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by gnashville
3684 days ago
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An agent's ability to do and not do without external influence or coercion. The other side of this though is if the agent believes he or she has the ability to do or not do, but actually doesn't, is it still free will? An example being you enter your office with the intention of working for five hours. Without realizing it, the door locks behind you from the outside, leaving you effectively trapped. Even if you never attempt to leave the room, are you staying at your own free will? |
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But in simple model, of just a world, where one only has configurations of atoms (or configurations of some substance or etc), there's nothing uniquely determining what's internal and what's external, what's an agent and what's not. So "free will" winds-up achingly ill-defined/under-determined here.
I think your definition is further relevant in that a lot of arguments confuse an ontological model and with a social/political model. And this could well be natural - as social beings, it seems like we tend to both model the world and see agents within it and so saying "in this model, you have choice but in this other model, you and choice don't exist" is highly counter-intuitive to an average human.