[joelfried]

Many would say you can't have free will in a deterministic world because free will is about selecting one option from many. If there is no alternative option -- because the universe is completely determined -- how can you have any choice? You were always going to do exactly what it was previously determined you were always going to do.

[card_zero]

They want "agency", which means something like looking at the universe and interfering with it without being part of it, like a scientist with the universe in a petri dish, somehow external to any universe and not subject to any rules or causality.

It's a bizarre but apparently intuitive wish. But this isn't necessary. A robot can select one option from among many. We can predict the robots choice. A human can do the same, and we can't predict the human's choice so well, because humans are deep and complex and actually think, but it's still a mechanism, and so what? The error here is in thinking that "mechanism = robot" and "mechanism = amoral", neither of which are true - except for all the non-human mechanisms, which is the great majority of the mechanisms (processes, etc.) that we see, and we don't like being lumped in with them in case it makes us robots and removes responsibility for choices. But it just doesn't.

[lupire]

And yet, knowing that free will does not exist can change someone's whole life trajectory. So free will is a useful delusion. But we can't control if we get to have the delusion. It's not surprising if this like of reasoning seems familiar.

[card_zero]

Free will does exist, deterministic agency exists, and reasoning that determinism removes moral responsibility is an error. What doesn't exist is this metaphysical type of god-like beyond-universe agency that people obsess over for no obvious reason.

[lisper]

Free will is not a delusion it is an illusion. The difference is significant. Illusions are normal sensory perceptions common across nearly all humans that just happen not to correspond to anything in physical reality.

[naasking]

> Many would say you can't have free will in a deterministic world because free will is about selecting one option from many. If there is no alternative option -- because the universe is completely determined -- how can you have any choice?

Because "select 1 option among many" is not what's meant by free will and not how anyone serious understands the term. If someone is holding a gun to your head and telling you to choose option X, which is an option that you would NOT otherwise choose, you still have a choice by your definition, because you can choose to die or choose to accede to those demands. No one would agree that you have a freely willed choice though. Clearly you're missing some important ingredient, and this extra bit is why free will is compatible with determinism.

[lolinder]

Some people in those situations have absolutely chosen to get shot, which means that true determinism functions differently than a metaphorical gun. You might not be morally culpable for what you do while under threat of death, but that's a separate question from whether you could physically have done something different.

In a deterministic universe there isn't a gun to your head, instead what you will do was decided by the configuration of atoms immediately after the Big Bang (and presumably by the configuration of whatever the heck came before). In a deterministic universe I do what I do because particles hit into each other in particular ways over countless eons and those particle interactions eventually coalesced into what I call myself and the particles in my brain bounce in particular ways that interact to create an illusion of choice.

[naasking]

> You might not be morally culpable for what you do while under threat of death, but that's a separate question from whether you could physically have done something different.

The principle of alternate possibilities was debunked by the Frankfurt cases, and that was not the point of the gun scenario.

The point was that nobody would consider a person acting under threat of death to be making freely willed choices, so defining choice in the naive and reductive sense that was suggested is just incorrect because it cannot exclude this case. Therefore this naive and reductive definition cannot be what people mean by "choice" in the context of free will.

> In a deterministic universe I do what I do because particles hit into each other in particular ways over countless eons and those particle interactions eventually coalesced into what I call myself and the particles in my brain bounce in particular ways that interact

So an intelligent being was created with certain preferences and values, and as long as this being was able to deliberate and make choices in accordance with those preferences and values, that being was making freely willed choices. How this being was able to do this at the subatomic level is completely irrelevant, and bringing it up is, at best, a category error.

[joelfried]

> The point was that nobody would consider a person acting under threat of death to be making freely willed choices, so defining choice in the naive and reductive sense that was suggested is just incorrect because it cannot exclude this case. Therefore this naive and reductive definition cannot be what people mean by "choice" in the context of free will.

I disagree with this characterization as it omits entirely the moral culpability central to Frankfurt's argumentation. Frankfurt cases are about moral culpability[1]. I did not refer to morality or culpability but only the base naive case given that the question was "why can't you have both?" and I think the epistemic force of the base case is nontrivial.

I think your error here is that you are presuming:

(a) If you are acting under threat of death, you cannot do otherwise but save your life. (b) When you define freedom as the ability to have done otherwise, you cannot be free in the case of (a). (c) All cases of human choice must be free. (d) Given (b) and (c), the definition must be incorrect.

As the other person in the thread pointed out, some people can choose death in the face of death or some other choice. It has happened many times throughout history. So saying "you must save your life" is outright false. Some people choose one option, some people choose another. This has no force on the definition of freedom.

Even if you say in that specific case a person is not free because they could not do otherwise, it does not follow that the definition of freedom can't handle the case. It may follow that the person is not blameworthy - which is what Frankfurt was getting at - but that's nowhere near saying that the theory can't handle the case at all. Some might say the person under threat of death could do otherwise, some might say the person under threat of death could not do otherwise. That's not fatal to anything, it just shows the definition is incomplete.

[1] Wikipedia covers it somewhat here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_cases#Frankfurt's_ob... but if you don't like Wikipedia for some reason, the intro to this 2007 paper https://digitalcommons.unf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1... gives more or less the same description.