomorphic to the foundations of math, or whether it cannot and is only valid in the realm of arbitrary human constructs (and is this as made up as anything can be).

Either you can handle it in IL or you can't.

If it cannot be handled in IL as a concept, it's not real.

'compatibilism' does depend on compatibility between IL and OL here.

I hereby regret that I tried to discuss linguistic philosophy with you. Compatibilism really has nothing to do with the two branches of linguistic philosophy that I mentioned in a past post, but it seems to have made you want to debate a subject that you know very little about. Mea culpa for injecting it into the discussion.

 

[Copernicus]

...
I feel like I am in a debate with a bot caught in an endless loop.

You are not the only one. I have been caught in that loop for a number of years. That we are both caught in this loop appears to prove my case.

No, it doesn't. That endless loop is caused by your tendency to post reactions to arguments that don't address or try to refute those arguments. Your reactions just tend to ignore what I posted and simply restate what you've said before--a classic ad nauseam tactic. That is the endless loop I referred to. If you tried to understand the text you were reacting to and actually said what you specifically objected to in it, you would advance the discussion beyond that endless repetition.

You just keep repeating the same misunderstandings of my position on free will without really directly addressing anything I say in response to those misunderstandings. It is not just about optional volitional actions that an agent has to select. It is about an imaginary model of a future in which the different imagined actions lead to different imagined outcomes. The point is that the future is irrealis to an agent. IOW, it is indeterminate prior to the volitional act. The "free" in free will is totally subjective. It depends on how the agents judge the extent of their control over their actions. If that control is felt to be unduly impeded, then they feel that they lacked reasonable control over their past behavior. That could lead them to believe that their action was not an execution of free will. I am trying to make this clear to you, but I see no evidence, as of yet, that you get what my point is or that you are willing to consider the possibility that I have made a reasonable point.

I keep repeating because the same erroneous objections keep being invoked. The issue of the failure of compatibilism has been addressed countless times.

No, you keep repeating because you refuse to address what is said to you. For example, see the fourth sentence in the above paragraph--the one that starts with "The point is..." That is where I define the concept of "free" in free will. What do you have to say in response? Nada. Nothing.

It is not complicated.

To repeat: if external elements, force, coercion, etc, are acknowledge to be restraints on freedom of will, so must production by determistic processes that fix the article of will, what you think and want, without awareness or choice...

What does that have to do with what I said about the concept of "free" in free will???? You just ignore it and repeat your reference to deterministic processes as if I disagreed with determinism. I am not an indeterminist. To act as if I were is a straw man fallacy. The dispute is over what free will means, not determinism!!! We are in violent agreement that every event has an antecedent cause, even the neural events that represent our thought processes.

Look, my argument is not impossible to understand, although it might be a little more complicated than you would like. We can describe the mind, thoughts, and linguistic concepts in terms of the underlying physical events that they supervene on, but we can also describe the overall behavior and function of the mind at a higher level of mental activity. Free will is not a concept that can be broken down easily into components that we can map to neural activity, but neuroscientists have made a lot of progress in that area. They don't talk a lot about the concept of free will, because it has no significance to their work. That doesn't prevent some neuroscientists from mentioning free will and how their work might have a bearing on the subject, but philosophy isn't their core area of expertise.

Trying to explain free will at the level of neural activity is a bit like trying to explain a computer program in binary or assembler language. It can be done, but the overall logic of the program is best explained at a higher level of function--in terms of data structures that programmers rely on to make computers produce interesting results. If you look at the same program in assembler or binary, it becomes extremely difficult to comprehend what the program is trying to do. That's why most programmers work with high level computer languages that are then automatically compiled into the low level components that actually execute in the machinery. Programmers don't actually have to know anything about binary code and registers in order to discuss the flow of logic in their programs. Similarly, you don't have to be a neuroscientist or psychologist in order to understand what free will is. You just have to pay attention to how people use the expression.

 

[Jarhyn]

...
As I said, free will specifically depends on whether it can be handled free of human contexts via language that is isomorphic to the foundations of math, or whether it cannot and is only valid in the realm of arbitrary human constructs (and is this as made up as anything can be).

Either you can handle it in IL or you can't.

If it cannot be handled in IL as a concept, it's not real.

'compatibilism' does depend on compatibility between IL and OL here.

I hereby regret that I tried to discuss linguistic philosophy with you. Compatibilism really has nothing to do with the two branches of linguistic philosophy that I mentioned in a past post, but it seems to have made you want to debate a subject that you know very little about. Mea culpa for injecting it into the discussion.

More, you seem to not understand why the discussion is important, and I guess I ought regret having a conversation about linguistics with someone who thinks their own education circumvents the need to consider points of view somewhat alien to their own.

