Why is this so hard to believe? Have you never played an open world video game that allowed you go anywhere right from the start?

You're treating reality like a linear video game. In such a reality free will can't exist. You choices, if you could call them that, are tightly bounded. In a reality with free will your choices are still bounded (like how even a large open world game has boundary edges), but they're bounded by things like the laws of physics (can't go faster than light etc.).

Remember that free will doesn't mean that you can do things outside of what's possible under physical phenomena. The set of all things freely possible under free will is still a finite set that is determined by your local reality (resources, your body's physical limits etc.).

So it looks like durkadurka is really just an "incompatiblist". According to Google's definition of free will libertarian ...
"Libertarianism about free will, which is completely distinct from libertarianism as a political doctrine, is the view that people do have free will, but that this freedom is incompatible with determinism. Thus, libertarians are incompatibilists who think that free will exists."

While durkadurka's position is ...
"So, being a libertarian, I assent to the incompatibility thesis. I don't understand how you can have responsibility without libertarian free will. If you're determined to do something, I don't see how that can be considered a responsible act. Now, I don't quite take a position on the deterministic thesis since I don't see how (just like I'm not an atheist/theist) you can epistemologically have warrant for that leap. So, IF the deterministic thesis is true, you'd find me being a hard determinist...but IF the deterministic thesis is false, then I'm still a libertarian."

Or more simply, durkadurka thinks free will responsibility is only possible if determinism +- quantum is false. But he doesn't "believe" free will actually exists nor does he "believe" determinism is false.

Also, I evidently had "Soft determinism" wrong. According to durkadurka, a compatibilist takes no position on determinism while a soft determinist is a compatibilist who accepts determinism.


PairTheBoard

I would argue that the human player of an open world video game is a "non-physical phenomenon" from the point of view of the physics inside the game.

I'm arguing that free will requires mind–body dualism. I've seen some secular people argue that free will is an emergent phenomenon that arises from the complexity of our brains, but I don't buy that. How could any amount of complexity get rid of the cause and effect relationship of physics?

I have what I think is a new idea on this subject. At least, new to this forum. It has to do with consciousness and the chain of cause-effect. Our physicalist/materialist model rests on our concept of physical reality proceeding according to a cause-effect chain of events. Every event is an effect caused by the conditions immediately preceding it. What is less often mentioned is that the event then becomes part of the conditions in the causal chain going forward.

This is the case for every event except one, consciousness. Consciousness seems to have no place in the causal chain going forward. It seems to be a dead end in the causal chain. This is a bookend to its problem as an event in the causal chain preceding it. Materialists believe the awakening of consciousness must be caused by the activity of its physical substrate. But there is no explanation for how this causation by dead stuff can actually happen. Thus the hard problem of consciousness.

Similarly, there is no explanation for how this awakened consciousness can play any role in the chain of cause-effect going forward. Thus explained away by calling it an illusion. Yet many have theorized that consciousness evolved due to some evolutionary advantage. How could that be possible if it has no role in the cause-effect chain going forward. Also, in Sklansky's Solution to free will put forward here, he proposes that the consciousness of the person being told what she will do by the predictor is crucial to the result.

In Sklansky's Solution it appears that it's the girl's consciousness that empowers her to defy the prediction. Thus, her consciousness defies the chain of cause-effect that the predictor relies on. This is free will. Is this power supernatural or simply another part of our natural reality left unexplained. Well, that is what we will try to find out (voice over by William Shatner).


PairTheBoard

The player character would be said to have free will because you, the game player, would give that to "it." However, I wouldn't go so far as to say that the "source" or "mechanism" behind that free will is necessarily a non-physical phenomenon, even from the point of view of the game world. Metaphysically, the reality that is our world is still physical to the game world. Likewise, whatever reality that may or may not exist outside our "video game" may not necessarily be considered non-physical. It would literally be metaphysical (superordinate to the physical).


It doesn't have to require the classical mind-body dualism. That simply could be analogous to a secular god of the gaps argument.

Again, this is likely a fact of not having the complete picture, so we fill in gaps in our understanding with plausible explanations.

Judgment is necessary for the human individual to intervene in their life. We build up a tolerance to judgment.

There is a threshold in which judgment crosses over into shame. With shame comes identity crisis, uncertainty about worthiness, etc.

