There isn't really a 'freewill problem'.

[Treedbear]

Not all dieties. An uncaused cause who creates man in his own image. There's also the issue of justice in the form of reward and punishment. I blame it on Plato with his philosophy that an elite aristocracy was required in order to interpret the perfect form. It's not what makes sense, but what is useful to society.

I must be being slow. Can you explain why having an axiom that one 'could have done otherwise all other conditions remaining the same' is related to an omnimax God?

Sorry, but it seems obvious to me. First off, in a deterministic cause-and-effect based world there must be a supernatural source for the power of free will and this is provided by an uncaused cause/creator God. Second, and probably more important, is that personal responsibility for one's actions must be based on one's ability to have done otherwise. That is, to have made some other choice under the exact same circumstances. This also provides the premise for the existence of Good and Evil in the world with the concommitent justification for eternal reward or punishment. That, of course, provides a means for religion to control the masses.

 

[Subsymbolic]

Not all dieties. An uncaused cause who creates man in his own image. There's also the issue of justice in the form of reward and punishment. I blame it on Plato with his philosophy that an elite aristocracy was required in order to interpret the perfect form. It's not what makes sense, but what is useful to society.

I must be being slow. Can you explain why having an axiom that one 'could have done otherwise all other conditions remaining the same' is related to an omnimax God?

Sorry, but it seems obvious to me. First off, in a deterministic cause-and-effect based world there must be a supernatural source for the power of free will and this is provided by an uncaused cause/creator God. Second, and probably more important, is that personal responsibility for one's actions must be based on one's ability to have done otherwise. That is, to have made some other choice under the exact same circumstances. This also provides the premise for the existence of Good and Evil in the world with the concommitent justification for eternal reward or punishment. That, of course, provides a means for religion to control the masses.

I assume you mean a supernatural source that is outside of the deterministic system? I see that, but I don't see how you get from some things being outside of determinism to any God; surely pretty well any dualist account of mind would cut the mustard just as well - the claim being that the physical world may be determined but the mental one isn't. In fact you don't even need the extravagance of a full substance dualism, surely even an irreducible property dualism of the sort proposed by Donald Davidson or even Jaegwon Kim would do just as well, with a distinction between the physical world of physically determined things and a platonic world of logically determined things.

Even if you didn't take that route, surely few who had the hots for determinism would also want an undetermined deity messing with it, as such, why can't you just argue for a stochastic world either on purely empirical grounds that both world and brain are undeniably stochastic or on theoretical grounds by invoking something like Bell's inequality?

As for personal responsibility, until the onimax theologies work out if they are worried about intentions or actions, it's hard to know where they want to locate the freedom. Even then, half (other fractions are available) of Christendom believes in predestination with the sinners pre elect or pre damned and, like Faust, dancing a jig they have no control over. In other words, there are deterministic traditions in Christianity, almost all of Islam is occasionalist and at least some of Judaism fatalist. What this means is that the traditions, if not the followers, are fully up to speed with personal responsibility in a determined or even predetermined world. You punish for vindication or even as a deterministic input. Determinism certainly doesn't remove the motivation for punishments and being able to do otherwisedoesn't seem to add anything to me.

More to the point, there are multiple examples of God messing with people's ability to choose 'hardening Pharaoh's heart' and so on before punishing them anyway.

One of Catholicism's arguments against Calvinism was a rejection of the predetermined , predestined world of the elect, in which you behaved yourself not to earn Heaven but to fit the pattern of submitting to God. Islam, of course means submission, not that it's actually necessary because occasionalism: not even a chemical reaction occurs without Allah willing it.

In short there are plenty of other highly effective mechanisms of social control. One that blatantly offers the possibility of doing otherwise is just asking for trouble!

Thanks for explaining, I get your point now and while I have piled up a few issues, it makes sense now. It's funny how in freewill, no matter how much you study it, you always miss a bit!

 

[Treedbear]

Sorry, but it seems obvious to me. First off, in a deterministic cause-and-effect based world there must be a supernatural source for the power of free will and this is provided by an uncaused cause/creator God. Second, and probably more important, is that personal responsibility for one's actions must be based on one's ability to have done otherwise. That is, to have made some other choice under the exact same circumstances. This also provides the premise for the existence of Good and Evil in the world with the concommitent justification for eternal reward or punishment. That, of course, provides a means for religion to control the masses.

