Quote:
Originally Posted by Jibninjas
Do you not believe that the way that we experience reality can be evidence for one side or another? I understand that there might not be a way to prove one side, but it seems to me that free will is at least prima facie true.
Except that fatalism was "prima facie true" in some ancient Greek cultures. In fact, the majority of ancient cultures have no reference to any kind of libertarian free will, you don't see that idea in cultures that don't have contact with Western culture in some form.
I can give plenty of examples of cultures which accept (as self-evident) premises that directly
contradict the idea of free will. If everyone experiences free will, then how is that possible? And how is it possible that some people (such as myself) have never believed in or "experienced" free will even when indoctrinated into the idea?
People run around claiming that free will is "how we experience reality," but you know what? Nobody has yet presented one shred of evidence that this is the case, or even attempted to refute my fairly strong evidence that it isn't. Do you doubt that there were cultures where people believed that everything was fated and that human action resulted from the will of the gods? If not, then how do you explain whole societies in which nobody believes in free will, if it's so self-evident? Every culture has some word for consciousness, for awareness, words for numbers, words for logical concepts, every culture we know of invokes these ideas so you can get away with calling them "self-evident" if you like, I don't agree but they are universal. Free will, however, is something people only believe in when they're
taught to believe in it. So you can't get away with this. You're just being arbitrary. "We" don't experience libertarianism in reality,
you do. And across human history, you're probably in the minority. And frankly I doubt anybody actually "experiences" technical points relating to the incompatibility thesis in the first place, you're really stretching to suggest that your experience of free will somehow implies incompatibility. There's nothing in your experience that says "this cannot be a result of a series of causes."
Even durkadurka just said that the reason he accepts it is that he "doesn't understand how you can have responsibility without libertarian free will," which is called the "argument from incredulity." I think it's absurd that he actually thinks that has merit, but hey, he gets points for admitting it. Your belief that your actions can't be expressed as a result of prior events isn't part of your basic subjective experience, you probably had your experience of free will before you even had a
concept of the incompatibility thesis.