| > Alas, the author has inadvertently presupposed the existence of agents with free will The existence of agents, not the existence of free will. > For one thing, it uses the language of cause and effect ... is the mass the cause of the acceleration? Completely irrelevant. > In order to at all make an intensional agent's behavior understandable, we have to treat them as uncaused causers. Since your argument feels like 'language games' in places, let me play one too: "We have to treat x as y" strongly implies that x is not y, but it's useful to pretend that it is. > And you have spoken counter-factually about this agent: the agent could have chosen to vary or not to vary the force. "Could have chosen" is like a coin which "could land on one side or the other". Not knowing the outcome of the coin flip is no reason to suggest the coin had a choice. Likewise with more complicated devices. From simple open-source programs, to programs whose source code you can't see, to a set of pre-trained weights embedded in an LLM mimicking neurons, to neurons themselves, automata become harder and harder to predict, but there's no cutoff after which an input-output device becomes qualitatively different. We are soggy meat responding to measurable electrical signals. > But arguing against free will by invoking the language of cause and effect, as the above definition does, is a category mistake If not cause-and-effect, what exactly do you propose 'free will' is 'free' from? |