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You've put the dilemma nicely - it can't be both 'free' and 'your will' by your definitions (well, without admitting supernatural beings that can affect and be

You've put the dilemma nicely - it can't be both 'free' and 'your will' by your definitions (well, without admitting supernatural beings that can affect and be affected by the natural world, but are not part of it). Personally I'm happy with other definitions, not because I feel I'm doing mental gymnastics, but because the version you give is clearly not what normal people mean by it when they refer to it. It might well be related to what philosophers argue about, but normal people who offer you a 'free choice' or who say that you did something 'of your own free will' do not mean anything like 'your choice was not a function of the state of the universe'. Despite being happy with those other definitions that you aren't, I'm equally skeptical of the idea that free will has to be rescued just because different points in time can be observed simultaneously. What does someone even mean by free will if it can't cope with that?

ngcc_hk 5y ago
Our “soul” is that being which “ can affect and be affected by the natural world, but are not part of it”. You can feel it as you are one of these “supernatural being”. Case closed.
vidarh 5y ago
> Personally I'm happy with other definitions, not because I feel I'm doing mental gymnastics, but because the version you give is clearly not what normal people mean by it when they refer to it. It might well be related to what philosophers argue about, but normal people who offer you a 'free choice' or who say that you did something 'of your own free will' do not mean anything like 'your choice was not a function of the state of the universe'. There's certainly a duality here where it's fine to talk about people having choices even if one strictly believe they don't, but my experience is that if anything people tend to often get exasperated or outright agitated if you try to question to what extent their decisions are free. A whole lot of human society is organised around the idea that we have agency and that we're the product of choices we've made of our own volition. E.g. if you genuinely believe the notion that we have free will is nonsense (and I do), then the logical extension is to be very uncomfortable with the notion of e.g. prison used for vengeance or anything at all other than to the bare minimal extent required to protect others, because the logical conclusion of thinking people don't have agency is that there was no way other than other external stimuli in their lives that they could have come out making other decisions. It's a very uncomfortable thing to view society through a lens of seeing free will as an illusion. But it's also very hard to unsee the lack of any kind of coherent theory of free will that could justify anything else. The reality is that if you actually talk to people about this, you'll quickly find that most people go through life with a very strong belief that they have agency and that people around them have agency, but the moment you start to question what that belief is based on, the basis for it tends to start to crumble very, very quickly. As I've said elsewhere, in decades of discussing this subject I've never seen someone come up with a definition of "free will" that still looks either "free" or like "will" under scrutiny. Usually you end up with people trying variations of arguments that just leads to infinite regress (e.g. arguing our soul gives us free will, at which point the question just shifts to a definition soul that would give it agency).
- kybernetikos 5y ago
  > if you genuinely believe the notion that we have free will is nonsense (and I do), then the logical extension is to be very uncomfortable with the notion of e.g. prison used for vengeance or anything at all other than to the bare minimal extent required to protect others Not really. You can view it as a game theoretic situation. Will the use of prison likely produce a good outcome or a bad outcome? Whether or not the criminal was deterministically required to commit the crime, the structure of punishments will (perhaps deterministically) affect the incidents and severity of future crimes. Just because the creature in Black and White may have made decisions deterministically doesn't mean I won't punish it if it behaves in an inappropriate way. If anything, believing the agents are deterministic would make me even more keen to punish in situations where it will change behaviour usefully.
  - martinpw 5y ago
    You are just agreeing with the OP here. The point is that prison is useful for some things, eg protecting others, changing behavior etc. But if there is no free will, then it makes no sense to say prison is for vengeance. These discussions are always interestingly recursive, since if I do not believe in free will then my own view on free will is itself not a free choice. And yet I still feel strongly that my not believing in free will appears to be my free choice.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    This is what I mean by setting vengeance up vs. "the bare mininal extent required to protect others". I agree that there are still people who needs to be locked up, including under possibly brutal sentencing terms. E.g. Anders Behring Breivik who carried out the 2011 terrorist attacks in Norway is up on a parole hearing today - if he gets out (it'd take a miracle) it doesn't matter if it's free will (in any sense of the term) or purely deterministic processes that leads him to act if he is still probabilistically likely to carry out another attack - it's still more important to keep the public safe from him than to worry about whether or not he had a genuine choice. To the extent there's a measurable effect of seeing the punishment of others, that too might be a justification, though I find that dicier. But if that is done based on a cold calculation of how it affects offending rates that to me is still very different from vengeance. So to be clear I'm not arguing it removes the justifications for punishments, and I agree with your mention of seeing it as a game theoretic situation - even really harsh punishments might be the best choice in some circumstances. But it removes "they chose this themselves" or "they deserve it" as a justification (the feeling is still valid; acting on it becomes cruel), and that makes for a very different legal system. It also shifts a focus towards considering that if it's not about vengeance, then you should look at how to actually optimise the balance between the public good and treating the prisoners as humanely as you can without reducing the public benefit of the punishment too much. Norway is far from achieving that, but if you look at e.g. Bastøy fengsel [1] ([2] has links to assorted longer articles), you can get one idea of what de-emphasising vengeance and taking rehabilitation and trying to address reoffending rates might start to look like (though Norway has by no means solved that, Bastøy also certainly haven't made it worse, but it also is not the norm in Norway either - yet anyway). For some people, it might well be that harsher prisons works better, or are necessary (I doubt Breivik will ever get the chance to serve his time somewhere like Bastøy for example). (Bastøy is the - so far - culmination of a process of reform that started in the 1960's, at a point where Norwegian prisons were quite brutal and the brutality of it eventually triggered a strong counter-reaction.) For others even less prison (Norway as it is have sentences that would look comically short for e.g. Americans or British people). But evaluating it as a "game theoretic situation" as you say would in any case very likely lead to very major change to how the legal system would work most places in the world (including Norway) [1] http://bastoyfengsel.no/English/ http://bastoyfengsel.no/English/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bast%C3%B8y_Prison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bast%C3%B8y_Prison

ngcc_hk 5y ago

Our “soul” is that being which “ can affect and be affected by the natural world, but are not part of it”. You can feel it as you are one of these “supernatural being”. Case closed.

