We've all got free will then. I consciously decided to have chicken for my dinner.

This is the position I've often advocated that the hard determinist should take. I think that all of our intuitive concepts that express some form of "freedom" or "choice" go out the window if we assume hard determinism.

Once you accept hard determinism, it becomes difficult to clarify what a "choice" is without creating great difficulties for yourself. Decision-making is just complex rock-falling. All it means is that the words we use to describe things don't actually reflect reality anymore. We can use them in some sort of "this expresses the experience of what I've done" sense, but the language is very inaccurate as far as trying to describe what actually happeened.

That's what I said in the first place. It is the determinists who are meaningless as is this thread unless you DEFINE YOUR TERMS PROPERLY.

An eventuality whose nature, though predetermined, is currently unknown, may aptly be described as 'a possibility'.

The same way that detectives investigating a crime can talk of 'possibilities' in how this or that part of the crime played out, even though in that case there's very definitely only one way it played out and no 'possibility' obtains.

A free-rotating axle is simply a type of axle. It has no more bearing on determinism than the expression 'free lunch'.

The hard determinist is making a claim about things being determined, so any other uses of the word "free" ought not be confused with the very specific type of freedom being rejected by the hard determinist.

So for example, saying that America has free speech usually means that it has an institutional rule which says that the institution can not punish someone for saying something. That this institutional rule exists is irrelevant of whether speech is predetermined. So we should be careful not to confuse the possible different meanings of "free speech" and should only reject the one that is actually rejected by accepting hard determinism. Likewise free motion can refer to a specific type of physical situation such as a lack of friction forces and is again true or false regardless of whether this physical situation is determined or not.

So I feel like the OP is a bit vacuous. It is essentially saying "on hard determinism, is any use of the word free not accurate" to which it has the answer "when denoting the type of freedom ensconced in hard determinism then obviously so, but when denoting some other concept - and there are many other concepts denoted by "free" - then obviously not necessarily".

It's not like you libertarian guys don't have the same issue... it's just that, for you, nothing is free except the will of humans. If you disagree, justify why you only use "free" to mean "free from deterministic cause and effect" when it comes to human decision-making.

We need not declare that the "only" freedom comes from humans. (Does anybody assert that? I can't think of any, but it doesn't mean it's not out there.) We only assert that humans have free will because the entirety of our experiences indicate that we have it. It's not an empirical claim.

There would be no logical difficulties regarding freedom if ants and trees (or even rocks) had it.

Possibility wasn't even the right word. I'm too tired to speak clearly. But it has nothing to do with determinism. It has to do with the amount of force required to cause the wheel to rotate around the axis, and that force being minimal

I wondered if you would be adding me to your ignore list. His questions are on topic tho?

I dunno , this implies that the conscious introspection is somehow separate from all the other processes, but its not. The conscious introspection is also part of the causes and processes that lead to the "decision". When you make a decision "I am going to go over there", although what has gone before( thoughts, etc) seems to have affected the process, the actual decision "I will go over there" is also just a thought, and popped up automatically, same as the other thoughts. And those thoughts were determined by the previous states of the brain, and the rest of the environment, no?



Isnt your consciousness part of the autonomous nervous system? Is your consciousness actually doing any of the things in the causal chain? Is it choosing the next thought, for example? Is it making the decision? Is it choosing between 2 thoughts? Or is that choice not just another thought that pops up "in consciousness", saying "yes, I will go with that one"?

I don't find these responses, which are all of roughly the same form, at all relevant. You are just restating the argument for hard determinism. The question in the thread title is "What, if anything, is free?". Why does "free" mean something completely an utterly alien to any other use of the word when talking about "free will"? Seems like either you can say that "free will" is a special case of freedom that cannot be reasonably defined in terms compatible with determinism and then justify that position (perhaps on historical grounds?) or you bite the bullet, like neeel has, and argue that nothing at all is free.

I mean, contra-causal free will is incoherent magical nonsense as I'm sure we (atheists) all agree. So why are hard determinists so insistent that contra-causal free will is the only kind that 'counts'? Defining free will as something like 'the ability to consciously deliberate and choose an action without coercion' is the only definition that makes sense, is the definition used in courts of law, has a history stretching back through Hume and the Stoics, and is the majority view of contemporary philosophers, and yet prominent atheists like Harris and Coyne declare it to be mere semantic trickery.

With respect, to respond to this would take the thread down a well-trodden atheist vs theist path, and that isn't what interests me today, so I'll maybe return to this when the thread is winding down.

I think you are mainly butting up against a linguistic problem. Namely we have this word "free" and it means different things in different contexts. Colloquially this isn't a problem (particularly if one typically operates as if their is free will), but when trying to talk about rigorous philosophical concepts, we can't just translate our use of "free" in the case of determinism to any other utterance of the word.

For example, let me quote a definition from wiki: Ditto something like a political freedom. It has a meaning separate from meaning something to do with the free will/determinism debate. Given this linguistic confusion, the only problem that I really see it posing is having to be a bit careful what we are talking about when using "Free" in some other context like political freedom.

I knew it would end up like this if zumby didn't define his terms. Here you are courtesy of wikipedia.

