Oh, OK. What is 'free' as indicated by the term 'free will' as generally understood? As in, not arising solely from prior conditions?

Nothing.

I'm confused, because I'm answering that question which you've posed as some clarifying 'This is what we're actually talking about, guys', but it's only now that I am, in fact, presenting the case for hard determinism. Prior to that I was just addressing what seemed to be some kind of linguistic confusion on your part re: 'possibility' and senses of the word 'free' other than that indicated by the term 'free will'.

I don't immediately see the connection between giving ants free will and an atheist/theist argument, but if you choose (pun) to come back to it later, we'll see where it goes.

i thought the distinction between "metaphysical free will" and something more like "legal free will" (in the compatibilist sense, I think zumby maybe you didn't love that designator but when I've heard Dennett talk about it he uses legal analogies prominently) already more or less dealt with this problem other then the semantics about which version was the one people actually mean by "free will"

I see how the parable represents, at least to some extent, your OP. I don't see how it addresses my (rather minor and ancillary) objection.

The "feels like we have it" argument is actually a very solid argument. The reason is that it all depends on how tightly one defines reality. Ontologically speaking, the only thing one can be sure to be real are one's subjective experiences. Other people, places, everything else, is merely speculation. On this basis, one may successfully argue that if the control you possess over your decisions feels real to you, then it is. It is one of the very few things that could indeed be said to be real, with a higher degree of certainty than one could claim concerning the existence of other people and places.

It is understandable that the scientific method has very little faith in subjective experience, but philosophically speaking, it is far more real and demonstrable than anything science offers.

I'm happy with the legal definition, where I part company with Dennett is his view on the sociological consequences* of people being told they have no free will.

It's the semantics I'm interested in. Both hard determinists and compatibilist deny that contra-causal free will exists. The difference is that compatibilists say "ok, here's a sane way to define 'free will' and avoid having to throw up a ton of useful concepts like 'choose', 'decide', 'free', 'voluntary', 'involuntary' etc etc". So either hard determinists can argue that these terms really aren't useful (which is the path neeel is taking), or they should explain why the compatibilist program is misguided.

It's like the "atom". For thousands of years it meant "indivisible". Then we discovered that it isn't indivisible. But we didn't run around like Chicken Little saying "atoms don't exist!", we just updated the meaning of "atom" in light of reality and moved on. Admittedly, sometimes we just throw out the word e.g. phlogiston, aether etc, but given it's kind of an arbitrary semantic decision, why is free will so unsalvageable?

*Several experiments have shown the people tend to behave immorally more often immediately after reading a passage that asserts that 'science has shown we have no free will'. I'm not convinced that this would map to any serious long-term change in behaviour and would be interested to see if similar results are found when reading other passages that overturn other strongly held beliefs.

I'm asking for a justification for making "not arising solely from prior conditions" the definition of "free". The only time we do it is when speaking of free will. So either there is a reason we have much stricter requirements for "free will" than we have for "freely rotates" or "free speech", or there isn't.

Here's an incompatibilist argument from SEP:


A) Any agent, x, performs an any act, a, of her own free will iff x has control over a.
B) x has control over a only if x is the ultimate source of a.
C) If x is the ultimate source of a, then some condition, b, necessary for a, originates with x.
D) If any condition, b, originates with x, then there are no conditions sufficient for b independent of x.
E) If determinism is true, then the facts of the past, in conjunction with the laws of nature, entail every truth about the future.
F) If the facts of the past, in conjunction with the laws of nature, entail every truth about the future, then for any condition, b, necessary for any action, a, performed by any agent, x, there are conditions independent of x (in x's remote past, before x's birth) that are sufficient for b.
G) If, for any condition, b, necessary for any action, a, performed by any agent, x, there are conditions independent of x that are sufficient for b, then no agent, x, is the ultimate source of any action, a. (This follows from C and D.)
H) If determinism is true, then no agent, x, is the ultimate source of any action, a. (This follows from E, F, and G.)
I) Therefore, if determinism is true, then no agent, x, performs any action, a, of her own free will. (This follows from A, B, and H.)

I think B is false. And I understand why religious people have to accept the absurd premise B, but I don't understand why atheists accept it. I mean... if "control" required being the "ultimate source of control" we couldn't say things like "the thermostat controls the temperature".

Furthermore, I'm pretty sure most of you think that free will doesn't exist even on indeterminacy ("randomness doesn't give us free will"). So you would claim that we don't have free will if determinism is true, and we also don't have free will if indeterminacy is true:

1. If P, ~Q
2. If ~P, ~Q

So how is determinism even relevant to free will?

Those are the areas where we can see differences between 'free' decisions and 'not-free' decisions (in chimpanzees iirc). Look, it's cool for you to doubt that scientific research could identify differences between voluntary and involuntary decisions, as long as you don't then go on to contradict yourself by bringing up other scientific research.

