Summations Only

Free will, to me, is incompatible with determinism by definition. In a long string of dominoes, the one one with free will gets to decide, itself, whether it will fall over or not (rather than the dominoe before it causing it to fall). Free will means that the choice you make was not and could not be determined before you, yourself, made it. It means that when you're standing at a Y in the road, the direction you will choose can not be traced back to the big bang, ultimately.The revisionist-compatiblist does use a different definition than this (whether or not the man in the street uses this definition, I don't know). Some people seem to be using a less strict definition of free will in the sense that raising your arm is "free will" regardless of whether it was pre-determined or not. I think that's a revision as well.And to reuse one of the analogies, I find the revisionist-compatiblist to be like this:MITS: "Were tigers created?"R-C: "Yes, of course tigers were created... ...created by Evolution!" You know what you're doing."Do we have free will?""Yes, its just pre-determined" Edited by Catholic Scientist, : No reason given.Edited by Catholic Scientist, : No reason given.

But Free Will doesn't mean that you're free to fly around like Superman or will millions of dollars into your pocket.... there's still contraints. Yeah it just moves it back; you have the will to not be shot by the guy and that's why you do what he says.But it *is* less free than if he wasn't there.There was other confusion between posters about whether or not you'd eat a shit sandwich, iirc. Obviously, that's gross and nobody would want to, but you could will yourself to do it if you really wanted too. So that could still be free will even if you weren't stoked about doing it.

Yeah, that makes it seem like its not absolute, full stop, to me. Thus making free will an illusion, I agree with that. I just thought the "abosulte-full stop" part was a little misleading/confusing. Go the other way with it: if I tied you down so you couldn't do anything at all, then you'd loose practically all the freedom of you will. But sometimes you have more constraints than others. But its never absolutely, full stop, free... because there's always some contraints.

Yes, if the laws of physics are completely deterministic.

Gotcha. Oh, ok, I see what you mean. With hard determinism, there was only one option for you from the beginning no matter what, so in that sense, there's only one level of contrain-ness: totally contrained. That makes sense. Yeah, like at all. Right: determinism. No free will.

Thanks, but I've always been an incompatibalist... there is one thing tho: I'm not much of a determinist

It sure seems like I can*... but I don't know how to tell if that's really an illusion or not.And I'm not totally convinced that the laws of physics are entirely deterministic... even that could be illusory because we're mostly dealing with idealizations.I do know one thing: If it is all predetermined, then we are just robots and we don't have free will.* I think thats a big part of it: With the simple approach of: "Hrm, do I have free will?" \raises arm\ "Yup, sure do" -- you get to the conclusion of free will. Its denying all that as an illusion that I'm not much for. At least, I don't find it convincing.

Well, sometime I act like I can't... It can help overcome fear. If I'm poised to hit a big jump on my dirtbike, I might think to myself: "well, just go for it, if I'm not supposed to make this, then it was all pre-determined anyways and there's nothing I can do to prevent it" Well, its about breaking causality, and thus breaking hard determinism - which has to happen to allow for true free will.We haven't identified what causes of a particular atom radioactively decaying, or the cause of the direction of the path an electron takes in a 'random walk', etc. This doesn't mean that they are cause-less, but with randomness-including simulations accurately modeling the behavior, it can seem like there is an element of randomness present. Too, if you spend enough time in the lab, eventually you'll get something that doesn't line up with theory. Even on the chemistry level, I've had mixtures react totally unexpectedly... heh, sometimes we joke: "must've been the hand of god on that one". The point is the idealization, we'd like to think that given these things mixing, its inevitable that this is the result, and then when that doesn't happen we think that we must've done something wrong. But what really happened? Maybe things don't always go as their supposed to. Now, I've never seen a ball drop upwards, but in the physics lab we had one that didn't fall at 9.8 m/s/s... It was assumed that we did something wrong, but how do we know if we really did? There's so much variance... We've all had it happen where we're gonna go to the store and end up driving half-way to work without even realizing it. Certainly a lot of the choices on the way were made unconsciously. On the other end, I spent some minutes deciding which attachment to put on my shotgun in Battlefield 3 last night, I was gonna go with the one, but then I thought about it some more and decided to change it back at the last minute. My will itself seemed like to sole causal agent in that choice and it was kinda a flippant decision based on asthetics (I like the reticle in the red-dot sight a little bit better even tho the kobra one with the ring might be better with a shotgun).Or you could add in another element... I throw to you a glass ball. You can either catch or watch it shatter. Its up to you whether that ball shatters or not. Without you, its definately gonna shatter, but you have the ability to cause that to not happen. You have time to weigh the options, and decide which outcome you'd prefer to see. You're having a real effect on the future and you are the cause of that future. The question is whether that future was pre-determined or if you, yourself, get to have a say in what's going to happen. If I was destined to break my arm on that jump from the moment of the big bang, then we aren't anything more than robots. But if we, ourselves, can cause causality, then in a sense we have broken the laws of physics... or maybe not broken, but molded into our own laws. If you decide to catch the glass ball, you've changed the causality of the situation. It was going to break, but you changed the future. You caused it, yourself, seperately from the chain of causality that was in place had you not stepped in.But that's on a different level than the reactions going on in your brain that make the decision and how those are subject to causality...

