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> That always seemed like a meaningless argument to me. Same as that is not the lived experience. I notice that I care about free choice. The idea that there'

> That always seemed like a meaningless argument to me. Same as that is not the lived experience. I notice that I care about free choice. The idea that there's no free will may be a pessimistic outlook to some but to me it's a strictly neutral one. It used to be a bit negative, until I looked more closely that there's a difference between looking at a situation objectively and having a lived experience. When it comes to my inclinations and how I want to live life, lived experience takes precedence. I don't have my thoughts sharp on it, but I don't think the concept even exists philosophically, but I think that's also what you're getting at. It's a conceptual remnant from the past.

adastra22 1y ago
"Free choice" is the first step towards the solution to this paradox: free will is what a deterministic choice feels like from the inside. The popular notion of free will is that our decisions are undetermined, which must imply that there is a random element to them. But though that is the colloquial meaning, it doesn't line up with what people say they want: you want to make your choice according to your own reasons. You want free choice. But unless your own reasoning includes a literal throw of the dice, your justifications deterministically decide the outcome. "Free will" is the ability to make your own choices, and for most people most of the time, those choices are deterministic given the options and knowledge available. Free will and determinism are not only compatible, but necessarily so. If your choices weren't deterministic, it wouldn't be free will.
- vidarh 1y ago
  This is the position that is literally called compatibilist. But when you probe people, while a lot of people will argue in ways that a philosopher might call compatibilist, my experience is that people will also strongly resist the notion that the only options are randomness and determinism. A lot of people have what boils down to a religious belief in a third category that is not merely a combination of those two, but infuses some mysterious third options where they "choose" that they can't explain. Most of the time, people who believe there is no free will (and can't be), like me, take positions similar to what you described, that - again - a proponent of free will might describe as compatibilist, but sometimes we oppose the term for the reason above: A lot of people genuinely believe in a "third option" for choices are made. And so there are really two separate debates on free will: Does the "third option" exist or not, and does "compatibilist free will" exist or not. I don't think I've ever met anyone who seriously disagrees that "free will" the way compatibilists define it exists, so when compatibilists get into arguments over this, it's almost always a misunderstanding... But I have met plenty of people who disagree with the notion that things are deterministic "from the outside".
  - adastra22 1y ago
    It is stronger than compatibilism. Compatibilism argues that free will and determinism are orthogonal. The argument I summarized is that free will is and must necessarily imply determinism..
    - vidarh 1y ago
      I think that is a distinction without difference in as much as it's an excuse not to deal with it. But compatibilist "free will" must imply determinism unless some "magic" third alternative exists, because there isn't another option, and there is no evidence to suggest such a third alternative exists, so in practice every compatibilist I've had this discussion with have fallen back on arguing free will is compatible with determinism.
    - GoblinSlayer 1y ago
      Definition doesn't tell all implications. In practice compatibilists do deeper analysis that reveals that determinism is required for free will.
  - GoblinSlayer 1y ago
    Opposing the term gives a wrong result too, as people jump to hard determinism.
    - vidarh 1y ago
      However "hard" your determinism, there is no support for the notion of agency, and that is all that matters. Without agency, free will is nothing but an illusion, with same moral consequences.
      - GoblinSlayer 1y ago
        And agency as inner motivation exists and is determined by your character, otherwise it would be not yours.
      - adastra22 1y ago
- t47477 1y ago
  I think a reasonable interpretation of the colloquial sense of incompatibilist free will is that people want to be (or have the experience that they are) their own causal origins or prime movers. That they originate an action that is not (purely) the effect of all other actions that have occurred, but in such a way that they decided what that action was. From the outside, this is indistinguishable from randomness. But from the inside, the difference is that the individual had a say in what the action would be. Where this tends to get tangled up with notions of a soul, I think, is that one could argue that such a free choice needs some kind of internal state. If not, then the grounds by which the person makes the choice is a combination of something that is fixed and their environment, which then intuitively seems to reduce the free-will process to a combination of determined and random. So the natural thing to do is then to assign the required "being-ness" (or internal state if you will) to a soul. But there may exist subtle philosophical arguments that sidestep this dilemma. I am not a philosopher: this is just my impression of what commonsense notions of free will mean.
  - adastra22 1y ago
    My point is that from the outside this doesn’t look like randomness at all, unless you are mistaking ignorance of their motives as a random oracle. If you can infer what set of goals drives their decision making, and the decision making process itself (e.g. ADHD brain vs careful considered action) you can very much predict their decisions. Marketing and PR people do this every single day. People don’t behave like random oracles, they behave like deterministic decision makers with complex, partly unknown goals so our predictions of their behavior are not always correct. That’s not the same thing as random.