"Free will is the ability of agents to make choices unconstrained by certain factors. Factors of historical concern have included metaphysical constraints (for example, logical, nomological, or theological determinism), physical constraints (for example, chains or imprisonment), social constraints (for example, threat of punishment or censure, or structural constraints), and mental constraints (for example, compulsions or phobias, neurological disorders, or genetic predispositions)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will

It is separate - it happens in different parts of the brain (e.g. mainly frontal lobes) compared with the autonomic nervous system (e.g. mainly brain stem). It also has certain phenomenological differences. Doesn't mean it's magic. Just means we can make meaningful distinctions between conscious brain states and unconscious brain states.

Yes, exactly.

No. The autonomic nervous system (I made a typo upthread) are the processes responsible for things like regulating stomach acid levels, blood pressure etc etc.

According to our best models, yes. For examples, experiments on priming show that flashing up a word too fast to register in consciousness has one result on a decision-making task and the opposite result if it flashes up slow enough to register in consciousness. The implication is that consciousness plays a causal role in decision-making.

No, you can't choose your next thought before you think it. Harris uses that example and it's nuts. No-one, literally no-one, not even Plantinga, claims that sort of power for free will. And when Alvin Bloody Plantinga is able to review your book on free will and say "lol, no Sam, your definition of free will is too free" you are basically ****ing things up for the rest of us.

I don't know how you can have read my previous post and still come up with this reply.

I understand you that you incompatibilists mean "free from the any causality" when you talk about "free" will. What I'm asking is why you (the hard determinists) would use such a metaphysically demanding definition. I KNOW why the contra-causal free will guys do it - they need to defy physics to get out of the logical problem of evil - but for atheists to insist that it is the only acceptable definition of free will seems bizarre, especially as you validate the theists definition only to deny its existence.

I like the example Dennett often uses:

"Real free will", says the hard determinist, "doesn't exist. And the free will that exists is not real free will"....

Perhaps we are still speaking past each other. I am not intending to comment on how - or why - a hard determinist defines their terms, merely to comment that the two examples you gave (free speech and free rotating axle) are both, in typical usage, referring to concepts that are independent (lol) of the determinism question. So I thought your examples were poor.

I like the dennet quote:up:

Has anyone heard an argument for free will that is something other than "it feels like we have it"

OK. I would have thought I've made it abundantly clear that I'm asking WHY those things are considered to be independent of the determinism question, not IF they are independent of the determinism question, but I'm not spending all night explaining this over and over again.

Have you ever heard an argument for hunger that is something other than "it feels like we have it"? How would you prove that hunger exists? I suspect that my definition of free will is actually more falsifiable than hunger e.g. if Libet-style experiments started testing meaningful decision-making instead of inconsequential whims, and got up from 60-70% predictive accuracy to ~100% then I would accept that conscious will is an epiphenomenon and therefore free will is an illusion.

Okay sure, well I can elaborate on why I think these other concepts that we sometimes put the word "free" on are independent of the hard determinism question.

Firstly, in the example of a political freedom like "free speech" this is a question of whether a particular institution has a certain property, such as a prohibition against prosecuting speech in a canonical document of a society. That the US "has free speech" in this sense is just a measurable property of the universe, and that property can be true in universe where hard determinism is either true or false. Note that on hard determinism what people can actually say may indeed by determined, but that doesn't preclude the political reality that "free speech"; they simply refer to different things.

Secondly, I quoted a random definition I knew to have the word "free" in it.
An object may be determined in whatever sense the hard determinist means, but that doesn't preclude the ability to single out an identifiable body of interest which satisfies this other definition of a free body. In mathematics there are very concrete concepts of "Free groups", etc. All these different concepts have the word "free" in it, but as you can see their freedom doesn't depend on determinism. Unless I am missing something about what you think hard determinism is...

So, what is it that has the free will to choose?

As far as I can see there is nothing there. Consciousness is just another process, that is deeply intertwined and connected with all the other processes. It has no power to choose. Yes, it can be part of the decision making process, but that doesnt make will any free-er that I can see.

In the end, the decision still pops up out of nowhere.

Specifically? The frontal and parietal cortices.

Agreed. I already said it's not magic?

The "free" aspect obtains when we are not coerced by an external agent e.g. we don't literally have someone pointing a gun to our heads.

Nowhere? Sounds suspiciously unscientific...

I'm sorry, but we're just going circles. Let me try a different approach with you. Could we have free will if determinism is false, perhaps via quantum indeterminacy?

So is that the specific area that has free will?

What about scientific research which says that decisions have been made up to 6 seconds before the subject has become conscious of othem



hmm ok, seems a bit of a strange definition of free will, but ok



Yes, unscientifically speaking, even after all the thought and conscious processes that go into making a decision, the decision , the confirming thought, still just appears from nowhere.

We must be, I am quite lost as to what the objection to my posts are. I tried going back and reading our subsequent conversation again and it didn't help. For instance, I have no idea why you just asked the question that you did. I am sure Aaron can attest to the fact that this is most likely some personal failing on my part here

Anyways, to answer your question at minimum I would need to have a precise description of the terms (given how they are used subtlety differently at times). But I am not really fishing for you to provide them as my goal wasn't to try and adjudicate the free will vs determinism debate, merely to offer a rather ancillary and quietist comment on your examples that seemed relatively obvious. I am convinced I must be missing something, however.

I've found a nice parable for my thread topic:

[source]

Perhaps that will help.