Once again you think your opinions are fact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberta...ambiguation%29

Just in case he's not trying to be funny. I can't tell.

"Libertarianism"'s first recorded use only applies to the metaphysical issue of free will...therefore it wins. (For some stupid reason, both wiki pages list the same 'first usage' but while it's clearly referring to 'free will' they don't explicitly state this...and they should for people like Ryan who get confused easily).

lol doublepostaments

durka, I don't think I want to go this far into it - doubtlessly you know the pessimist's position and the standard lines of objecting to it. So I'm more interested in the metaphilosophy - do you really think there's a parity in terms of how intuitively appealing the positions are? As I say, I have no problem understanding pessimistic incompatibilism, and I understand where compatibilists are coming from, but I don't have any intuitive understanding of libertarian free will and responsibility in terms of metaphysics. Libertarians may poke holes in various arguments, but I have never encountered even a minimally substantive (and non question-begging) account/condition/criterion of genuinely free, deliberative agency. This is to stress I have been looking for one.

Slavery was legal in the states before it was not...therefore it wins.

gtfo troll

This is pretty LOL.

smd clown

I agree, and it is using the same line of logic as Durka. You two are apparently incapable of seeing that.

If I add someone to my ignore list is that an act of free will?

Clearly, citing wikipedia makes it a fact.

you are constantly posting without reading. the person i quoted told me to read wiki on it. i posted those wiki links in reply to that. maybe you should try reading before replying.

Meh. When it looks like you're trolling, I feel no compulsion to give you credit for anything.

thats fine but dont quote if thats the case. just quick reply without quoting me because that means you are responding to what i wrote implying you actually read it.

The fact that you quoted wiki entries on other meanings of libertarianism shows that you're either grossly ignorant or trolling when you post those links...

Was enjoying this thread. Ryanb9 ruined it.

Oh well. Was certainly stimulating for a while. Found some fun things to ponder and read.

If someone would like to get it back on track...I believe we were talking about Strawson...

Can durka or Aaron expand a bit on the concept of libertarian free will, especially how it relates to causality? I've seen some philosophers (Davidson iirc) claim that a causal connection obtains between two events only if they can be related with a true nomological law under some description. To me, that seems to satisfy madnak's condition for determinism:
Since libertarian free will is a negation of this claim, does this imply that libertarian free will is uncaused and that free-willed actions are at least partially uncaused?

Having read Strawson's article on free will in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (linked above by smrk), I'm for the moment satisfied that the no-freedom pessimistic argument looks pretty sound to me. I'd be interested in hearing a critique. And maybe exploring what everyday, non-ultimate, and possibly illusory kinds of moral responsibility exist, and how they function. And thinking further about the causa sui fallacy and if, when it's acknowledged, any interesting sense of the self's causal powers or specialness can be salvaged.

I thought AFAIK means "as far as I know". Did I miss the context or something? (I'm again reading this as I leave work so I can't read it in more detail right now)

Hell, I'll spell it out so we don't get into internet battlez about who doesn't understand what:

If you think determinism is true (AFAIK?) then you either deny free will or accepting free will is coherent with determinism. (Edit) And I thought you said you were libertarian with respect to free will at some point. Hence my post. There.

I'm curious about the use of the term "pessimistic" here.

I can see "fatalistic" but not "pessimistic". There would really be no point in being optimistic or pessimistic if you believed everything was predetermined. In fact, there would be no real point to anything.

My $0.02 -- this is a question that pure logic is going to have trouble answering, because the root of it has to do with the essential characteristics of life and consciousness that logic hasn't explained yet. I think there are some big open questions on those topics, and they likely need to be resolved first.

I'm willing to believe the big bang necessitated the Mississippi River, but I honestly can't believe the big bang necessitated Weird Al Yankovic.

Others may clarify, but pessimistic in this context is short for "pessimistic incompatibilism", a standard metaphysical position whose basic thesis is that free will is incoherent/impossible even if determinism is false (although, false too if determinism is true i.e. not compatibilism). Oversimplifying, physics (QM I guess, but I wouldn't know the exact history of metaphysical indeterminism) has given philosophers many reasons to doubt that events are fully determined. The denial of a fixed future flowing necessarily from the past seems to be a big help to libertarians. However, the pessimistic camp says that indeterminism of the kind described by physics does not help explain at all how free will is possible. Roughly, if events occur randomly and that some kind of random event in the brain is responsible for a choice, it will be true that a person's future is not fixed but it will be false that the person is responsible for the random event in the brain that brought about the choice.

Ah, thanks for the explanation. Didn't realize it was a technical term.

I think they are correct that the uncertainty principle is not particularly helpful in this context (given our current understanding).