Compatibilism has everything to do with the philosophy of language and systems theory. Either you can handle it in a language with strong isomorphism to reality (translated: handle it with IL; handle it with Systems Theory where Determinism is defined), or you cannot and it's an arbitrary made up fuck-fuck game existing purely in and of your imagination as a subjective and purely arbitrary concept.

Anthropocentrism has no place in the discussion of hard problems, for all we get our first hint at general concepts from the specific case of humans and other animals.

If you cannot model free will without context, how do you suppose it fits into a system which is without wider context such as reality is?

My contention is that you can model it without context, but most people don't.

DBT is asking, demanding, to see it modeled without context as a fundamental discussion of systems theory under the family of "Deterministic systems". He often ignores it when I do, though, hence the only reason I agree with you that he is the "black knight" in this sorry tableau.

 

[Copernicus]

More, you seem to not understand why the discussion is important, and I guess I ought regret having a conversation about linguistics with someone who thinks their own education circumvents the need to consider points of view somewhat alien to their own.

I'm sorry that you see it that way, and I am happy to have conversations about my field of expertise--linguistics. I only mentioned the IL/OL schools of linguistic philosophy because free will is very much a philosophical controversy, and I am taking an Ordinary Language approach. I realize that you are a programmer who works with a formal symbolic languages, so you perhaps felt a need to defend Ideal Language approaches. However, that would take us far afield from the discussion of free will and determinism in my opinion. Moreover, it would entail a lot more discussion about the basics of those two approaches than I have time for, and I am not confident that it would profit either of us to spend that time.

 

[Jarhyn]

However, that would take us far afield from the discussion of free will and determinism in my opinion

And I disagree entirely. I rather find OL approaches to take us far afield from what is, at its heart, a basic discussion of systems theory.

IL approaches do one thing well: they discuss contextless formal systems.

Discussions of determinism are about a formal concept. It goes much further "afield" when you try to discuss it in OL.

Look at what DBT is doing, maybe try re-reading his arguments: he's trying to attack your philosophical foundation "determinism" itself as something that fundamentally rules out the concept of regulatory control And choice. He is relying on (badly learned armchair) concepts of neurology to do it, saying that "a system cannot decide on its own configuration".

This is PURE IL, in the form of systems theory. You can't address that purely with contextual tokens, you have to address it by looking at what we mean by "system" and "determinism" and "regulatory control" using a general concept of "agents" or "cellular automata", ideals rather than things which you would normally want to confine the discussion to (people making decisions).

I have no doubt that you could articulate my point better than I could, with more accessible language than I could, if only you would try.

Admittedly, I think this will do nothing to unfuck DBT's broken record on the subject, hence why I want to have a discussion that goes into the basic linguistic approaches we use to handle the concept rather than dickering around with Mr. Not-Even-Wrong.

What? Do you WANT to spend the next three months bickering with quisling-ish arguments saying the same thing about different arguments from authority saying the same thing not-at-all even addressing compatibilism? I've been there and done that and it's boring!

Spend some time with me, go walking a bit far afield, and see if you don't manage to find somewhere that makes sense.

 

[Copernicus]

Admittedly, I think this will do nothing to unfuck DBT's broken record on the subject, hence why I want to have a discussion that goes into the basic linguistic approaches we use to handle the concept rather than dickering around with Mr. Not-Even-Wrong.

That is exactly what I did, but you are confused about the fundamental difference between natural languages and formal languages. I've tried to talk to you about this before, but you never seem to grasp what I am talking about. You simply have no familiarity with basic concepts in linguistic semantics, and I don't have time to give you a proper background. I just don't want to get into that with you here. It is too much of a distraction from the topic.

Nevertheless, I'll briefly summarize my position below. The next paragraph will explain the basics, and the following paragraph will explain the relevance to free will.

Linguistically speaking, free will can be understood in terms of the semantics of basic tense and time reference in natural languages. Tense systems come in two modes: realis moods and irrealis moods. (There are other types of time reference called "aspect" that aren't particularly relevant. Those deal with whether the speaker refers to a point in time, an continuous segment of time, or repeated segments of time.) A realis mood refers to actual experiences--past and present events. So languages have past and present tenses. An irrealis mood refers to imaginary events--future, conditional, counterfactual, imperative, etc. Realis and irrealis moods represent a fundamental split in the way all human beings think about events. Looking at how natural languages consistently refer to events gives us a handle on one aspect of basic human cognition. English uses past and present tense suffixes on verbs to refer to realis mood, but it uses special modal auxiliary verbs (and other constructions) to refer to irrealis mood--will, must, can, shall, should, could, etc. Other languages use different linguistic constructions, but the semantics of tense and time reference is universal. It always manifests the same split between realis and irrealis.