vidarh 5y ago

> Personally I'm happy with other definitions, not because I feel I'm doing mental gymnastics, but because the version you give is clearly not what normal people mean by it when they refer to it. It might well be related to what philosophers argue about, but normal people who offer you a 'free choice' or who say that you did something 'of your own free will' do not mean anything like 'your choice was not a function of the state of the universe'. There's certainly a duality here where it's fine to talk about people having choices even if one strictly believe they don't, but my experience is that if anything people tend to often get exasperated or outright agitated if you try to question to what extent their decisions are free. A whole lot of human society is organised around the idea that we have agency and that we're the product of choices we've made of our own volition. E.g. if you genuinely believe the notion that we have free will is nonsense (and I do), then the logical extension is to be very uncomfortable with the notion of e.g. prison used for vengeance or anything at all other than to the bare minimal extent required to protect others, because the logical conclusion of thinking people don't have agency is that there was no way other than other external stimuli in their lives that they could have come out making other decisions. It's a very uncomfortable thing to view society through a lens of seeing free will as an illusion. But it's also very hard to unsee the lack of any kind of coherent theory of free will that could justify anything else. The reality is that if you actually talk to people about this, you'll quickly find that most people go through life with a very strong belief that they have agency and that people around them have agency, but the moment you start to question what that belief is based on, the basis for it tends to start to crumble very, very quickly. As I've said elsewhere, in decades of discussing this subject I've never seen someone come up with a definition of "free will" that still looks either "free" or like "will" under scrutiny. Usually you end up with people trying variations of arguments that just leads to infinite regress (e.g. arguing our soul gives us free will, at which point the question just shifts to a definition soul that would give it agency).

kybernetikos 5y ago
> if you genuinely believe the notion that we have free will is nonsense (and I do), then the logical extension is to be very uncomfortable with the notion of e.g. prison used for vengeance or anything at all other than to the bare minimal extent required to protect others Not really. You can view it as a game theoretic situation. Will the use of prison likely produce a good outcome or a bad outcome? Whether or not the criminal was deterministically required to commit the crime, the structure of punishments will (perhaps deterministically) affect the incidents and severity of future crimes. Just because the creature in Black and White may have made decisions deterministically doesn't mean I won't punish it if it behaves in an inappropriate way. If anything, believing the agents are deterministic would make me even more keen to punish in situations where it will change behaviour usefully.
- martinpw 5y ago
  You are just agreeing with the OP here. The point is that prison is useful for some things, eg protecting others, changing behavior etc. But if there is no free will, then it makes no sense to say prison is for vengeance. These discussions are always interestingly recursive, since if I do not believe in free will then my own view on free will is itself not a free choice. And yet I still feel strongly that my not believing in free will appears to be my free choice.
- vidarh 5y ago
  This is what I mean by setting vengeance up vs. "the bare mininal extent required to protect others". I agree that there are still people who needs to be locked up, including under possibly brutal sentencing terms. E.g. Anders Behring Breivik who carried out the 2011 terrorist attacks in Norway is up on a parole hearing today - if he gets out (it'd take a miracle) it doesn't matter if it's free will (in any sense of the term) or purely deterministic processes that leads him to act if he is still probabilistically likely to carry out another attack - it's still more important to keep the public safe from him than to worry about whether or not he had a genuine choice. To the extent there's a measurable effect of seeing the punishment of others, that too might be a justification, though I find that dicier. But if that is done based on a cold calculation of how it affects offending rates that to me is still very different from vengeance. So to be clear I'm not arguing it removes the justifications for punishments, and I agree with your mention of seeing it as a game theoretic situation - even really harsh punishments might be the best choice in some circumstances. But it removes "they chose this themselves" or "they deserve it" as a justification (the feeling is still valid; acting on it becomes cruel), and that makes for a very different legal system. It also shifts a focus towards considering that if it's not about vengeance, then you should look at how to actually optimise the balance between the public good and treating the prisoners as humanely as you can without reducing the public benefit of the punishment too much. Norway is far from achieving that, but if you look at e.g. Bastøy fengsel [1] ([2] has links to assorted longer articles), you can get one idea of what de-emphasising vengeance and taking rehabilitation and trying to address reoffending rates might start to look like (though Norway has by no means solved that, Bastøy also certainly haven't made it worse, but it also is not the norm in Norway either - yet anyway). For some people, it might well be that harsher prisons works better, or are necessary (I doubt Breivik will ever get the chance to serve his time somewhere like Bastøy for example). (Bastøy is the - so far - culmination of a process of reform that started in the 1960's, at a point where Norwegian prisons were quite brutal and the brutality of it eventually triggered a strong counter-reaction.) For others even less prison (Norway as it is have sentences that would look comically short for e.g. Americans or British people). But evaluating it as a "game theoretic situation" as you say would in any case very likely lead to very major change to how the legal system would work most places in the world (including Norway) [1] http://bastoyfengsel.no/English/ http://bastoyfengsel.no/English/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bast%C3%B8y_Prison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bast%C3%B8y_Prison