But the moon being not perfectly spherical didn't mean that the moon didn't actually exist as understood but was instead an illusion.Like I said before, what your doing is like saying:"Of course tigers were created!.. they were created by evolution."The fact that they evolved means that they weren't created at all and that its only an illusion that they were created.

So how are you at snake handling? I'm sorry for your loss. Like a boss! The hard determinist cannot allow for any element of randomness so its a counter argument to the non-existence of free will being based on hard determinism. It doesn't have to be randomness... you just have to allow for you, yourself, to be a part of the cause that is independent of any previous state. Yeah, but I thought about it for a minute and came to a decision on my own. It didn't feel like it was influenced. Look at it this way:I can sit here and look at my hand and move my fingers around however I like, on call whenever I want them to move. Its simply a result of me willing them to move. It doesn't seem like an inevitable outcome due to a long string of causes that result in my pinky curling up just a bit. No, I just made the decision to do it right now and I, myself, was the cause of it happening indepenently of the previous states of my existence.I just can't sit here and watch my fingers move and get the sense that they were pre-determined to do that. But the bed couldn't have changed its mind and decided to go ahead and watch the ball shatter just for the fun of it.

I don't think so. Implicit in the Mits definition of free will is the incompatibility with determinism (I assume, we may just have a difference of opinion here). A better anology would be if you were discussing "created tigers" because the word tiger alone does not imply creation like the definition of free will implies non-determinism. Better: "Of course created tigers still exist, even though they evolved; they're exactly the same thing whether they were evolved or created or anything else"Sure, but referring to them as "created tigers" gives the wrong impression like referring to a free will that is compatible with determinism does. Better: you should stop calling them created tigers.

But hard determinism asserts that the initial conditions of the universe determine all future states, so there is no room for any randomness. Okay, I'm not inserting randomness into decision making either. What I was trying to offer, was another option: that you are a cause of your own causality. That is, you, yourself, as a cause that is independent of another. A source of cause, so to speak.

There's an extra "not" in there... But I get what you're saying.I honestly could go either way, but I'm not convinced that it is fully deterministic. To further complicate it: it could be that its not really random, but random with respect to prediction... If you knew all the states of a person's brain, could you really predict which choice they will make? Maybe, maybe not. If you couldn't, that doesn't necessitate that their choice was a random one. It could just be independent. I'm convinced that I am in control. The chaos has been overcome. Granted, that could just be an illusion. Well I play the piano... sometimes I know exactly which notes to hit next, and am sending the signals to my fingers for exactly what to do, and it still doesn't come out right. Other times, afterwards I'll go: "OMG, how did I pull that off!?" As the saying goes: Shit happens. Gawsh, I can sit here and wiggle my finger at will and know exactly when its going to start moving before it actually does.