PyramidHead
Contributor
People have wills. They will to do this or that. To say that the will is "free" to do this or that - contra-causal freedom - requires, I propose, three things, at least.
1. A person must have an awareness of the choices available.
2. A person must have some sense of the value inherent in the choices that exist.
3. A person must be able to rationally choose this or that.
With regard to (1), contra-causal freedom says that the most basic choice that is required is A and ~A.
With regard to (2), the person must have a sense of the costs and benefits of choosing A and ~A.
With regard to (3), the person is not forced or compelled to choose A or ~A based on the relative values of A or ~A but rationally considers the choices with their values, and his choice of A or ~A is rational.
Does this work?
If all of the factors in 1, 2, and 3 are reducible to physical properties of the brain, then any choice a person makes is determined by the laws and probabilities that govern matter in the universe. A person may believe they chose ~A, but in reality, the chemical reactions in her brain produced the only outcome they were able to produce, given their initial configuration and the rules of chemistry. A sufficiently advanced alien race, who had mastered the understanding of human brain chemistry, would be able to accurately predict every decision she makes before she makes it. To this race of beings, it would be like looking at the film reel of an entire movie. The characters on the screen appear to be making choices, but if you skip to the end of the film reel, the ending is always the same. In the same way, the chemical makeup of human beings is restricted by nature's film reel, such that even when we appear to make decisions, we are actually merely acting out whatever our brain's chemistry is bound to do according to natural laws. Substitute chemistry with particle physics if you like; it introduces some randomness, but randomness is not free will any more than determinism is free will. Libertarian free will is akin to a character in a movie spontaneously deciding to do something other than what is already laid out in the film reel, hence it is called contra-causal. There is no mechanism we know of that could account for this miraculous occurrence even in principle.
Compatibilism is the position that all of the above is true as far as causes and effects go, but when ordinary people use the word 'free' they mean something less stringent than what libertarians say. If I choose to skip work and watch TV all day, I can get in trouble with my boss because, presumably, I freely decided to be lazy instead of coming to work. Notice that my boss would not accuse me of contravening the natural laws of the universe to interfere with my brain's physical makeup. He uses English like regular people do. He would say I freely chose to stay home from work unless I presented evidence that, for example, my wife was very sick and needed bedside care all day. In that case, I still chose to stay home, but I was partially constrained by my obligation to my wife. Even more obligation could be imagined if someone had me at gunpoint and told me I could not attend work that day. In each of those scenarios, my will is less and less free, but nothing about the universe or its natural laws has changed from case to case. Therefore, people must be talking about something other than the universe or its natural laws when they say somebody acted of their own free will. I like compatibilism because it takes the wind out of determinism's sails. It concedes that our every action may be the inevitable result of what came before it, which is not under our conscious control, but rightly points out that nobody who talks about free will in everyday life uses the term that way, so determinism has nothing to do with whether or not we actually have free will.