I've been reading up on the debate between Sam Harris and Dan Dennet and i've spend numerous hours ruminating over this concept. As someone with a background in Social Psychology i've always had an interest in morality and how morality seems to be influenced by different forms of indoctrination.

I strongly believe that empathy has a biological and evolutionary foundation, as it's found in animals in all sorts of degrees as well, for instance because it prevents a kind of species from eating each other.

An experiment with apes/monkeys showed that a monkey that was given the choice; eat and you'll electrocute your buddy, or don't eat, was willing to starve himself for 12 days, so it's already a pretty complex concept up on the evolutionary ladder.

Maybe our concept of morality is merely a conceptualized offshoot of empathy, and it's an illusion, or at least not the grandiose goodness that we like to believe it is. We do indeed not wish upon someone what we don't want happening to ourselves and (most of us) at least cringe at the sight of people in terrible situations.

The notion of there not being free will (as in hard determinism) was kind of messing with me. I can't see how one can even validate themself as a human being when everything they do is already determined. In fact, if this were to be true (and I don't believe it is based on nothing more than dem feels), "I might as well stay in bed all day because what would be there to live for?" If however I have the option to choose to stay in bed all day, isn't that almost immediately discrediting hard determinism?

I could very well be brainfarting here. I realize that morality and responsibility are at stake here, and not as much me choosing to stay in bed. I do have the option to make choices and maybe they are right in saying that the range of choices I have are hard wired because if I were given the same choice a 100 times (without knowledge of the effect of previous choices and in the exact same situation) I would always choose the same thing.

Maybe this shouldn't change anything about our validation or perspective of ourself, and maybe it's simply not important. But only the notion of there not being free will has to do something with you as a human being and your perception of reality and moral standards, esp considering how the avg layman (like myself) interprets the concept of free will. It seems like that even if the whole concept of free will as we, people, experience it, is an illusion, we still benefit from that illusion as a society as a whole.

Hard determinists seem to be under the impression that you can't hold someone accountable for his or her actions, maybe punishment should still be handed out, but only to give victims and their families a sense of retaliation.

One of the things that come to mind for me personally are the arab kids that grew up in safe european cities like my hometown (amsterdam) and somehow made the decision to go to syria out of all places and fight for whatever they think is a good cause. You can easily argue that they were brainwashed by a religious doctrine, you can also argue that they were demoralized by a constant pressure and discrimination from society making them more manipulable. However, they're not sick, they are (quite often) well educated, well behaved kids without a criminal record and without extremist parents that could've led them to somehow make the decision to go and behave like a bunch of savages. No matter what their background or motives are though, they seem to make conscious decisions here.

Anyway, I know there are some questions in my text, and i'm just generally curious what people's ideas are about these concepts. It seems that a majority of philosophers are attending to a sort of "soft determinism", which I think I agree with, but i'm sure i'm making some mistakes in my thinking and i'm open to suggestions and literature to read to widen my perspective.

If free will is a fallacy then what is illogical about it?

heh, i'm asking if my thinking contains any fallacies, not the concept itself...

You're asking if it is a fallacy to question whether the concept of free will is fallacious?

lol, no, please disregard the title...

I'm barely questioning the concept, i'm undecided. I'm making some assumptions that could be fallacious as the concept itself seems to be subject to different interpretations.

the question "why shouldn't I just stay in bed if hard determinism is true" is sort of already self-contradictory, since (given hard determinism) you either will or will not stay in bed and all your thinking about it will turn out to be some sort of post hoc rationalization anyway

You can enjoy the faint feeling of light-headedness you get as you think about free will but my recommendation is you don't take your thoughts too seriously on this subject, at least insofar as you are planning your day. If volition is an illusion, it's one that's constitutive of being human. Zeno might suggest at this point that you consume an alcoholic beverage. Often times I disagree with Zeno but in this instance I think I'd concur.

Okay, the OP is not fallacious thinking.