Ain't I a stinker?

Those are the Libet experiments I referenced upthread. In those experiments, the subject is typically asked to do something along the lines of raising a finger whenever the urge takes them. Later experiments by Soon et al did something similar but asked them to raise either the left or the right finger. In both these type of experiments, something called the Readiness Potential was observed some fraction of second before the 'decision' appeared in consciousness, and in some cases a few seconds before.

There are many problems with the experiments but the two biggest ones imo are:

1) Raising a finger is not the sort of thing one normally associates with an act of free will. It's inconsequential. It's not even as consequential as whether to have tea or coffee. As such, these experiments are really looking at whims, not conscious decisions. And no-one (apart from Harris) is arguing that control over whims is relevant to the concept of free will.

2) These experiments are normally predictively accurate to around 60% with a few experiments being accurate to around 80%. 60% actually is statistically significant, but it is far from the 100% needed to demonstrate that the conscious experience is an epiphenomenon. For example, Libet himself concluded that the conscious experience acts as a 'veto' for the whims arising in the unconscious, and therefore is causally efficacious. This model explains the data very well.

Given that the decisions are inconsequential (raising a finger, looking to the left or the right corner of the room) it is unlikely that such a conscious veto would be enacted very often. For those proposing consciousness as epiphenomenon, the discrepancy is harder to explain. Jerry Coyne argues that it is a product of the lack of sophistication in our current fMRI technology, though is no more than writing a huge promissory note on behalf of his metaphysics that he hopes can be cashed further down the line. But I will make a prediction now that the accuracy will actually drop as we develop tests of more consequential decision-making processes. [/QUOTE]

It's not about having stricter requirements; it's about the word meaning different things in different contexts, that's all. You might as well be asking why the 'yellow fever' virus doesn't exclusively reflect light in the 620–750 nm range.

I mean, suppose there is no justification for defining free (in this context) as 'arising solely from prior conditions'. What will happen? Will we no longer talk about the problem of whether or not human choices arise solely from prior conditions? Or will we just invent a substitute term for 'free' and use that instead?

Of course we could. It is again about the word being applied in different senses in different contexts.

If I find the defendant's fingerprints on the murder weapon, that means he did it. But if I find no fingerprints, that doesn't mean he didn't do it.

Its not that I doubt the scientific research. Rather I am just doubting the distinction between voluntary and involuntary. What does it mean for something to be voluntary?

I'm puzzled that I haven't made myself clear. I understand THAT you are defining the "free" in "free will" as "not arising solely from prior conditions". I'm asking why you stick to that definition when we all agree that contra-causal free will is incoherent.

E.g. what's wrong with my position if I say "theologians traditionally defined "the Earth" as less than 10,000 years old, therefore science has shown that "the Earth" doesn't exist. Maybe the word might mean different things in different contexts, yadda yadda, but this is a category error"

I feel like I already typed this bit up earlier, but here it goes anyway:

Compatibilists say: contra-causal free will doesn't exist, but there are sensible ways to talk about free will that don't invoke magic.
Hard determinists say: contra-causal free will doesn't exist, and there is no other way to talk about free will, stop changing the subject.

Atheist hard determinists reasonably have a bit of justification to do, because ~60% of contemporary philosophers are compatibilists, fan-favourites like the Stoics and David Hume were compatibilists, our legal systems are compatiblist, and experimental philosophy suggests that 76% of ordinary folk are (naive) compatibilists. So it's not like the argument that "well that's what free will means" has much to support it beyond an appeal to the primacy of judeo-christian philosophy. Which is an odd and counter-productive position for atheists to take imo.

Isn't there a problem with hard determinists and compatibilists redefining free will while still engaged in debates with those that suggest free will as generally understood exists?

But we don't all agree on that. Libertarians exist.

Furthermore, it's not as though, contra-causal free will being incoherent, we're compelled to construct some notion of 'free will' other than contra-causal. We can simply refer to 'will' under the understanding that it arises solely from prior conditions.

There isn't anything much wrong with that, except that by the very act of showing that "the Earth" doesn't exist, science has provided its own alternative definition.


It really seems to me that the compatibilists would be better off inventing a new term. If, when they say "free will", they very definitely don't mean "free will" as understood by libertarians, then why exactly are they saying "free will" at all? The issue has always been about will. Libertarians say the will is 'free', meaning not arising solely from prior conditions, and incompatibilists say no, it's not free. So why do the compatibilists come in and say, hey, we're using the terms of the libertarians even though we don't agree with them, now stop being silly and invent a new definition for the term?

OK? I mean I understand each individual bit of that, but not why it's all been lumped together and shown to me.

I suppose I just don't understand your overall thrust ITT. You want hard determinists to do something, apparently. What is it?

