[naasking]

So by that argument, cars don't exist either. Ontologically, this is true. The ontology of physics contains neither cars or free will.

So when someone points to a car and says, "that's a car", what are they doing if not pointing at a car?

If you can answer this question sensibly, then it should be straightforward to also understand what a victim means when they point to an accuser and says, "they attacked me of their own free will".

Free will is just as real as cars. Which is to say either you reject the existence of both, or you reject neither.

[ravenide]

> Free will is just as real as cars.

This is true. They're both abstractions. I think the important property we ought to care about is how easily each abstraction breaks down, in the sense of leading to an untrue belief.

Calling a car a car is mostly pretty safe. Although a car is just a shorthand for a bunch of atoms, no one is going to use that fact to take issue with me saying that a car hit me at 40 mph.

Free will is ontologically like the car, but breaks down faster. It implies one could have chosen differently than one did. That's the whole reason people care about free will. But where the fact that cars are just a bunch of atoms is mostly uninteresting, here the fact that 'you' are just a collection of cells is of tremendous relevance, because your 'choices' are themselves just cellular activity. If you try to use the free-will abstraction to claim people 'could have' acted differently, the details underlying your abstraction will start to give you trouble.

Actually, the car abstraction has edge cases too. If you bolt something onto a car, is it still part of the car? What if that thing was what hit me? What if it was someone else who bolted it on? In these cases, what a car 'is' comes under needed scrutiny as well.

[naasking]

> Free will is ontologically like the car, but breaks down faster. It implies one could have chosen differently than one did. That's the whole reason people care about free will.

The Frankfurt cases debunked the full principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), so I disagree that PAP is why people care about free will. I think people recognise that no matter what, we need some ability to assign blame when someone is responsible for causing some harm.

When and how this responsibility is assigned is exactly the function served by free will.

Notice how there is no reference here to being able to do otherwise. That's an assumption you have carried into this debate without justification, and Frankfurt demonstrated that this assumption is actually false.

[ravenide]

> The Frankfurt cases debunked the full principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), so I disagree that PAP is why people care about free will.

I didn’t know about Frankfurt or PAP. Thanks for telling me!

As far as why people care about free will, I dunno, almost everyone I meet insists free will exists, and when I ask why, they insist that they have a choice, and then I say “but you could only have made one choice,” and at this point most of them become absolutely incandescent with disagreement.

I guess I don’t agree that because something is proven false, people will stop caring about it and wanting it to be true.

I think one way out of the blame problem is to recognize that blame being an abstraction (I’m becoming a broken record) doesn’t make it less useful or meaningful. Assigning someone the blame as a killer still gives us the knowledge to act (e.g. separating them from society). But recognizing that ultimately everyone is a victim of fate in one way or another allows us to simultaneously have compassion for the people we’re locking up.

[vidarh]

> As far as why people care about free will, I dunno, almost everyone I meet insists free will exists, and when I ask why, they insist that they have a choice, and then I say “but you could only have made one choice,” and at this point most of them become absolutely incandescent with disagreement.

Because the notion that they don't instinctively feels wrong. It feels like they are choosing, and so it is emotionally difficult to even question how that choice would have worked in a way that gives them agency.

And if they actually think about it, people tend to quickly get a strong impulsive understanding that this would destroy a lot of their world views, such as e.g. as you point out, assigning blame, and we're deeply emotionally invested in believing we can blame people and assign responsibility for all kinds of things.

A lot of people also whether they say so or not are deeply invested in variants of the just world hypothesis, and that just falls apart if people had no alternate possibilities, and so reasonably no blame.

So many attitudes are tied to the assumption that we can discuss fairness and blame and responsibility on the basis of our view of how a person chooses to act. Take away responsibility for those choices, and we need to re-evaluate everything.

I don't think free will is a reasonable belief, by the way. I keep asking people who believe in it to define it in ways that does not just boil down to a veneer or obfuscation of determinism, and in ~30 years of asking countless people that question I've only ever gotten exasperated attempts at avoiding a definition, or attempts at evading the question by claiming dualism, which then leads to exasperation when I ask the same question again, because it remains just as relevant.

Otherwise exceedingly smart people can be reduced to going in circles with logical flaw after logical flaw over this.

[naasking]

> As far as why people care about free will, I dunno, almost everyone I meet insists free will exists, and when I ask why, they insist that they have a choice, and then I say “but you could only have made one choice,” and at this point most of them become absolutely incandescent with disagreement.

Sure, it's frustrating knowing something intuitively without being able to articulate why it makes sense!

If you want to make sense of free will and see evidence that lay people actually accept Compatibilism in which free will is compatible with determinism, I suggest my post elsewhere in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23476919

[adjkant]

The way you are using the object and the name can also apply to humans within a deterministic world though along with the parent argument.

When I say a car, I am using it as shorthand to say "this collection of atoms". Same goes in your example of the attacker. But, you added a very interesting phrase at the end with "of their own free will". I've addressed this in other posts, but basically, what you mean with free will there has nothing to do with the formalized free will the article discusses, but is still very much a relevant idea to the situation and the practical world.