Realis and irrealis time reference is important to the concept of free will, because they represent two different domains of reference. Those two domains are where we think about causally connected chains of events and agentive roles in those events--reality vs imagination. Agents can cause things to happen in both domains--in real life and in imaginary life. You can't change reality, so there is no way to define the freedom in free will by considering just realis time reference. Reality is fixed in episodic memory, and choices have to be made in real time. Alternative options don't exist in that time frame. The "freedom" part of free will comes in with irrealis time reference. The alternative options before an agent do exist in that imaginary time frame. Moreover, one can even think about realis events in the past where the alternative irrealis options were still open to the agent. It is at that point where the "illusion" of free will makes sense. Irrealis (imagined future) options exist when an agent considers taking an action, and they also exist when an agent judges a past event where the outcome would have been different if a different irrealis branch had been selected.

I have tried to make it very clear here how I define the concept of free will in a way that is compatible with determinism and how I came to define it that way. Natural language illuminates our knowledge of how human cognition works universally, so one can build a  theory of mind (TOM) with linguistic tools and explain how complex concepts like free will operate within that explanatory framework. However, there is a lot more to what I am proposing here. There is a lot more to say about how human beings think about and describe temporal events and chains of causation. In the interests of brevity and mercy, I'll stop here.

 

[Jarhyn]

Linguistically speaking, free will can be understood

Except that you don't actually do any "under" in the understanding.

Your description is, essentially, merely a out what you WANT free will to address in terms of "how people use it" but this is NOT in any way approaching an actual formal description of process.

Contrast this to the approach I take in the Rousseau's thread.

All your description accomplishes is "saying how people use free will to discuss future and past and responsibility" in a way that is as wide as an ocean and as shallow as a paper cut.

It doesn't actually establish that anything real or physical is actually happening, and at best can be taken as a hint that there might be something more fundamental and real happening that justifies that usage, however common and emergent.

To me this acts as a hint that an IL treatment is likely possible, but it doesn't actually produce the IL treatment. It just says "this is how we tend to treat it".

 

[Copernicus]

Your description is, essentially, merely a out what you WANT free will to address in terms of "how people use it" but this is NOT in any way approaching an actual formal description of process.

My description is a common sense description of what free will is that is based on factual linguistic evidence. There can be many kinds of formal descriptions, but formalism for the sake of formalism is not helpful. Mine uses a technical point about English syntax and semantics to support my conclusion. And I remain more convinced than ever that I do not want to discuss the OL/IL branches of linguistic philosophy with you.

 

[Jarhyn]

My description is a common sense description of what free will is

No, it isn't. It's a common sense description of how people use the term.

What it is is separate from how people use the term in practice.

It's like saying "addition is the word people use to handle putting things together and counting the objects" rather than actually getting into the nuts and bolts of it. You couldn't use that, for instance, to get to 2's compliment binary addition, for example.

It's shallow as a paper cut.

There is no "common sense" description for what most things actually are. That's one of the reasons science exists: because OL doesn't address reality, it addresses approximations of reality, approximately badly.

We need to actually define it more than in terms of what people use or what they want to express but in in some more general terms IF we want to claim it is "real".

People use "God" to discuss something they think is real all the time, after all. It's something they seriously entertain a belief in, a belief about something they think they talk to. DBT, for all their flaws, rightfully recognizes that talking about it, even if many cultures and people do, even if most languages have terms for it, recognizing that it is used in consistent times and ways does not make it real.

I recognize the whole modality thing, believe me. It fits in right between the input space and the output space of a key selector function for a mapping or dictionary of some kind. That's all rather succinct.

ETA: it does in fact discuss time, but in terms of some other rather unfortunate terms "real" and "not real (yet)". This gets really close, but it leans on the unfortunate notion of "imaginary numbers" being "simply made up" rather than "polar rotational components" of physical systems.

Is is no more "imaginary" than the charge held by a capacitor, in my estimation. It's not here yet, but it is actually over there. In this way, alternatives can also be held, not merely in "the unreal imagination" but rather "in the hand as an object relative to a choice operation", as the marble in the bag of marbles waiting to be picked out, but still a real material object.

Your definition does correctly recognize that in common usage, it doesn't require any sort of "freedom from causality" such as DBT references in some of their arguments. It discusses what a modal fallacy is, but it doesn't address why the modal fallacy is fallacious.

It doesn't at any point reference an actual object that is an "alternative" in any structural or real way, nor any operations that qualify as a "choice", nor what makes that choice "free" in terms of the operation of the system other than "not coerced" which is also not suitably defined for the sake of your contributions to the conversation.

I think the term here that I'm looking for is "semantic completeness". You need to suitably semantically complete "free will" in terms of system theory. That's the problem here. DBT's argument has ever been that if you were to try to do that, as he fancies he or perhaps his clergy* has, "you wind up with a contradiction".