I assume you mean a supernatural source that is outside of the deterministic system? I see that, but I don't see how you get from some things being outside of determinism to any God; surely pretty well any dualist account of mind would cut the mustard just as well - the claim being that the physical world may be determined but the mental one isn't. In fact you don't even need the extravagance of a full substance dualism, surely even an irreducible property dualism of the sort proposed by Donald Davidson or even Jaegwon Kim would do just as well, with a distinction between the physical world of physically determined things and a platonic world of logically determined things.

Yes, a supernatural non-deterministic God. True, there are many rationales for a non-deterministic will. But if something within God's creation has free will then that God must also have that ability. No? If that God doesn't it seems it would be inferior to its creation.

Even if you didn't take that route, surely few who had the hots for determinism would also want an undetermined deity messing with it, as such, why can't you just argue for a stochastic world either on purely empirical grounds that both world and brain are undeniably stochastic or on theoretical grounds by invoking something like Bell's inequality?

As for personal responsibility, until the onimax theologies work out if they are worried about intentions or actions, it's hard to know where they want to locate the freedom. Even then, half (other fractions are available) of Christendom believes in predestination with the sinners pre elect or pre damned and, like Faust, dancing a jig they have no control over. In other words, there are deterministic traditions in Christianity, almost all of Islam is occasionalist and at least some of Judaism fatalist. What this means is that the traditions, if not the followers, are fully up to speed with personal responsibility in a determined or even predetermined world. You punish for vindication or even as a deterministic input. Determinism certainly doesn't remove the motivation for punishments and being able to do otherwisedoesn't seem to add anything to me.

I'm a determinist. I fully recognize the need for corrective actions in the name of justice. You can call it punishment. But eternal punishment is just plain vindictiveness and requires an absolute moral basis. As for the rest ... I was raised a Roman Catholic and have the scars to prove it. So I tend to neglect the inequities of the other branches.

More to the point, there are multiple examples of God messing with people's ability to choose 'hardening Pharaoh's heart' and so on before punishing them anyway.

One of Catholicism's arguments against Calvinism was a rejection of the predetermined , predestined world of the elect, in which you behaved yourself not to earn Heaven but to fit the pattern of submitting to God. Islam, of course means submission, not that it's actually necessary because occasionalism: not even a chemical reaction occurs without Allah willing it.

In short there are plenty of other highly effective mechanisms of social control. One that blatantly offers the possibility of doing otherwise is just asking for trouble!

All religions have evolved over time and have to deal with their incongruities. That's why they have apologists.

Thanks for explaining, I get your point now and while I have piled up a few issues, it makes sense now. It's funny how in freewill, no matter how much you study it, you always miss a bit!

Reading that link I gave earlier about the ancient Greeks' view on free will is helping me understand it a bit better.

 

[bilby]

One of the possible foundations hypothesized by free will advocates for their belief system is the idea that quantum uncertainty allows for free will.

If we accept, ad argumentum, the 'many worlds' interpretation, then we can see how (at least with regards to that particular interpretation of quantum mechanics), free will remains illusory.

If I make a 'free' decision to take the left hand fork during a ramble in the woods, then (according to MWI), there is a 'parallel universe' in which I 'freely' chose the other path. There is, in fact, an identical me who DID choose that path.

So where is the choice? According to this thought experiment, both (all possible) choices were made; and there was no other possible outcome than the making of all of the choices available. Where's the free will? In this interpretation, there cannot be a choice - all possible things actually occur, and each new universe contains a consciousness that is absolutely convinced that it is the 'real me', and that it made a 'free choice'. But they cannot all be right - and as there is no rational way to choose between them, or to assign any of them a higher 'realness' value than any other, they must therefore all be wrong. There is no freedom, much less any free will, in such a scenario.

So what happens if there is only one universe? Nothing changes, except that the choices not made do not exist. But they don't exist for any of the different mes in the earlier argument either, so that's not a point of difference from my perspective. In this situation, there is one world, in which quantum choices are truly random - and therefore not able to be subject to will (free or otherwise). All we have is probabilities - you no more choose what course of action to take than you choose the hand you are dealt when playing cards with a randomly shuffled deck.

If we assume a classical physics world, then determinism is the obvious outcome; But there appears to be NOTHING in quantum mechanics that changes that fact - it might introduce unpredictability, but it in no way introduces a way for a consciousness to put a thumb on the scales, and in some way influence which of the possible outcomes is chosen (or even to influence their relative probabilities).

 

[ryan]

One of the possible foundations hypothesized by free will advocates for their belief system is the idea that quantum uncertainty allows for free will.

