[margalabargala]

Additional note: compatibilism is only obviously correct if you accept that "free will" actually just means "the experienced perception/illusion of free will" as described by Schopenhauer.

Using a slightly different definition of free will, suddenly Compatibilism becomes obviously incorrect.

And now it's been reduced to quibbling over definitions, thereby reinventing much of the history of philosophy.

[FeepingCreature]

I think free will as philosophically used is inherently self-defeating and one of the largest black marks on the entire field, to be fair.

[margalabargala]

Why is that?

Here's what we know:

- we appear to experience what we call free will from our own perspective. This isn't strong evidence obviously. - we are aware that we live in a world full of predictable mechanisms of varying levels of complexity, as well as fundamentally unpredictable mechanisms like quantum mechanics. - we know we are currently unable to fully model our experience and predict next steps. - we know that we don't know whether consciousness as an emergent property of our brains is fully rooted in predictable mechanisms or has some decree of unknowability to it.

So really "do we have free will" is a question that relies on the nature of consciousness.

[FeepingCreature]

No, I disagree with this conclusion. The problem is very much solvable if one simply keeps the map/territory split in mind, and for every thing asks himself, "am I perceiving reality or am I perceiving a property of my brain?" That is, we "experience free will" - this is to say, our brain reports to us that it evaluated multiple possible behaviors and chose one. However, this does not indicate that multiple behaviors were physically possible, it only indicates that multiple behaviors were cognitively evaluated. In fact, because any deciding algorithm has to evaluate a behavior list or even a behavior tree, there is no reason at all to expect this to have any connection to physical properties of the world, such as quantum mechanics.

(The relevant LessWrong sequence is "How An Algorithm Feels From Inside" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-alg... which has nothing to do with free will, but does make very salient the idea that perceptions may be facts about your cognition as easily, if not more easily, as facts about reality.)

And when you have that view in mind, you can ask: "wait, why would the brain be sensitive to quantum physics? It seems to be a system extremely poorly suited to doing macroscopic quantum calculations." Once the alternative theory of "free will is a perception of your cognitive algorithm" is salient, you will notice that the entire free-will debate will begin to feel more and more pointless, until eventually you no longer understand why people think this is a big deal at all, and then it all feels rather silly.

[margalabargala]

> However, this does not indicate that multiple behaviors were physically possible

Okay, fine, but what indicates that multiple behaviors were not physically possible?

Our consciousnesses are emergent properties of networks of microscopic cells, and of chemicals moving around those cells at a molecular level. It seems perfectly reasonable that our consciousness itself could be subject to quantum effects that belie determinism, because it operates at a scale where those effects are noticable.

[FeepingCreature]

> Okay, fine, but what indicates that multiple behaviors were not physically possible?

I don't follow. Whether multiple behaviors are possible or not possible, you have to demonstrate that the human feeling of free-will is about that; you have to demonstrate that the human brain somehow measures actual possibility. Alternatively, you have to show that the human cognitive decision algorithm is unimplementable in either of those universes. Otherwise, it's simply much more plausible that the human feeling of freedom measures something about human cognition rather than reality, because brains in general usually measure things around the scale of brains, not non-counterfactual facts about the basic physical laws.

[margalabargala]

Well, no, your hypothesis is not automatically the null hypothesis that's true unless someone else goes through all goalposts regardless of where you move them to.

I know you thought about it for a moment, and therefore had an obvious insight that 40% of the profession has somehow missed (just define terms so to mean things that would make you correct, and declare yourself right! Easy!) but it's not quite that simple.

Your argument that you just made basically boils down to "well I don't think it works that way even though no one knows. But also it's obvious and I'm going to arbitrarily assign probabilities to things and declare certain things likely, baselessly".

If you read elsewhere in this thread then you might find that exact approach being lampooned :-)

[TheAncientGeek]

There isn't a single philosophical meaning. You are probably thinking of libertarian free will..furthering Obviously false because determinism isn't obviously true.