To be fair, the semantic completion of the definition of "free will" that DBT references does lead to a contradiction. This is because as YOU point out, he's semantically completing a term that most people are not actually exercising when they speak it; DBT's is a straw man argument. This has been your argument so far: that most people aren't discussing the term that DBT semantically completes to "contradiction", and your IL does get you that far, but it does not get you "all the way". To get all the way you need to semantically complete your definition.

This is why IL is important. Only IL, and not just IL but ZFC or some other axiomatic structure is actually required to provide the basis for that completion.

Your approach gets you to you didn't disprove free will, but it does not get you to you proved free will.

Edit: my argument is the semantic completion, the attack of an opponent position through complete support of my own. Darwin didn't attack special creation or whatever came before by poking holes in that theory, Darwin answered it by simply presenting a theory that made more sense. Be like Darwin.

*Not literal clergy; metaphorical clergy.

 

[Copernicus]

Thanks for your comment, Jarhyn. I have nothing more to contribute on the subject for now. You seem to feel that you have a better way of addressing DBT's concerns, so I feel you should take up those concerns with him. Sorry for giving you that papercut.

 

[Jarhyn]

Thanks for your comment, Jarhyn. I have nothing more to contribute on the subject for now. You seem to feel that you have a better way of addressing DBT's concerns, so I feel you should take up those concerns with him. Sorry for giving you that papercut.

Well, I feel you don't have a suitable way, and I wanted to discuss with you whether you could help make my approach more suitable, seeing as it is quite dense and difficult to unpack or explain.

As TheAntiChris points out I have NEVER encountered another philosopher who approaches it the way I do, by searching systems theory for isomorphism.

I acknowledge that you are quite intelligent, and I acknowledge that I'm an intractable asshole. For what it's worth, I don't have any problem following your formal language treatment, I just think you need to keep going.

I would very much like to see if you think my semantic completion makes sense.

Also, read the ETA.

ETA: it does in fact discuss time, but in terms of some other rather unfortunate terms "real" and "not real (yet)". This gets really close, but it leans on the unfortunate notion of "imaginary numbers" being "simply made up" rather than "polar rotational components" of physical systems.

Is is no more "imaginary" than the charge held by a capacitor, in my estimation. It's not here yet, but it is actually over there. In this way, alternatives can also be held, not merely in "the unreal imagination" but rather "in the hand as an object relative to a choice operation", as the marble in the bag of marbles waiting to be picked out, but still a real material object.

I've tried a few examples over the years.

The clearest concrete example I've used is "selecting from a set of marbles", with examples such as "the marbles are in a narrow tube (LIFO)", or "the marbles are in a one way tube (FIFO)", the tube IS a choice structure; the marbles ARE alternatives to the choice function; only one marble is free such that a force applied will exit it from the space of the tube. This is a description of the tube in ANY physical environment. The tube does not need to be operated for it to be a choice function, nor for an outside observer to accurately describe the degrees of freedom of the system. It is no less "imaginary" than the aforementioned charge in the capacitor. The question is not whether there is a charge, but where and how that charge will find ground.

I have no doubt at all that calculating such things as what a system will do requires "imaginary" numbers, in fact. We certainly know that's on the bill for discussing the charge in a capacitor in terms of voltage over time, and that time certainly enters into it... But "imaginary" is a misnomer here.

Another thing that happened, for what it's worth, was a long discussion about "alternality" and "imagination", and in fact simulation. At one point DBT was arguing that there are no available or real alternalities. I think there was (is?) a misunderstanding there along the lines of "if I went back in time and chose differently it wouldn't be 'myself in that moment' choosing it would be someone else so the exercise doesn't make sense," though to be fair I can't recall if it eas DBT dropping that nugget or FromDerInside.

My answer to that at the time was, to paraphrase, "I don't really need an alternality; I need to know the generalized rules of physics and to faithfully simulate those rules with regards to directing simulated force at a simulated target; I am interested in exploring the properties of the target in general. This simulation provides suitably physical environment for provisioning the artifacts on which my choice function operates, and provides one of the loci from which my 'will to act by internally sourced wills' is set up to accept 'internal'."

As long as the "error bars" of the simulation keep the metaphorical poles of the goalpost suitably wide, thus revealing the will more as a handler of a set of continuities and the goal more as a set of locations and results, it will suitably include "whatever actually is going to happen". In fact whether it inevitably does or doesn't is itself a real and momentary measure of the freedom of the will, thus making freedom both a provisional irrealis concept in terms of what the simulation predicts, as well as an actual concrete observable in terms of what reality says on the matter.

Free Will in this way discussed not just what will happen, but what did happen. "Did I fail of my own free will?"

I believe I have seen others handle it in terms of "did it not happen by my free won't?"