If we accept, ad argumentum, the 'many worlds' interpretation, then we can see how (at least with regards to that particular interpretation of quantum mechanics), free will remains illusory.

If I make a 'free' decision to take the left hand fork during a ramble in the woods, then (according to MWI), there is a 'parallel universe' in which I 'freely' chose the other path. There is, in fact, an identical me who DID choose that path.

So where is the choice? According to this thought experiment, both (all possible) choices were made; and there was no other possible outcome than the making of all of the choices available. Where's the free will? In this interpretation, there cannot be a choice - all possible things actually occur, and each new universe contains a consciousness that is absolutely convinced that it is the 'real me', and that it made a 'free choice'. But they cannot all be right - and as there is no rational way to choose between them, or to assign any of them a higher 'realness' value than any other, they must therefore all be wrong. There is no freedom, much less any free will, in such a scenario.

In this case, "you" at a given moment after the split chose that outcome. The person that is not you anymore chose his outcome.

So what happens if there is only one universe? Nothing changes, except that the choices not made do not exist. But they don't exist for any of the different mes in the earlier argument either, so that's not a point of difference from my perspective. In this situation, there is one world, in which quantum choices are truly random - and therefore not able to be subject to will (free or otherwise). All we have is probabilities - you no more choose what course of action to take than you choose the hand you are dealt when playing cards with a randomly shuffled deck.

We only know so far that it is objectively random; we don't know that there is not a "subjective force" piloting QM.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I'm restarting this as a separate thread as it's clearly not a good fit for the Freewill Poll.


I think that the overwhelming majority of the freewill problem comes from remaining committed to a series of misleading questions based upon some very archaic assumptions, most of which don't remotely stand up to analysis.

The easiest one to dispose of is the idea that we 'could have done otherwise all other conditions remaining the same'. There are literally no real world situations in which one could 'do otherwise all other conditions remaining the same'. This has nothing to do with any issues about freewill and everything to do with the impossibility of all other conditions remaining the same.

The fact is that any given state of the universe, or even the relevant light cone, can only occur once. More to the point a given agent can only occupy the same place at the same time once, not least because they would get in their own way. I'll say it again, it's impossible for all other conditions to ever be the same. We only ever get one shot at any given state of the universe.
As such this idea is always impossible for any given account of freewill. It can't even really be imagined, and as is so often the case with misleading thought experiments, one can only imagine imagining it. It's not only physically and practically impossible, it is simply logically impossible for the same thing to be in the same place at the same time twice.


The modified claim 'could have done otherwise almost all conditions remaining the same' really doesn't have the same force for obvious reasons. indeed, with the benefit of chaos theory and the realisation that there is always a sensitive dependence on initial conditions, the old adage that you cannot stand in the same river twice takes on additional force.

Even if it were possible, which it most certainly isn't, there's something inherently odd about wanting to do be able to do otherwise all other conditions remaining the same. Surely whatever form the will takes, you'd want it to be rational and that means that given identical circumstances you'd reach the same conclusion through whatever rational process you followed. However, this minor quibble pales into literal insignificance because you couldn't ever be in that situation.

Any objections?

Yes, I object. I think your account does not reflect the sense of free will most people have.

And I'll start a different thread to discuss the kind of free will most people think they have.
EB

 

[Emily Lake]

I'm restarting this as a separate thread as it's clearly not a good fit for the Freewill Poll.


I think that the overwhelming majority of the freewill problem comes from remaining committed to a series of misleading questions based upon some very archaic assumptions, most of which don't remotely stand up to analysis.

The easiest one to dispose of is the idea that we 'could have done otherwise all other conditions remaining the same'. There are literally no real world situations in which one could 'do otherwise all other conditions remaining the same'. This has nothing to do with any issues about freewill and everything to do with the impossibility of all other conditions remaining the same.

The fact is that any given state of the universe, or even the relevant light cone, can only occur once. More to the point a given agent can only occupy the same place at the same time once, not least because they would get in their own way. I'll say it again, it's impossible for all other conditions to ever be the same. We only ever get one shot at any given state of the universe.
As such this idea is always impossible for any given account of freewill. It can't even really be imagined, and as is so often the case with misleading thought experiments, one can only imagine imagining it. It's not only physically and practically impossible, it is simply logically impossible for the same thing to be in the same place at the same time twice.


The modified claim 'could have done otherwise almost all conditions remaining the same' really doesn't have the same force for obvious reasons. indeed, with the benefit of chaos theory and the realisation that there is always a sensitive dependence on initial conditions, the old adage that you cannot stand in the same river twice takes on additional force.

