(no subject)

[sigmaleph]

i have bowed out of the free will debate going on in my tumblr dash, because I know from experience no matter how convincing my arguments and analogies feel to me they will not change anyone's mind (nor will the reverse happen) and it is tedious for my followers to see it.

but gosh it is An Effort to tell my 'but that's wrong, and I have a clever way to show how!' instincts to shut up and not reply.

(incidentally if you want to tell me all about how compatibilism is wrong, the dreamwidth comment section for this post is open and doesn't dump annoying arguments where anyone else has to see them)

Comments

[feotakahari]

My standard is that all philosophy is either ethics or a meaningless waste of time. As a utilitarian, I don’t need free will or lack of same for my ethics, so I get to not care about free will.

[lunartulip]

I think my objection to compatibilism is encapsulated pretty well by a short exchange I once had with one of my philosophy teachers:

Me: "I think we have every bit as much freedom as a falling baseball."
Him: "But I want more freedom than that!"

The point being that, as far as I can tell, the people who care about free will don't consider any action-which-could-have-gone-differently to be indicative of free will (as with the quantum randomness that determines exactly how a baseball falls), but only actions which could have gone differently in a fashion driven by the actor in some fashion. Given determinism, and even given non-determinism for as long as the non-deterministic processes fundamentally live in low-level physics rather than in minds, that criterion can't possibly be filled; therefore, compatibilism is false. (At least relative to that particular conceptualization of free will; I have the impression that it's the one people who care about free will are generally talking about, but I could be wrong about that, and if so that would make this argument inapplicable.)

[sigmaleph]

So the point of compatibilism is precisely "that definition of free will you're using is bad and also incoherent, here's a better one"

I think I have more free will than a falling baseball, because a falling baseball doesn't have any at all. I don't think this means I'm exempt from physics, I just think it's a mistake to reason about free will as though the options are "freedom" or "whatever physics says you will do".

because, like, we are made of physics.

It'd be absurd to say "gravity doesn't make things fall down, because in a deterministic universe either things fall down or they don't, so clearly there can't be any role left over for gravity to play". Gravity is the mechanism via which things fall down in a deterministic universe. Analogously, I think it's absurd to say "you don't make choices, because in a deterministic universe, physics determines what happens and there's no role left over for you to play". I am a subset of physics and my brain doing its thing is the mechanism via which physics determines what happens when I make a choice.

[lunartulip]

...in that case, I'm confused about why people care about fighting over free will. Like, if they're not fighting over whether the world has some specific property (as I thought they were, with the property being the actor-driven could-have-gone-differently-ness I was using in my post) and are instead just fighting over what the term 'free will' should designate, why is that a fight anyone is invested in? Why not just say "the incompatible-with-physics thing is called Free Will One, the thing which it's obviously true that we have is called Free Will Two, we have the latter but not the former"?

[sigmaleph]

I mean, because it's not just about what words we use but about further implications of the concept.

like. some people say the thing compatibilists call free will is not enough for moral responsibility, because you are not "really" making choices. So there's no such thing as evil in a deterministic universe. I disagree. You could call that a disagreement about words like "evil" and "moral responsibility", too, but ultimately it cashes out in different opinions about punishment and stuff.

and also some people argue that, since we clearly feel like we are making choices, and clearly we could not feel that in a deterministic universe, this must have implications about have brains actually work. So pointing out how choices work in a deterministic perspective is a way of arguing that this notion that we are making choice is not evidence for anything.

and also because compatibilists think that the thing the libertarian free will side thinks we have is not just not real but also can't meaningfully be real, so that's a disagreement about, idk, metaphysics or ontology or something.