Originally posted by Obbe
So what do you mean by this in relation to free will?
The term free will brings a range of ideas that are related to
agency AKA what makes you qualify as a morally competent agent. This is the meat of the idea. Literally everything about the idea is about its relationship to agency. In one conception, it also carries (as a naive
assumption) that the ultimate root of your agency is informed by some sneaky spoopmin like a soul. We both agree that's not real, so lets throw it away. But instead we can give a very reasonable material bound (rather than a "soul") to define the fringes of your responsibility for your actions and keep everything else.
The only justification you have ever given to this is that "the common conception" of free will involves the spoopy idea, so we can't call anything without that free will. Which is frankly total horseshit; if you ask almost anyone whether or not your genetics and your upbringing have an impact on the way you behave as an adult, they'll say yes. I would bet money that the answer wouldn't be no. In fact, by merely proposing that one participate in the act of choice (lets say with two options), you are proposing a constraint down to two degrees of freedom.
It's obvious that the idea of an immortal soul or whatever as an ultimate intentional causer is still present in a lot of people's minds, but it's just an explanatory bridge that exists
in addition to [genes+environment], probably as a vestige from religion because the mechanics of our decision making are very complicated and mostly opaque to us through introspection.
Free will is what I call the sensation of being in control of my thoughts and actions and intentions
Ok, we're good so far. We can fully give you this without any contradiction with determinism.
and the idea that I could have done something differently than I did if I could turn back time.
Why? What
about your conception of freedom is contingent on this?
Lets imagine you and I went for lunch to a place that offers a side of fries or coleslaw with each meal, and lets assume that you vastly prefer fries.
If I rewound that occasion exactly as it was a billion times, you would choose fries again a billion times. Why wouldn't you? Of course; you like fries better than slaw!
More importantly, I could also take you to the same restaurant many times over the course of many years and presumably, even despite the conditions not being precisely the same every time, you would still pick fries. Each time I can make this prediction based on the fact that you prefer fries, and it's not a coin flip each time, if you want fries then you get fries. I know you control your order because that's why it's fries every time. And if you order something that would obviously be worse with fries than with slaw due to your preference for fries and then don't like the combo, I can rightly blame you for your decision
because of your predisposition, rather than
in spite of it.
Additionally, if I take someone who prefers slaw into the same restaurant, he might choose slaw. And he might choose slaw every time with the same predictive accuracy, and the same range of variables surrounding the decision (same restaurant, sufficiently randomized and controlled environment between both people).
Nobody would argue that you don't have a predisposition to make certain choices, in fact it's integral to your identity. You want to require some additional "essence" to tack on to take responsibility, when it's just a stupid concern that isn't even relevant to the meat of the concept. There are degrees of responsibility as there are degrees of freedom, and responsibility is an extremely useful semantic tool that gives us large syntactic efficiency at dealing with situations involving agents that exercise agency. For example, we can use it to enable the "intentional stance", which is a highly important "hack" that is integral to our lives and causally consequential to our world in a real way and has no substitute. The best demonstration of this is Dennett's two black boxes thought experiment:
http://cogprints.org/247/1/twoblack.htmThe tl;dr version is; there is surely some syntactical (mechanical) explanation that could principally be found to explain the causal regularity between the two boxes, but it is no substitute for the utility of the
semantic explanation involving true and false, which has no easy, clean unifying syntactical basis or explanation. In this case, the view of LaPlace's Demon would actually lose to the view of a human in terms of syntactical efficiency; you could either hand simulate the physical path of each different string with each system state to determine if it will activate any given light, or just write a true, false or indeterminable statement and would be massively more useful for predicting which light turns on, and even for determining when the check will fail by seeing whether the two boxes share the same semantic concept, even if they share no syntactical similarities at all.
This type of semantic property has real causal relevance to our world; for example, a traffic light is massively important to the functioning of our society purely through semantic representation.
If we agree that sensation does not reflect reality, that our thoughts and actions and intentions are caused by a variety of factors we have no influence over and that we could not have done differently than we did in the past, then I do not know what you mean by "everything else" in relation to free will.
I don't know why it's so hard for you to just use the "and" operator and model freeness of will on a spectrum. No you don't ultimately control anything. Nothing ultimately controls anything, it's just causes and effects backwards and forwards into infinity. That's just a stupid definition of control and is just vacuous pedantry; we can call it "Buntimuntimer" instead if you'd like, but it's just an unnecessary restart from 0 where we have to reconstruct the exact same concepts but with a different word because you don't like that it has one particular bad connotation.
Let me give you an actual science example; back in the 18th and 19th century, there was a movement called Vitalism that seeked to establish that life required a special "elan vital", a substance of life, that breathed the fire the fire of biology into otherwise lifeless physical processes. Well guess what; elan vital doesn't exist, and all the sufficient conditions for life can be met through what are fundamentally just physical interactions.
The autistic way to process this would be "life isn't real; there is no substance called life and life is an illusion". The sensible way to deal with it, and which is how we collectively did deal with it, was to say "life is real, but it isn't what we thought it was."
We very easily abandoned the soul without abandoning life at all; life is simply the phenomenon and our understanding of its explanation has changed. That's the same case as our free will; we freedom of will for reasons that have nothing to do with a magical element, just like we have life and it has nothing to do with a magical substance. We can just as easily abandon the soul without abandoning free will at all.
If you can just admit that you might not
ultimately control anything but you can still control some things more than others, you open up a field of useful efficiency, just like we can make very useful determinations by saying "life is a thing, some things are more alive than other, and there are boundary conditions where something counts as not being alive any more", even though there is no defined point where a soul escapes you and you "become dead" or the fire enters you and you "become alive". Whether or not I put you in the hospital or in the cemetery from a given point onwards relies on this call, despite the lack of "life juice".
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