Even if it were possible, which it most certainly isn't, there's something inherently odd about wanting to do be able to do otherwise all other conditions remaining the same. Surely whatever form the will takes, you'd want it to be rational and that means that given identical circumstances you'd reach the same conclusion through whatever rational process you followed. However, this minor quibble pales into literal insignificance because you couldn't ever be in that situation.

Any objections?

A thought on the eternal free-will vs. determinism argument: Both of these are probably wrong.

The key word there is 'probably'.

Determinism is wrong. As you said, you cannot have the exact same conditions again. But it's even more than that. No matter how much you know, it is not possible to know everything. Some things are not knowable. It is impossible to know all of the initial conditions. And at least some portion of those initial conditions are random. Maybe not a very big portion, but it's still there.

Free Will is wrong. Clearly we can't just decide to disobey gravity.

But we DO have feedback loops - we learn from our past actions, and we learn vicariously form the actions of others. We extrapolate and project. All of those imply a degree of agency that is inherent in the concept of thinking. To cast the entirety of human knowledge and functionality as an elaborate joke played on us by the entire universe is about as un-Occam-ish as you can get.

I propose that it's neither free will nor determinism. It's probability. Human actions and choice are bounded complex systems. There is a degree of randomness involved - any given action or thought process has a distribution of possible outcomes, bounded by the laws of physics. So depending on the initial circumstances, a person's actions may be highly predictable with extremely low likelihood of other outcomes, or highly unpredictable with many possible outcomes of nearly uniform likelihoods.

 

[Emily Lake]

We learn. We think. We speculate. We extrapolate. We imagine. We weigh options. We consider the possibilities. We create thought experiments.

All of these are support for the assumption that the world is NOT deterministic. Unless you believe that consciousness is an elaborate hoax. But there you go thinking and believing and considering options again... so where does that leave us?

It's all a big messy set of complex probabilistic clusters adding a dash of random into a response based on the nearest-neighbor of past experiences, and making a guess about what's most likely to produce an outcome that benefits us.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Free Will is wrong. Clearly we can't just decide to disobey gravity.

I'd like very much to know who are the idiots who ever argued that free will would allow you to "disobey gravity".

Most people think they have free will but I'm quite sure no one sane believes they could disobey gravity because of it. So the fact that we cannot decide to disobey gravity is irrelevant to whether our notion of free will is wrong or not.

You must be confusing free will with omnipotence.
EB

 

[bilby]

One of the possible foundations hypothesized by free will advocates for their belief system is the idea that quantum uncertainty allows for free will.

If we accept, ad argumentum, the 'many worlds' interpretation, then we can see how (at least with regards to that particular interpretation of quantum mechanics), free will remains illusory.

If I make a 'free' decision to take the left hand fork during a ramble in the woods, then (according to MWI), there is a 'parallel universe' in which I 'freely' chose the other path. There is, in fact, an identical me who DID choose that path.

So where is the choice? According to this thought experiment, both (all possible) choices were made; and there was no other possible outcome than the making of all of the choices available. Where's the free will? In this interpretation, there cannot be a choice - all possible things actually occur, and each new universe contains a consciousness that is absolutely convinced that it is the 'real me', and that it made a 'free choice'. But they cannot all be right - and as there is no rational way to choose between them, or to assign any of them a higher 'realness' value than any other, they must therefore all be wrong. There is no freedom, much less any free will, in such a scenario.

In this case, "you" at a given moment after the split chose that outcome. The person that is not you anymore chose his outcome.

Sure; But they are indistinguishable - both have the same claim to being "me". So where's the will? No matter what the person does, thinks, wishes wills or desires before the split, the outcome is always the same. They have not affected reality (not even the part of it that they call "me") in any way.

So what happens if there is only one universe? Nothing changes, except that the choices not made do not exist. But they don't exist for any of the different mes in the earlier argument either, so that's not a point of difference from my perspective. In this situation, there is one world, in which quantum choices are truly random - and therefore not able to be subject to will (free or otherwise). All we have is probabilities - you no more choose what course of action to take than you choose the hand you are dealt when playing cards with a randomly shuffled deck.

We only know so far that it is objectively random; we don't know that there is not a "subjective force" piloting QM.

We don't KNOW that there's not a teapot orbiting the sun between Jupiter and Mars either. But we are best served by assuming that there is not.

 

[ryan]

Sure; But they are indistinguishable - both have the same claim to being "me". So where's the will? No matter what the person does, thinks, wishes wills or desires before the split, the outcome is always the same. They have not affected reality (not even the part of it that they call "me") in any way.

