[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