Two people will get why I am posting this. The others will, nonetheless, enjoy it.

Please paraphrase the general points of the article for us.

You are doing it wrong by doing it at all. Just say no. One free will debate is all it takes to lead to something worse.

Maybe I should post this in "Confessions of SMP" but I confess I didn't know about the explosive qualities of the duck penis.

It does sort of give a more "Hey, little girl. Want some candy?" creepiness to earlier conversations if reread with the knowledge and presumption that I did know.

This should help:

Also, I did not know.

It would be even creepier if purple Popsicles* worked the same way.

* Is there a point where 5 year old inside jokes become untenably rude in a public forum? **

** Did we surpass this point 4 years ago?

This guy even has take on the BruceZ situation:

Never. Still not getting the whole purple to green part.

I should not stretch when not sober.

So why am I free to call those workings free and not call what that freedom entails responsibility.

I also don't merely wish to parrot zumby's contribution to this discussion on here because he's done it better than I and there's little left to add but I can hold myself responsible for my actions to the same extent that I hold a thermostat responsible for controlling the temperature of my boiler.

It may be that my decision to take a drink of tea while pondering this sentence was entirely caused by the laws of nature and some Laplacean demon could have predicted my taking it but once I had decided to I wasn't going to not outside of being coerced into not doing it. Thus in taking the drink had I spat it over my keyboard, I would have been at least the proximate cause of the tea drenched laptop.

The Roskies paper on free will and cognitive science gives some indication of the areas available for further consideration.

If I actually start posting more in SMP there will be plenty of opportunities.

Thanks, this is interesting. I mean, this makes sense to a certain extent, i'm not saying i'm agreeing with it, nor do I disagree with it. I'm kind agnostic about the subject (so far) and maybe that (and a constant shifting in perception of the actual meaning) is why in that last long post I seem divided.

The OP was more of a thought experiment and my initial title
was "free will, is this a fallacy?" Just making sure I even understood the concept correctly.

I don't want to be part of club lol.. But yes, intuitively I would agree with that notion. I mean, it seems like these clubs have pretty much different definitions because they seem to look at it on a different level. I'm simply stating that free will must exist within the human experience, because we can prove that by asking people and by judging our own experience. Whether this is actually free will from a universal POV or whether his is illusionary isn't that important, even when contemplating the only thing that's really at stake, morality... In a society morality is still dictated by the will of the masses, retaliation, empathy and so forth.

The noob that I am, I admittedly felt a rather strong emotional resistance to the notion of there not being free will, but slowly came to the realization that even if it were ever to be proven to not exist, it really shouldn't have any impact on how I see the world. It shouldn't change anything from yesterday before I read major buzzkill harris' essay.

I wasn't particularly enlightened by zumby's post, i'm just pointing out that that's closest to how I feel about it intuitively (admittedly clumsy) so in that sense it was nice to read, but so was reading dennett's rebutal to sam harris and some other stuff that made the counter arguments point more clear.

I was trying to point out that people have a rather large effect on their own internal processes, that there is an observing self that is capable of secreting thoughts from reality and bend them at will, work with them etc. This can be nondualistic, when that's simply how the brain works, we still understand very little about this part of our internal processes, other than that we are capable of utilizing it and initiate brain plasticity with it...

And thats how I feel intuitively about free will as well; if that's how the brain works, if it's a "function of the machine", it simply exists within the realm of perception of that machine, and therefor people could be attributed free will. Does that mean that all of that has prior causes? Of course, that's inevitable in a logical universe without a creator.

If this is the compatibilist view, then i'm happy that my intuition is in line with most philosophers, but i'll never be able to explain it as well as they are without years of experience and in my non native language and in the end, i'm not choosing sides.

How do you sleep at night? (serious question)

Anyway, there seems to be a fundamental difference (correct me if i'm wrong) between how you're looking at the idea of free will itself... and how someone like dennett seems to look at it....

I once read something by the philosopher Thomas Nagel arguing that you could know in precise chemical detail what is going on in the brain when a human eats chocolate, but that information does not by itself tell you what chocolate tastes like. What is the answer to that?

(Is anyone here arguing that determinism is too reductionist a world-view?)

True, even if you could look at it in precise chemical detail, you'd still need to be able to interpret it.. You can measure electric activity, map out connections, and you can see certain neurotransmitters at work, but for the most part the brain is still poorly understood because often they have no idea what they're looking at. fMRI is an astonishing piece of technology though and it will def help understanding in the long run.

If that's the chocolate experiment where they measured a rise in serotonin and then concluded that since serotonin lacks in depressed patients, chocolate might help with depression; all those claims have been refuted including the order of the causal connection between serotonin and depression (chicken/egg). I think that overall neuroscientists tend to jump to conclusions too quickly just because they're able too measure something, and then the media add a bunch of fuel to the fire with overly conclusive interpretations.

