They're in Glimcher's book:

http://www.amazon.com/Decisions-Unce.../dp/0262072440

Choice is a precondition for responsibility. It doesn't follow that one can only be held responsible for one's rational choices. What's the problem? What needs to be reconciled?

Well, the problem is that you seem to think that a hallmark of free will is irrationality and yet when we attribute responsibility, we check first whether the agent is rational, and if the agent is not rational enough, we see this as mitigating responsibility. In other words, there seems to be a positive correlation between degree of culpability and degree of rationality.

How is choice a precondition for responsibility?

A tornado is responsible for a dozen deaths. It had no choice...

Determinism has a different set of problems that it cannot explain.

Would you call the tornado an "evil" tornado if it killed people, and a "good" tornado if it did not? And would you consider this to be the same way in which we describe people?

This is amusing. So all that it takes to be a libertarian is to assert an empty, merely verbal alternative to "determinism" and "randomness" (without having one damn clue about how the metaphysics work out) and insist it's the other guys who take a weak line?

The general argument that it's incoherent has been cited and given a dozen times itt. Either events are completely determined by antecedent causes or they are not. If events of making a choice are completely determined by antecedent causes, then { insert critique of compatibilism that we seem to agree on }. If events of making a choice are not completely determined by antecedent causes, then certain (crucial) aspects of making choices come about randomly. If certain (crucial) aspects of making choices come about randomly, then people cannot possibly be responsible for those aspects of making choices which come about randomly.

Your response to this has been that there's more than one kind of randomness, or more than one kind of indeterminism: randomness and some other indeterministic framework for making choices. But this is a sophistic alternative, since you cannot come up with a non-circular way to distinguish this other indeterministic framework from randomness.

How is "thinking" in this context by the human any different than a tornado that reacts to various outside wind currents? Tornado's change their path in the same manner that you are claiming a human changes it's mind.

And please explain what you mean when you say "aren't necessarily deterministic"? I don't quite understand how something does not have free will and is also not controlled deterministically.

Wait, so you agree that a human is "evil" in the same way that a tornado is "evil"?

What evidence?

The only problem I can see is our intuition that we're free to act other than we do. What others are there?

Correct. It's the same in the sense you're talking about, which is the only sense that really matters in this discussion. I only meant it is different in that it is a lot more complex in humans because humans have brains.



Because deterministic means there's no room for randomness. So in a deterministic universe, if I were to go back in time to 9:00 this morning I would be absolutely certain to order a large cup of coffee just like I did in fact have. But in a non-deterministic universe, at that same point there could be a non-zero chance that I order a medium cup of coffee because of quantum randomness. In neither example did I possess free will.


With respect to actions and the consequences of those actions, yes. But humans are conscious and therefore can experience a wide range of happiness and suffering, where as tornadoes aren't and can't.


Basically everything neuroscience tells us about the mind and physics tells us about what the universe is made up of points to there being no ghost in the machine. And if not for a ghost in the machine, there's just such a small likelihood free will can exist (whatever that would even mean).

I never said any of that, nor is it implied by what I said.

You know what the most rational animal is? A bug...bugs are extremely rational. Irrationality is a sign of intelligence and higher-order cognitive processes, odd as it sounds.

You're equivocating on "responsible."

A human is normatively responsible for its actions...a tornado is not.

The standard explanation is that attention to process inhibits performance in certain tasks. It has a pretty strong effect in tasks that involve implicit pattern recognition ("game conditions change without our being able to know") and/or procedural memory (strategy).

You will find that paying attention to how your arms swing as you walk makes you walk awkwardly. Poor performance is not the same as irrationality in either walking or game performance.

None of this is counter-intuitive unless you believe tacit knowledge/skills is always better than implicit knowledge/skills and that we are born with a tabula rasa.

What I'm talking about is totally different, though. I know what you're talking about, and it's not the angle that I take (because it's fairly obvious).

For example, in some experiments, we're VERY good at behaving with irreducible complexity (proper amount of randomness around a game-theoretical optima) subconsciously, but as soon as we consciously try to behave with irreducible complexity, we become very predictable and move away from the optima. It's weird, and the standard "because you're paying attention" explanation isn't as obvious.

Why would people argue over a definition? That seems like a complete waste of time that has no philosophical value.

Instead we should be arguing over the truth/falsity of an actual statement composed out of terms with definitions that are agreed upon. How is it even philosophically interesting that we choose to assign an arbtrary word a particular definition? Words are just placeholders.

And even if both sides come to a consensus on how free will should be defined, then how does that change anything? The statements of the side that "lost" don't become false, they just have to be rewritten as "free will (definition 2) exists/doesn't exist".

Am I missing something?

Because the side that chooses which definition is correct gets to be right, duh.

How was free will defined ITT?

It is the same mechanism, and states nothing about free will at all.

It is about conscious vs. subconscious processes (as you correctly point out), which is interesting (as you correctly point out), but has nothing to do with free will. Implicit vs. explicit is another way of putting this that makes it easier to understand without resorting to messy concepts that we have multiple definitions for (consciousness). Some implicit processes are inhibited by explicit processes.

It does very much have to do with will, which doesn't imply free will. I think you correctly left out "free" when you first mentioned this.

"Will" is the ability for an agent to deliberate and act without complete constraint by current external (to the agent) circumstances. Damn near everyone believes that will exists.

Free will is the ability for an agent to make choices that are (at least patially) unconstrained by the internalization of past causes (things that make you who you are), internal processes that naturally follow from past causes as well as external circumstances. In other words, free will is the ability for an agent to act (to at least some extent) without prior cause.

Determinism is the idea that everything follows a causal chain. It is not the same thing as fatalism (the idea that we are drawn by fate towards a knowable destination), but that we are driven from behind by cause and effect.

In both cases, subjects are making conscious choices. In the former, they're going with their gut, in the latter they're deliberating. It's not a 'conscious'/'subconscious' issue, which most psychologists today think is a highly dubious distinction.

Reread what I wrote because we are arguing at cross-purposes. I said that conscious/subconscious is messy and that implicit ("going with gut")/explicit (deliberating) is the proper distinction.

The more important fact is that it is completely uninformative on the question of the existence of or nature of free will.

Durka?

It blows my mind how many people in this thread and others still do not understand that there's no need to redefine "free will" and that, for the sake of this discussion, this Webster's definition (the definition that 99.9% of people mean when they use the term) will suit us just fine:

Free Will (noun)l: freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention

To believe in this nonsense is like believing in creationism or some crap. It's just plain silly, given what we know about the brain and its relationship to the physical universe.

So yeah, the free will debate has long been over; it's just that philosophers are always redefining the term for their own mental masturbation. There is no need to redefine it, because no other definition has any relevance to this particular discussion.

Not sure what you are blathering on about. No one here has "redefined" free will.

Sure it's informative! You seem to be working under the mistaken impression that something can only be informative if it proves that free will exists, or that it doesn't. But that's wrong. Something can be informative if it gives us insight into the nature of free will. This research suggests something that has never been considered before: maybe the expression of our free will is to be found in our ability to be irrational -- something that most other conscious beings are unable to do.

That's progress!

Well, the compatibilist takes "that" definition of free will and says that it's mistaken: we're free in the relevant sense, but free will is consistent with determinism. So they do redefine it, and they give arguments. clfst simply can't comprehend why people would argue over a concept, which is really his failing.

clfst: What if I were to say: you know what, choice means selecting something and doesn't require there to be more than one option? Would you agree? If you disagree, guess what: we're arguing over the definition of 'choice' qua concept.