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by Jesse_Ray 4919 days ago
You misunderstood my argument. I did not assert the existence or nonexistence of libertarian free will or compatibilist free will. Such assertions were beside the point. I was only pointing out that the argument to which I responded contained a logical error. It assumes that "people do not have libertarian free will" entails "people are causally impotent", but the former does not entail the latter.

As an aside, your omission of "libertarian" from the quote of me suggests that you might be conflating two kinds of free will. Because you talk about free will without specifying the kind, the meaning of your reply is ambiguous. Hence, I have trouble agreeing or disagreeing with it. For what it is worth, I do not deny that compatibilist free will can have various degrees of freedom, where the degree is a function of the complexity and arrangement of the things it emerges from. For example, I do not deny that humans, dogs, and cats can be said to have compatibilist free will, nor that the human wills have more degrees of freedom than dog wills and cat wills.

1 comments

My point is rather that you cannot argue meaningfully about "will" by pointing to physical causality; the two are at different levels of abstraction. It gives absurd results.