There is a part of us that wants to use voluntary self-shaming in order to access maximal intervention. There is another part of us that resists this strongly.. so strongly that it will deny the truth of what I’m describing.

This problem is a major reason why the question of free will resonates, but your belief one way or the other about free will doesn’t resolve the conflict. It requires engaging deeper, more powerful beliefs.

I spent a large amount of time in my 20s and 30s trying to solve this and similar questions. Now 53, I’ve had much the same opinion for a decade, and I quite like it.

Roll two rocks together. At the moment they collide, they’re aware of each other. That’s awareness.

Consciousness is fundamentally the same thing, although it is more complex - a constant state of lots of different rocks colliding in lots of different ways.

If I need to put an I in physics, and explain my own existence / self-awareness, then I’m ok with being a local subset of ‘all physics’. I share your consciousness. I am you. I just experience you in a different point in space as a different bag of rocks.

If physics allows for free will then, sure, I believe in it. It certainly feels real enough - not that you can ever simultaneously call and fold a river, though I wish you could.

It doesn't have to be classical mind-body dualism. Maybe the universe is a simulation, and like an open world video game, we are being controlled by someone in a different reality. But that is also an example of dualism - there is a separate mind from our physical body, making or influencing our decisions.

I'm asking the question: how could we have free will without any kind of dualism?

Why must free will be contingent upon some version of dualism? One scenario, which is entirely within the realm of possibility, is that the human brain evolved with the ability to direct the organism it's housed in to behave in ways that go against or contradict the biological organism's own prime directives (reproduction, survival, etc.). You might be wondering how this could be beneficial for fitness or survival (it isn't), and you could then argue that free will in this case would be an evolutionary anomaly or aberration and then make the common conclusion that it must be an emergent property.

I think part of this difficulty in grasping how free will can be free from being contingent upon dualism is rooted in coming from a deterministic view of reality. Modern physics tells us that the universe is fundamentally probabilistic. Radioactive decay, for example, is an example of true randomness in nature. You can't predict exactly when the atoms will decay, even though you would know the probability of decay. This demonstrates that there are true random events in the universe. Free will, then, can be thought of as a system with randomness (in a way) at the macro scale. Given a set of possible choices in your decision space, the choices for a free, rational agent can have probability weightings.

If I presented to you a set of choices for what you would choose to do on a Friday evening, for example, I could use priors (based on whatever personal knowledge I would have of you and/or the knowledge about the set of "men who do Friday evening kind of stuff on a Friday evening") and assign probabilities to those choices. I still can't predict or know exactly what you will do, even if I had knowledge of every single variable in the universe up until your decision point, but I can say something like, "there's a 70% chance that you will go drinking with your buddies and check out women at your favourite bar." The other decisions could be something like, "20% chance to gambool at the poker tables," "5% chance to go the gym," and "5% chance of staying in at home." All of the previous four choices (assume there aren't other choices for the sake of argument) would be probable, but not predictable. Free will can fundamentally exist here and your choice would seem random to outside observers in a vacuum, because they are (from the outside). From your perspective, however, they're not random, because you chose.

Every instance in your life where you make a choice can be thought of as having a probability density function (whose distribution is unknown, but could be inferred based on the type of choices you might make), where the space under the curve determines the odds for the random variable, and the events would be data points that fall somewhere in that distribution. Then we'd come up numbers like, "70% chance to go drinking with buddies and check out women at favourite bar."

This question doesn't arise naturally, like "what are trees?" or "what distinguishes humans from other animals?", questions that anyone might have posed at any time.

This is a question that arose first within Christian theology, given the premise that God was omniscient and omnipotent, so that nothing could happen without his willing it. Therefore it would seem that our own will is an illusion, since it does not in fact guide our actions. Hence, "is there free will?"

Then later it recurs within the materialism of early modern philosophy (possibly it was also a problem within ancient materialisms such as Lucretius', I can't remember), where it is assumed that all that really exists is matter following inviolable laws of motion. So once again, how could something immaterial such as will affect anything?

If you're neither a Christian nor a materialist it's not a question. It would be like asking whether your hand has five fingers.... apparently it does.

It’s only not a question for the willpower that you already have readily available to you. What about the willpower that you don’t have immediate access to?

