3 ms·
You can dismiss them as “mental gymnastics” but defining the term is the heart of the discussion. Philosophers argued about gravity and heat a lot too before we
by snowwrestler 5y ago
You can dismiss them as “mental gymnastics” but defining the term is the heart of the discussion. Philosophers argued about gravity and heat a lot too before we settled on rigorous physical definitions that could be expressed mathematically.
At a first approximation there are obviously limits to our “free” will as no one has yet been able to will themselves to float through the air without support, go without food or water indefinitely, pop a pet dragon into existence, survive the physical destruction of their brain, etc.
So it’s hard to start from a position that anyone ever seriously thought “free will” meant no limits or dependencies.
- danbruc 5y agoMental gymnastics was probably not the best choice for the wording. What I really meant is defining free will as something that is in a certain sense trivial. If you want to call making choices according to your personal preferences free will, fine, but this is a triviality and we don't need to debate over this for centuries. And the next guy looks into the predictability of decisions and assigns free will to an entity if its future behavior can not be determined with certain resource constraints. Fine except that the term is now overloaded, you might have the first but not the second kind of free will and both properties are not well described by the term free will.