I'm not sure there are other question. Any hard determinist should reply "nothing" to your question, if not he is not a hard determinist. I would think he believes this because simply because he sees the universe as a linear chain of causal events.

As for why anyone would be a hard determinist... why would anyone have a a set view on will at all? To me it it seems pointless.... attributing values to unknowns only serves a purpose in method, not in knowledge.

Zumby's argument seems to me to sidestep the main issue. Surely hard determinists won't have a problem with compatibilists inventing some new word and using the label "free will" (except for minor issues such as it potentially being confusing). To me, the real debate between hard and soft determinists is whether any such alternative concept of "free will" is adequate to do the work that the libertarian concept supposedly does, e.g. grounding moral responsibility, making sense of our phenomenology of choice, etc. In other words, it is not enough to have a coherent definition of "free will" that is compatible with determinism.

I'll admit though that I'm not familiar with Harris or Coyne's writing on free will, so perhaps their objections are more in line with the concerns Zumby is focusing on here.

I'll grant you that I'm not discussing what you consider (and I don't necessarily disagree) to be the 'main issue', but I find this a kind of annoying rhetorical move on your part. It's going to be hard to get many threads going in RGT if we can only discuss the 'main issues'... for example, all questions of internal consistency of theology can be deflated by pulling out "well you are sidestepping the main issue of whether god exists".

I'd also be interested in a thread on whether determinism negates moral responsibility (Sam Harris' view) or is required for moral responsibility (Richard Carrier's view). And a thread on whether the term "free will" should be abandoned in exchange for more scientifically and philosophically rigorous terms like "volition" and "moral responsibility" appeals to me. For that matter, a thread on the role of counterfactuals w/r/t free will could be fun. But I choose to start a thread asking "what, if anything, is free for hard determinists", and it's one part amusing and one part annoying that I have some people (tame_deuces, neeel) saying "OBVIOUSLY hard determinism precludes any definition of free, you silly goose" and some people (AIF, uke?) saying "OBVIOUSLY hard determinism only precludes libertarian free will, you silly goose" and you now telling me I'm asking the wrong question.

Dunno if this was your attempt at humour or a genuine reading of what I said, but not going to dignify it with a clarification.

Yes, that gif clarifies everything and definitely establishes that you have a substantive point and are not simply obsessing over the label 'free'.

In this thread, you seem concerned with this question:
The correct answer to this question, according to the hard determinist, is that definitions of freedom compatible with determinism end up not being able to justify moral responsibility, phenomenology, etc. So while you are welcome to come up with and use these alternative definitions, they are not philosophically interesting (according to hard determinists). So I'm not saying that you are asking the wrong question, but rather that I think that by bracketing off the central issue you end up missing why hard determinists give the answer they do.

Here's an analogy. Let's say that "hard atheists" claim that God doesn't exist. Then along come some "soft atheists" who claim that while "god" understood as a divine being roughly in line with the major world religions doesn't exist, "god" understood as the impetus for goodness that exists in humans does exist. Hard atheists might think that when soft atheists talk about "god" they are talking about something else, which might be interesting, but doesn't have much to do with the conversations hard atheists are having with theists.

Now, this might be disanalogous in that you think that the compatibilist understanding of free will does ground moral responsibility, or that this understanding of free will is actually the correct way to understand our basic intuitions about "free will" (e.g. that in fact the soft atheist understanding of god does all the work of the hard atheist and is in fact what is meant by talk of god in the major world religions). But then you are arguing that the hard determinist is wrong, not just trying to figure why they disagree with compatibilism.

As I said, I'm addressing the substance of your comments, not the interest or appropriateness of the topic.

OK. But do you agree that no-one apart from you has given this answer?

Okay.

You have a charming and disarming habit of parachuting in to threads and presenting the arguments people should be making as if they had made them. I'd love for AIF or whoever to actually argue why intuitions about free will are best captured by incompatibilism , but that isn't what has happened.

You should've asked about intuitions about free will, then, instead of talking about the definition of 'free'. I'm not psychic.

Would you mind providing a link to this?

I said nothing even remotely close to this:shrug:

http://www.csom.umn.edu/assets/91974.pdf

I'd take it with a pinch of salt though

It doesn't necessarily have much to do with overturning strong belief; It has likely much more to do with making a course of action an easier alternative that requires less contemplation.

For example you have a study where doctors where asked to call patients out hip replacement surgery lists to to test a single drug vs cases where they had to call patients out of hip surgery to test two drugs. In the first (not surprisingly) the majority of doctors opted for number one. In the second the majority opted to go through with hip replacement. In the control almost no doctors chose sending patients to hip replacement over testing two drugs.

What this means is that once you make a choice require more considerations, the less likely people are to make it compared to an existing easy choice - almost regardless of the nature of the choices.