They are very much distinguishable and no longer one person. They are the you that willed after the split but now 2 physically different people.

So what happens if there is only one universe? Nothing changes, except that the choices not made do not exist. But they don't exist for any of the different mes in the earlier argument either, so that's not a point of difference from my perspective. In this situation, there is one world, in which quantum choices are truly random - and therefore not able to be subject to will (free or otherwise). All we have is probabilities - you no more choose what course of action to take than you choose the hand you are dealt when playing cards with a randomly shuffled deck.

We only know so far that it is objectively random; we don't know that there is not a "subjective force" piloting QM.

We don't KNOW that there's not a teapot orbiting the sun between Jupiter and Mars either. But we are best served by assuming that there is not.

Nobody is claiming this is scientific (although Hameroff and Penrose do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztGNznlowic ). If you are going to stay in the scientific realism domain, then you can't even say it is false. I am responding to the seemingly negatively certain OP and saying that there may be ways we can still have free will at least in general philosophically/logically.

 

[Treedbear]

Sure; But they are indistinguishable - both have the same claim to being "me". So where's the will? No matter what the person does, thinks, wishes wills or desires before the split, the outcome is always the same. They have not affected reality (not even the part of it that they call "me") in any way. ...

They are very much distinguishable and no longer one person. They are the you that willed after the split but now 2 physically different people. ...

It might be argued that a person is what a person thinks and does. That would mean that if I could have acted differently and actually did then I would not be the same person I am today. Whether I exist in one universe or in a multitude of universes. They are not the same me because there is a lack of continuity between them.

 

[Emily Lake]

Free Will is wrong. Clearly we can't just decide to disobey gravity.

I'd like very much to know who are the idiots who ever argued that free will would allow you to "disobey gravity".

Most people think they have free will but I'm quite sure no one sane believes they could disobey gravity because of it. So the fact that we cannot decide to disobey gravity is irrelevant to whether our notion of free will is wrong or not.

You must be confusing free will with omnipotence.
EB

So far as I can tell... those idiots are the people who argue for the side of determinism. I've always thought it was a stupid interpretation of what free will means, but I've lost track of the number of times that (or something substantially similar) has been tossed out as an argument for why we don't have free will.

 

[ryan]

Sure; But they are indistinguishable - both have the same claim to being "me". So where's the will? No matter what the person does, thinks, wishes wills or desires before the split, the outcome is always the same. They have not affected reality (not even the part of it that they call "me") in any way. ...

They are very much distinguishable and no longer one person. They are the you that willed after the split but now 2 physically different people. ...

It might be argued that a person is what a person thinks and does. That would mean that if I could have acted differently and actually did then I would not be the same person I am today.

Yes, for a moment in time and onwards you are 2 different people

Whether I exist in one universe or in a multitude of universes. They are not the same me because there is a lack of continuity between them.

I agree. What's the problem?

 

[bilby]

It might be argued that a person is what a person thinks and does. That would mean that if I could have acted differently and actually did then I would not be the same person I am today.

Yes, for a moment in time and onwards you are 2 different people

Whether I exist in one universe or in a multitude of universes. They are not the same me because there is a lack of continuity between them.

I agree. What's the problem?

There's no problem; but there's also no choice, and so nothing upon which will (free or otherwise) might act.

If the restaurant always serves your cake with both cream and ice-cream, then the customer never gets to choose which is served. You always get both. No choice, no freedom, no 'will'.

 

[Subsymbolic]

They are very much distinguishable and no longer one person. They are the you that willed after the split but now 2 physically different people.

So what happens if there is only one universe? Nothing changes, except that the choices not made do not exist. But they don't exist for any of the different mes in the earlier argument either, so that's not a point of difference from my perspective. In this situation, there is one world, in which quantum choices are truly random - and therefore not able to be subject to will (free or otherwise). All we have is probabilities - you no more choose what course of action to take than you choose the hand you are dealt when playing cards with a randomly shuffled deck.

We only know so far that it is objectively random; we don't know that there is not a "subjective force" piloting QM.

We don't KNOW that there's not a teapot orbiting the sun between Jupiter and Mars either. But we are best served by assuming that there is not.

Nobody is claiming this is scientific (although Hameroff and Penrose do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztGNznlowic ). If you are going to stay in the scientific realism domain, then you can't even say it is false. I am responding to the seemingly negatively certain OP and saying that there may be ways we can still have free will at least in general philosophically/logically.