“Do I have the will to change?” Do you not agree that this is a universal question? If it is universal, then the related question of whether or not that desired willpower is freely available is also universal.

I don't see how the question "is my will strong enough for to accomplish X" suggests the question "is will even real?" any more than "do I have the strength to lift this rock?" leads to "do I have any strength at all?".

Or if you mean something different by "is freely available" then I don't think it's what the question of free will is concerned with.

The ‘no’ comes first. “Am I currently able to accomplish X?” No.

Then, the question arises. “Even though I am currently unable, is there a willpower available to me which makes me capable?” That leads to the questioning of free will. Universally.

I think there's a problem of English translation here. If you will something but are incapable of it, then lack of will is not the cause.

So the question "is there a willpower available to me which makes me capable?" doesn't make sense to me.

If you mean someone doesn't quite have the will to do something, but wishes they did, they might wonder "will I ever have the willpower to accomplish this?" or something like that, but I don't see that leading to the question "is my will free (or predetermined somehow)?".

To clarify, it’s a universal question for someone who is willing to engage the struggle after the ‘no’.

Someone who is willing to engage the struggle will wonder if they can access additional willpower, making them more capable, if they are willing to accept the cost. They won’t give up at the ‘no’.

Someone who accepts the ‘no’ but wishes they were capable is someone who is unwilling to engage the struggle. Yes, these people will not get to the part where they question free will.

You paint an abstract picture. If you mean something like sometimes people in the midst of a great struggle (say a long swim to shore from a capsized boat) ask themselves if they have the will to continue, maybe that is so. But if it is does this really lead to the question of free will? (Meaning, if you agree with me, free will vs. determinism).

I don't think so. It doesn't seem true to my imagination and also seem to explain why the question, if we trace its literary tradition, seems to be bound up with Christianity and then again with materialism.

As far as I know you don't find for example pagans asking the question of free will, even though they of course experienced tests of will like any other people.


ETA: Maybe a better way of getting at this is to clarify the question. When someone seriously asks "do I have free will?" what do you think is the alternative to free will that they are implying? As in "do I have free will, or is free will just an illusion and everything is determined by the laws of physics?" What dichotomy do you have in mind?

We don't eat or **** at every opportunity, like some animals do, because it might not be the best strategy for survival of ourselves and our genes in the long term. It doesn't prove free will, just that our incentives are more complicated. But this is irrelevant because I'm talking at the level of neurons, which most likely behave deterministically, in spite of quantum effects.

We've gone through this earlier in the thread. To the extent there is determinism there is no "free", and to the extent there is randomness there is no "will". And quantum randomness may only be apparent. We explained the apparent randomness of Brownian motion by the underlying physics of thermal molecular motion. We might eventually find that quantum randomness is only apparent, and is deterministic at some underlying level.

The apparent randomness of behavior you describe in your post might only be because you're lacking information. You might know I have pizza for dinner one night a week on average (~14%), but if I had it last night I'm very unlikely to be in the mood for it tonight. So can you predict my choice if you have more and more information? What if you knew the state of every neuron in my brain, and all the interconnections, right before a decision? Would I have chosen differently if this exact brain state could be repeated (including not remembering the repetition)?

Although, this doesn’t mean that they would be unwilling in the future. Wishing can lead to believing.

How about this:
The articulation of the question of free will is not universal and seems to be associated with cultures that place value on individualism.
The experienced tests of the will which give rise to the (articulated) question are universal.

I would say that the value of the question is not to be in some imagined good standing by knowing the right answer. Like we are trying to pass a quiz.

Rather, the question is indicative of an important inner conflict that requires attention.

I think what's central to the question of free will is the philosophical field of ethics rather than the Christian religion. The concern is whether people are ethically responsible for their actions under determinism. Some say no and also believe people are ethically responsible. Thus they reject determinism and call the mode under which ethical responsibility vests, free will.


PairTheBoard

You say that as if determinism is some self-evident possibility.

There is quite literally no question of free will until some variety of determinism is believed.

Well science does have the nukes.

You don't understand what I mean.

I mean what I say but I may not mean what I say as if.


PairTheBoard

What would "free" mean in "freewill?" We have will and agency ... not free, uninfluenced, total knowledge, total control will. Of course.