Yeah, this was what I was thinking.

lol, awesome response. I already edited the text and put quotations around the staying in bed thing, as I wasn't actually staying in bed all day, nor was I planning to. I questioned the effects of the notion of there being no free will on people in general, I guess.

This concept does light up some sparks in my brain, which isn't a bad thing. But i'm mostly just going with the idea that

Some portion of human behavior is surely determined. But when someone chooses to take one particular action out of a choice of several plausible actions after conscious thought and deliberation about it, it would seem reasonable to consider it an act of free will and indeterminate.

You can steer the ship so to speak (maybe), but there is no way to articulate why you choose certain actions instead of others. And there is certainly no way to argue how you would make different decisions if you were exactly someone else.

It is all pretty logical, but most are afraid of the reality that we may not have any control at all. Of course, society has to control people, and that means that those who make decisions that do not conform with the group that is in control, are going to get the short end of the stick and often times face punishment for things that they are not responsible for. There are certain crimes that most all societies deem unacceptable, but even on that level, you have to ask yourself if people really are in charge, or if it is essentially like getting strapped into a roller-coaster early in life and then you get shot on a multi-decade journey that has you trying to channel your desires into something positive in the given human system that you just happened to be dropped into, as you try to manipulate the world around you.

I changed the thread title to more acturately reflect the OP.

The Free Will debate has raged on this forum in many different manifestations through the years.

Here is a link to the most recent one in which some famous and infamous posters get into nuts and bolts while us onlookers make snide comments:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/47...mness-1451006/

There are 2 or possible 3 other threads on this subject; some very good, some not so good. You can do a search and find them if you wish.

I get confused sometimes how can one have freedom of choice and not also have free will?

Zeno's given you a good start OP but this thread from zumby is worth a look, he's by far the best proponent of the compatibilist position I've read here

Thanks for the link, def something to chew on.

This hits home for me the most, and this is how I always figured it to be without really giving the concept itself too much of my attention.

This is fine but understand that if you agree with zumby's position here then you are agreeing with the general thesis that determinism and free will are compatible; you are agreeing that one's choices can be 100% determined by prior causes, but that it is still fully coherent to describe those choices as freely willed. You would be agreeing, for example, that if Sam's decision to enroll in medical school was 100% determined by the state of the universe a millennium ago, we could still describe her decision as freely willed, because nobody was holding a gun to her head, or that she had a proper think about it, at the time when she was going through the thought process to enroll in medical school. In other words, it would be Sam's ineluctable fate, and simultaneously her free choice, to go to medical school.

This is just to say that since you expressed this concern in your op, this is the basic incompatibilist intuition, something that compatibilists like Dennett and zumby disagree with.

I'm just wondering if OP has a thing for National Geographic titties.

Only he/she can answer that. I can assure you that I do.

I have been thinking about this a bit (again), and the issue isn't whether it is coherent, it is whether we can use the compatibilist definition of free will in the same way as the libertarian definition.

I don't think you can. Just because you could justify blame using the libertarian definition, doesn't mean you can using the compatibilist definition.

That's ultimately right, but typically the dialectic goes like this, someone says that free will and determinism are compatible, somebody replies that this is incoherent, free will cannot exist if every choice is determined by prior causes, and then the reply is, that may be incoherent according to your weirdo metaphysical misunderstanding of free will, but there is a perfectly coherent account of free will and determinism, and here it is, and then a bit down the road your point here is asserted.

Usually I don't see it asserted. Usually I see weirdo definition and then unabashed equivocation fallacy galore. In this case, the only purpose to the exercise is to pretend that assigning responsibility is philosophically justifiable.

People are weirdos.

Well, if you see unabashed equivocation fallacy glore, then ipso facto* you have incoherence. Can you imagine describing discourse fraught with unabashed equivocation fallacy glore as coherent? It may not be ultimately incoherent, but this requires people to figure out what their positions actually entail. Personally I'm still inclined to say that compatibilism is incoherent if compatibilists fail to account for why we have strong intuitions to hold people morally responsible and not robots or slot machines, but then it seems like I'm saying their intuitions are incoherent, which may be problematic because intuitions aren't propositional and may not be things which are properly coherent or incoherent.