Hang on there! I'm not saying that we don't have free will. I'm saying that there isn't a freewill problem. More specifically, I'm asserting that perhaps even thinking about freewill as freewill isn't terribly helpful.

Indeed, many of the shibboleths of freewill just seem to be accepted uncritically and are rather difficult to think around.

We are not and never could be predictable by any Laplacian demon: the world is stochastic, our brain is stochastic and there exist clear mathematical proofs of irreducible emergent complexity. Not least the Banach Tarski paradox and, of course, the good old sensitive dependence on initial conditions of Chaos theory. You just need one single example of a genuine indeterminacy, as provided by Bell's inequality, and Laplace's demon is blind. We can do slightly better than that. Obviously, the demon is just a metaphor for the world itself, but the world is not and never has been purely deterministic.

'Could have done otherwise all other conditions remaining the same', is still under debate here, but I'm still not quite sure why anyone who isn't after a deity (although that was a good point) would take the idea terribly seriously.

'freedom from causal constraint', Always reminds me of Pinball Wizard from Tommy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK33CY68s1w

Freedom from causation is freedom from perception. That's a high cost for freewill and would leave you unable to respond to anything.

Finally, the point at which we locate freewill appears oddly difficult to pin down. Descartes' captain is out and that leaves the field rather open...

 

[ryan]

Yes, for a moment in time and onwards you are 2 different people



I agree. What's the problem?

There's no problem; but there's also no choice, and so nothing upon which will (free or otherwise) might act.

If the restaurant always serves your cake with both cream and ice-cream, then the customer never gets to choose which is served. You always get both. No choice, no freedom, no 'will'.

But now you are talking about 100% control over the universe. I am talking about choosing between A, B and C.

 

[ryan]

They are very much distinguishable and no longer one person. They are the you that willed after the split but now 2 physically different people.

We only know so far that it is objectively random; we don't know that there is not a "subjective force" piloting QM.

We don't KNOW that there's not a teapot orbiting the sun between Jupiter and Mars either. But we are best served by assuming that there is not.

Nobody is claiming this is scientific (although Hameroff and Penrose do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztGNznlowic ). If you are going to stay in the scientific realism domain, then you can't even say it is false. I am responding to the seemingly negatively certain OP and saying that there may be ways we can still have free will at least in general philosophically/logically.

Hang on there! I'm not saying that we don't have free will. I'm saying that there isn't a freewill problem. More specifically, I'm asserting that perhaps even thinking about freewill as freewill isn't terribly helpful.

Indeed, many of the shibboleths of freewill just seem to be accepted uncritically and are rather difficult to think around.

We are not and never could be predictable by any Laplacian demon: the world is stochastic, our brain is stochastic and there exist clear mathematical proofs of irreducible emergent complexity. Not least the Banach Tarski paradox and, of course, the good old sensitive dependence on initial conditions of Chaos theory. You just need one single example of a genuine indeterminacy, as provided by Bell's inequality, and Laplace's demon is blind. We can do slightly better than that. Obviously, the demon is just a metaphor for the world itself, but the world is not and never has been purely deterministic.

'Could have done otherwise all other conditions remaining the same', is still under debate here, but I'm still not quite sure why anyone who isn't after a deity (although that was a good point) would take the idea terribly seriously.

'freedom from causal constraint', Always reminds me of Pinball Wizard from Tommy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK33CY68s1w

Freedom from causation is freedom from perception. That's a high cost for freewill and would leave you unable to respond to anything.

Finally, the point at which we locate freewill appears oddly difficult to pin down. Descartes' captain is out and that leaves the field rather open...

maintaining an obsession with Laplacian notions of predictability and so on while ignoring simple biological facts like the reality and inherent necessity of stochastic neural function.

We don't

Sorry, I thought that you were claiming that free will is impossible.

 

[Subsymbolic]

Sorry, I thought that you were claiming that free will is impossible.

On the contrary. I think most of the freewill debate is nonsensical, but I have a positively Panglossian view of how much self control is smeared in and around us.

 

[bilby]

Yes, for a moment in time and onwards you are 2 different people



I agree. What's the problem?

There's no problem; but there's also no choice, and so nothing upon which will (free or otherwise) might act.

If the restaurant always serves your cake with both cream and ice-cream, then the customer never gets to choose which is served. You always get both. No choice, no freedom, no 'will'.

But now you are talking about 100% control over the universe. I am talking about choosing between A, B and C.

No, I am talking about the universe having 100% control over you.