adastra22 1y ago

"Free choice" is the first step towards the solution to this paradox: free will is what a deterministic choice feels like from the inside. The popular notion of free will is that our decisions are undetermined, which must imply that there is a random element to them. But though that is the colloquial meaning, it doesn't line up with what people say they want: you want to make your choice according to your own reasons. You want free choice. But unless your own reasoning includes a literal throw of the dice, your justifications deterministically decide the outcome. "Free will" is the ability to make your own choices, and for most people most of the time, those choices are deterministic given the options and knowledge available. Free will and determinism are not only compatible, but necessarily so. If your choices weren't deterministic, it wouldn't be free will.

vidarh 1y ago
This is the position that is literally called compatibilist. But when you probe people, while a lot of people will argue in ways that a philosopher might call compatibilist, my experience is that people will also strongly resist the notion that the only options are randomness and determinism. A lot of people have what boils down to a religious belief in a third category that is not merely a combination of those two, but infuses some mysterious third options where they "choose" that they can't explain. Most of the time, people who believe there is no free will (and can't be), like me, take positions similar to what you described, that - again - a proponent of free will might describe as compatibilist, but sometimes we oppose the term for the reason above: A lot of people genuinely believe in a "third option" for choices are made. And so there are really two separate debates on free will: Does the "third option" exist or not, and does "compatibilist free will" exist or not. I don't think I've ever met anyone who seriously disagrees that "free will" the way compatibilists define it exists, so when compatibilists get into arguments over this, it's almost always a misunderstanding... But I have met plenty of people who disagree with the notion that things are deterministic "from the outside".
- adastra22 1y ago
  It is stronger than compatibilism. Compatibilism argues that free will and determinism are orthogonal. The argument I summarized is that free will is and must necessarily imply determinism..
  - vidarh 1y ago
    I think that is a distinction without difference in as much as it's an excuse not to deal with it. But compatibilist "free will" must imply determinism unless some "magic" third alternative exists, because there isn't another option, and there is no evidence to suggest such a third alternative exists, so in practice every compatibilist I've had this discussion with have fallen back on arguing free will is compatible with determinism.
  - GoblinSlayer 1y ago
    Definition doesn't tell all implications. In practice compatibilists do deeper analysis that reveals that determinism is required for free will.
- GoblinSlayer 1y ago
  Opposing the term gives a wrong result too, as people jump to hard determinism.
  - vidarh 1y ago
    However "hard" your determinism, there is no support for the notion of agency, and that is all that matters. Without agency, free will is nothing but an illusion, with same moral consequences.
    - GoblinSlayer 1y ago
      And agency as inner motivation exists and is determined by your character, otherwise it would be not yours.
    - adastra22 1y ago
t47477 1y ago
I think a reasonable interpretation of the colloquial sense of incompatibilist free will is that people want to be (or have the experience that they are) their own causal origins or prime movers. That they originate an action that is not (purely) the effect of all other actions that have occurred, but in such a way that they decided what that action was. From the outside, this is indistinguishable from randomness. But from the inside, the difference is that the individual had a say in what the action would be. Where this tends to get tangled up with notions of a soul, I think, is that one could argue that such a free choice needs some kind of internal state. If not, then the grounds by which the person makes the choice is a combination of something that is fixed and their environment, which then intuitively seems to reduce the free-will process to a combination of determined and random. So the natural thing to do is then to assign the required "being-ness" (or internal state if you will) to a soul. But there may exist subtle philosophical arguments that sidestep this dilemma. I am not a philosopher: this is just my impression of what commonsense notions of free will mean.
- adastra22 1y ago
  My point is that from the outside this doesn’t look like randomness at all, unless you are mistaking ignorance of their motives as a random oracle. If you can infer what set of goals drives their decision making, and the decision making process itself (e.g. ADHD brain vs careful considered action) you can very much predict their decisions. Marketing and PR people do this every single day. People don’t behave like random oracles, they behave like deterministic decision makers with complex, partly unknown goals so our predictions of their behavior are not always correct. That’s not the same thing as random.