* Correct, non-gratuitous use of ipso facto?

For some reason while reading this the picture of time laid out already like in Slaughter House Five came to mind. So if everything happening now has happened already, past, present and future have no differnt meaning, then seems like things can be determined and we can still claim choice no problem no inconsistencies? Maybe, I don't know does time confuse us here?

I was trying to get you to say something like that.

I think (?!?) responsibility can be justified by just noting that it works (and when it works and when it falls down on the job). It is an emotion, right? It works particularly well in getting us to do nonsensical prosocial things like be nice to nice people. Try to justify giving a tip to a waiter or waitress at a city you will never return to without resorting to some sort of "well s/he deserved it!"

Better examples include bedroom play. Nothing like knowing how "I was close, damn it"* isn't just a statement about the big bang to motivate a good performance.

I hold your great-great-second-cousin-thrice-removed responsible for making me giggle a bit. I hold you in a semi-neutral disdain for the lack of a part you played in his clever footnote.

*translation: sleep with one eye open.

This whole discussion seems to come down to semantics. No, we don't choose our brain, no, we don't have "control" over the actual processes in the brain. We do, however, have a machine up and running that, under circumstances where there is no immediate threat (ie, it doesn't fully operate on the primal parts of the brain/the Basal ganglia, limbic system etc), has the capacity to make decisions based on good/bad, wise/stupid, this is a process of deliberation, anticipation, and not beyond our control.

Neuroplasticity shows that we can work to change the machine, this initiation of "work on the machine" is a conscious effort of becoming a "better human being".

Sure, quite a few people freak out when sam harris mentions there being no free will, but it seems like his whole perception of it seems to be "your brain is an evolutionary machine, therefor you have no fee will, although it can make choices and i can separate good from bad, all that is conditioned and evolutionary behavior that will always end up the same way"...

While this might be true in some sort of abstract physical essence, it takes away, and completely undermines, the human experience, and I think it's bordering on arrogant and irresponsible to make those claims...

We, as people are completely capable of making decisions. Every moment we decide to make a movement out of "free will", can be considered a decision. I can decide to move my hand right now, or move my hand in 20 seconds and i'm going to do none of those because my free will gave me the option not to and i'm tired. Me saying that doesn't change the fact that I'm here capable of moving my hand out of free will, a perfectly rationalizable concept that can exist within that machine that spawned from a deterministic universe.

I might not have control over my range of thoughts, but I do have control over which ones I choose to be valuable and which ones I don't.

Close to 90% of people experience intrusive thoughts.. saying there is no free will is like saying they'd actually act on those, but no one ever does. There is a big difference between a psychopath and someone with intrusive thoughts. The person that experiences these intrusive thoughts normally doesn't value them as relevant, or he freaks out over them, something that can over time develop into a form of OCD. But no matter how intrusive these thoughts become, there have been no (properly diagnosed, which is very easy to do) people that actually acted out on their thoughts.

How do we make these thoughts become less intrusive again in the case of this form of OCD? We teach them to accept them, not pay attention to them and treat them as just what they are, manifestations of a complex mind, something that everyone experiences, but that they became overly obsessed with out of fear of becoming a bad person. (note that these people are considered to be extremely moral beings, hence their fear of otherwise normal thoughts). This therapeutic model only works when people actively engage in it, out of free will. When properly attended, this form of therapy is very effective.

There is a reason why 90% of psychologists are compatibalitits and only 40% of neurologists (can't find references but someone posted that here). Psychs understand the "mind" much better on a conceptional level, neurologists only understand it on a (very limited) mechanical level.

Anyway, have fun with your semantics breakdowns and endless discussions about a different concept. I'll be here, enjoying me free mind.

without knowing wtf you're talking about, i'm probably guilty as charged.