[danbruc]

The usual argument is that compatibilists are moving the goal posts, but I simply don't understand that argument.

It is moving the goal post because it just changes the definition of free will into some triviality. I had a choice between apples and oranges and I picked the apple because I like apples more. Sure, you can call this free will if you want to but what is the point? The max function had a choice between 1 and 2 and picked 2 because it likes bigger numbers more.

Maybe you want to contrast the above situation with a situation where the apples are sold out or someone forces you at gunpoint to pick the orange. But this is now an entirely different thing, now we are talking about external constraints. And you can move into all kinds of directions and define free will to be this or that but the result will always be kind of trivial.

[jakobnissen]

Do you really think the difference between someone coerced and someone free is "trivial"?

Or between someone who is free to make a choice because they are informed versus one who can't make it because they don't know of it? Or between someone who is capable of understanding the consequences of their actions and someone who is not?

These differences are - obviously, I might add - very important. And they have nothing to do with magical free will.

By the way, the difference between internal and external factors is not the critical thing. There are several ways to restrict people's free will with internal factors - like for example, a person who doesn't know X exists cannot make a free choice to do X.

[danbruc]

They are trivial in the sense that you can easily reason about them. Sure, you can construct wildly complex scenarios where available knowledge, resulting consequences, existing constraints, and what not make it non-obvious what can or cannot or should or should not be done but that this will only be a consequence of the complexity of the situation. This is in contrast to [magical] free will where you have fundamental problems of even defining the meaning of your concepts and arguably you are destined to fail because the concept is logical inconsistent to begin with.

[jakobnissen]

I'm sorry, but I still completely fail to understand why concerns about competence, informed decision making, ability to understand consequences and coercion is not _the_ relevant point here.

Why is it relevant how easily we can reason about them?

[danbruc]

I agree with you that this are the relevant points but they only become the relevant points once you accept that there is no magical free will. And it seems to me that this is not generally accepted.

[dlkf]

> These differences are - obviously, I might add - very important. And they have nothing to do with magical free will.

So why continue to use an unrelated term that has so much baggage? Why not just tackle these issues individually, on their own terms, in language that isn't laundering outmoded intuitions about some magic grounds for responsibility?

[jakobnissen]

Because they _do_ have something to do with _actual_ free will. When you drill down at what "free will" could plausibly and coherently mean, you inevitably end up focusing on these important differences.

And then you can _actually_ begin to articulate why someone is culpable and another person isn't. A magical free will believer can't really make sense of that, because if free will is something indescribable and magic, there is no reason to believe a person does not have free will to do X, just because they e.g. are incapable of doing it.

Conversely, if you believe _both_ in magical free will, and have also thought about the material conditions for free will (e.g. they must be informed, and understand the consequences, and not be coerced etc.), then you already have a completely coherent materialistic belief about free will, and have just awkwardly bolted supernaturalness to its side, completely unnecessarily.

[danbruc]

Because they _do_ have something to do with _actual_ free will.

But this is the problem right there, you call it actual free will and someone believing in magical free will will deny this and call magical free will actual free will. Sure, one can do this, overload the term, and figure out from context what kind of actual free will is meant in each instance. But would it not be much easier to give up on the term free will and use new different terms for different things?

[jakobnissen]

It's similar to how both people who believe in phlogiston and people who believe in chemistry call fire "fire" - or how people who believe in the life spark and people who don't call life "life", or how people call light "light" regardless of whether they believe in the ether, the standard model or something else.

No matter the academic discussion of what free will is or isn't, we still have to address the fact that dominoes and animals and people appear to behave according to different rules. We have to consider the difference between freedom and coercion. We have to address what accountability and responsibility means, and what makes a person morally blameworthy.

This is what people talk about when they talk about free will. That's why people can claim they strongly believe in free will without being able to articulate, or even having thought much about, how free will is instantiated.

In short: Because "free will" is a name for something we concretely observe. We may be misinterpreting what we observe (maybe it _is_ an illusion), but we still only have that one name for that thing.

[kazoomonger]

> the fact that dominoes and animals and people appear to behave according to different rules

The crux of the issue is that you're wrong here. Humans have this vanity that we're special, but we're really not. We behave according to the same rules, we're just relatively complex systems within those rules compared to dominoes.

When most people think of "free will", what they actually mean is "unpredictability". That's why nobody thinks dominoes have free will, some people think animals have free will, and lots of people think humans have free will. It's much harder to predict human behavior from the point of view of a human than dominoes, but to a superintelligent AI, we're just dominoes.

> accountability and responsibility ... morally blameworthy.

It's actually very simple and doesn't require any such notions. If there is a thing that is causing you or others harm, you act to prevent that thing from causing harm. There's no difference between a murderer and a deadly snake in that regard. I'm not going to ponder whether or not its morally blameworthy as I remove it from my house.

[croon]

I don't know where I myself land, but free will gets more interesting in situations like:

* I see a piece of litter on the sidewalk and a garbage can on the other side of the road. Do I pick it up or not. Why/why not?

* I never feel like working out. Sometimes I do it, sometimes I don't. Why?

Sure, you can reduce these down to apples v oranges and just claim they have more variables to check first, but there's a lot of things we "decide" to do outside of preference.

[danbruc]

There are always constraints and preferences and whatnot. Do you have time to pick up the can? Do you care about the garbage on the street? And this will result in an action be somehow combining all those bits and pieces. Could be perfectly deterministic but could as well have an element of randomness, for example you care enough to pick up the can four out of five times if no other constraints prevent you from doing so. But whether there is some deterministic logic behind your decision or whether your brain just flipped a coin or a combination of both, there is no deep mystery here, just a very complex system that is hard to predict.

[usgroup]

I think decisions presupposing self-consciousness posit an input into the decision making process that doesn’t come from the outside. Surely correlated with the world but not determined by it.