One of the most prolific and solid breaktroughs was the discovery of brain plasticity, where they were able to measure that the brain is always changing and quite different in people who engaged in certain activities over longer periods of time. This also presents the problem with interpreting, brains develop in different ways over time.

nevermind, misinterpreted masque de Z's posts. I suppose you're talking on the level of QM? Is that even relevant for things that are "real"? My very limited idea of it was always that it's only relevant on a submolecular level and processes in the brain (seem to) happen on a molecular level.

This seems very similar to the Mary's Room thought experiment. With an interesting perspective here

Probably from about the same angle as the lesswrong guy, there is Dennett's Quining Qualia

Scientific American Article

The article is informative with many references to other things to read. The suggested extra reading alone is worth the effort to peruse the article.

Funny, when I was 8 I wondered if someone else would see a color the same way as I did, they might've still learned what a color entailed in all its facets, so they'd be able to distinguish red from blue etc, but they might have a completely different experience than me. When I asked someone how he experienced red, I realized he wasn't able to answer anything more than "I just see red".

I think that's different from this experiment though, don't have time to get into it now..

Does anyone know where to find "There's Something About Mary"? I can only find the movie...

Thanks (and thanks for the monty python sketches!)

I have by no means read everything Dennett has ever written or heard everything he's ever said about compatibilism, but I'm not aware of him promising more than the (more or less) legal version of responsibility. I don't think he promises that it can provide anything you want if what you want is the kind of moral responsibility that requires contra-causal free will, since he doesn't think that exists.

According to the wiki page on moral responsibility, he once wondered "why anyone would care about whether someone had the property of responsibility and speculates that the idea of moral responsibility may be `a purely metaphysical hankering'." (Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting.)

So to be a compatibilist certainly should mean giving up some things that you may want in an understanding of moral responsibility or free will.

I think the parenthetical about what 'good' means under determinism gets to something I'm trying to get at. Which is that ultimately compatibilism isn't just about deciding on the definition of one term in isolation. It's really an attempt to posit a more or less coherent framework for thinking about a whole suite of related issues under determinism: freedom, responsibility, punishment and retribution, and morality. The challenge is that the intuitions about "free will" that are implicit in a great many people's world views are at least challenged by determinism (I say challenged rather than incompatible given the mixed survey results about common views).

As far as asking whether it makes sense, under determinism, to hold people responsible (again leaving aside "moral" for the moment) Dennett says yes, and in a fairly common-sensical legal sort of way. We hold people responsible for their actions in order to cause more of certain kinds of things to happen and less of other kinds of things to happen.

Obviously the very language of expressing that idea implies a choice that doesn't metaphysically exist under determinism, but that seems like a limitation of language. I think under determinism it's difficult to justify the idea of punishment or retribution, but the idea of putting someone in jail to prevent future offenses is still reasonable. As is rehabilitation. In some sense, rehabilitation may be more justifiable, in that you don't take someone to be "evil" in some metaphysical and immutable sense. Some sorts of behavior may be modifiable and others not and its just a question of figuring out which is which.

If you attach the adjective "moral" and assume a moral ontology or meta-ethics that implies libertarianism, it would become inconsistent. But I think Dennett is purposefully trying to avoid settling those questions. As in the quote above, he seems to believe that a whole host of traditional moral questions should be simply dissolved.

Right. Part of what I was trying to get at was that going from a determinishtic account of free will to a deterministic account is not necessarily as large a distance as it may seem to be at first glance.

But I wasn't attempting to inject any room for "freedom" in the metaphysical sense.

so.. lets make a magical assumption that people would be punished but they would be completely ignorant of that possibility, because the moment they'd get prosecuted, everyone they know will have their memory of that person erased and police/court rooms would be invisible (or whatever, this is more fun than "what if there are no laws").

Would that change their behavior, and if so, isn't that also a justification for punishment and somewhat of an argument for compatibalism?

He’s saying there’s nothing about deterministic physics that denies or refutes what we take as self-evident: that we exercise free-will.
If it’s a future fact that I had fish instead of steak for dinner tomorrow, that future fact doesn’t exclude my free-willed decision to have fish in lieu of steak, it encompasses that free-willed decision.

In his words:

The notion of past events determining and explaining future events… arises completely from an unholy marriage of A-series time with deterministic physics. The mistake is natural and understandable, because of the way the A-series dominates our lives and our thinking, especially causal/explanatory thinking. It remains nevertheless a mistake. A deterministic physics gives us logical relations of determination, not a unique temporal relation of determination.