The "you don't exist" in the parent argument is not being used to say the person does not exist in the physical world or with a collective name for the atoms, it simply is highlighting that such a level of complex formal free will doesn't appear to be possible. It's begging the question of the definition of free will.

[naasking]

> what you mean with free will there has nothing to do with the formalized free will the article discusses

There is no accepted formalization of free will, that's why it's still a topic of hot debate in philosophy. When people say that free will exists, they're saying that there is coherent notion of control over one's actions that grounds moral responsibility. Some people additionally assert some metaphysical baggage from religions or what not, but that's irrelevant to the real question of free will.

So I reject your premise that the article's conception, or really anyone's conception, of free will is "canonical" in any meaningful way, and so I also reject your claim that "formal free will doesn't appear to be possible".

[adjkant]

> When people say that free will exists, they're saying that there is coherent notion of control over one's actions that grounds moral responsibility.

My top level post very much says the same thing, I agree.

However, that definition has little to nothing to do with randomness or determinism is very much a mystery to me. When I say "formalized" free will here, I understand that there's much debate on definition, as I exactly said in the post about begging the question of definition. However, the content of these and other free will arguments show that the one many approach is not the one you just supplied. I think both definitions have importance, but the existence of each has different implications.

You seem to have the issue opposite of many formalized philosophers - getting stuck on definition, but on the "practical" one. We're in agreement on that one but using different words. But you're writing off the importance of the "formal", or at least the one this writing implies.

[naasking]

Most philosophers are actually Compatibilists [1], along similiar lines to what I've been writing. I have no issue with determinism as it's compatible with free will in my view.

[1] Around 60% Compatibilist, https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl

[adjkant]

I'm familiar with compatibilism of course. By your definition of free will I would also be considered a compatibilist to you. I'm not arguing that. I'm saying that the different definition of free will (the more stringent / nearly logically impossible one you are writing) still has value in discussion because philosophers argue for it (including some of those compatibilists I'm sure) and that definition has meaning in relation to determinism and the resulting ethics of how we use agency/choice/your definition of free will. You can't erase other conceptions of free will because you believe in one, and I've tried to capture that with the "formal" and "practical" labels, admittedly needing work.

I think we're both on the same page on the definitional problem of free will, but I don't see how/why you are minimizing all other definitions.

[naasking]

Maybe you can provide an example of what sort of definition I rule out, because I'm still not understanding what you mean.

[nicky0]

There is no underlying concept of "free will" just as there is no underlying concept of "a car". They are just names we give to things that appear to be.

Within the experience of consciousness there is a sense of free will. The mind takes ownership of whatever it perceives, and works it into a story, in which itself is the protagonist. So for practical purposes we all behave as if we have free will. It's all just part of the universal dance.

[ajuc]

That kind of free will isn't controversial, but it's also not what people mean when they debate determinism, free will, consciousness, etc.

If we define free will as just an abstraction over some behaviours then nobody's going to argue. But then determinism, quantum mechanics, soul, consciousness and intelligence is irrelevant. You can then speak of free will of a bacteria or a Roomba just as well.

[naasking]

> That kind of free will isn't controversial, but it's also not what people mean when they debate determinism, free will, consciousness, etc.

I disagree:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...

[vidarh]

People may have compatibilist intuitions, but start digging into what they they think past their initial intuitions and you tend to get completely different responses. Most people never think about what free will implies, and so their intuitions are fairly uncorrelated with what they'll insist on if you start questioning them about details in my experience.

[ajuc]

Ask them if their roomba has free will.

[naasking]

Their roomba doesn't have thoughts, beliefs, intentions or the ability to learn in any meaningful way.

Ask yourself to what extent a person who lost the ability to form new memories should be responsible for breaking a law that changed after their injury.

[ajuc]

What's a thought and why should it matter for free will?

What's an intention, and how do you know roomba doesn't have intentions but people do?

When roomba tries to go forward but can't and changes direction - how is that different from when a human does it?

In the end all the differences are in your model of reality and none of them are in the actual reality. You categorize roomba decision process as "lacking free will" and your own as "having free will". But there's nothing in the actual data justifying that distinction, it's just artifact of our simplified model of the world. Sociall interactions were so important for us that we got huge coprocessors in our brains dedicated to recognizing and simulating decisions processes going on in other humans.

We lack such coprocessors for other decision processes like ai or corporations, so we intuitively feel they are qualitatively different. But there's no data to back that intuition.

> Ask yourself to what extent a person who lost the ability to form new memories should be responsible for breaking a law that changed after their injury.

I could ask why a memory that you form by changing weights on neurons count for a purpose of having free will and memories formed by switching transistors don't. But that's again irrelevant. You can have free will without being able to form memories at all.

Besides in all law systems I know you can be punished for a crime you weren't aware even is a crime.

[naasking]

> I could ask why a memory that you form by changing weights on neurons count and memories formed by switching transistors don't.

There is no difference, as long as those transistors are part of a general learning system. A roomba thus does not qualify.