Summations Only

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.

I don't deny that. But apply some common sense: if I pointed a gun at your head and said 'Steal that shirt or die' - would it be even remotely reasonable to ever say 'Straggler stole the shirt of his own free will'?I would say the following: If you steal the shirt, you were not acting of your own free will. If you do anything else (Struggle with the gunman, refuse to steal the shirt, steal the wrong shirt, run away, scream for help) then that was more likely to be something we would be comfortable classifying as 'free will'. Because our brains are deterministic engines. If you supply a certain input you can guarantee the output. Therefore: If a person puts a gun to your head, that may be the determining factor. It is their will that is being executed, not yours, so it cannot be said to be your free will. The key is about what is the proximate cause, the deciding factor. Is it some internal preference, or is it an externally imposed one?You might argue that you are complying of your own free will when you choose to comply, but I don't think Mr Mits would be comfortable with that kind of thing. I'm not using it to define anything, I'm just using it to develop clear examples of what Mr Mits and Dr A would agree is free will and what is not free will.If the will is Mr Gunman's it is not my will. Therefore it is not my free will. It is my will that I steal the shirt, to avoid death - but it would be stretching all possible meanings to say that my will was in any way 'free'. Sure, determinists have their own set of disagreements with Mr Mits. If Mr Mits thinks he was predetermined to steal the shirt, he may well then argue that he can't be morally blamed for doing something he was essentially programmed to do. But Mr Mits thinks he should be blamed for it. Unless, perhaps, he was compelled to via a gun or starvation or something.That is not a unique difference of just the Compatabilists: It's all Determinists.

Except in the very important sense that when Greek philosophers talk about fire, they are talking about the same thing as Dr A is talking about when he talks about fire, even though they disagree on how fire works.Mr Mits and Dr A agree on most things about free will. They just disagree what it is that it is free of. I haven't disagreed. What I am saying is that they are talking about the same practical meaning: They refer to the same real world phenomena when they talk of 'free will'. They may disagree that humans have a soul, but they agree on what a human is. They may disagree about the metaphysical nature of a cloud, but they both agree that the white fluffy things in the skies are called clouds. They may argue ceaselessly about what fire really is, really, deep down at its very metaphysical nature, but they both agree that that hot burny thing is made of fire.

And so would everyone else. My question is, why would they call this supersight, then? Wouldn't that just serve tio introduce confusion, especially among those debating the ability as it was defined, i.e. unaided? Yes, so therefore, I would completely justified in saying that supersight is an illusion, it doesn't exist.

Unfortunately, that sort of thinking doesn't work for me, because I always tend to keep thinking along the lines of, "Well, if I can anticipate that something bad will happen, then it can influence me not to attempt the jump."Of course, I don't often ride dirt bikes. One time, I was riding my mountain bike down a path. Ahead of me, I saw some people, so I took the side course, completely forgetting that it ended in about a 4 foot drop onto rock. When I saw the drop ahead, and knew I couldn't stop in time, yeah, I became kind of fatalistic, and instead of trying to stop it, I just accepted that it was going to happen and did all I could to just land the jump and keep going. It worked out fine. QM implies that randomness is indeed the order of atomic-scale things...or more correctly, probabilities. However, this doesn't exactly add "choice," and in fact, if we added randomness into decision making, I think people would feel even woprse about themselves than if we were all deterministic robots.For example, now we can rationalize when someone does something unspeakably horrible, by assuming they must have had a mental defect, or were abused as a child, or something. If it was actually random or probabilistic, it would seem to imply that there is a non-zero chance that anyone, including yourself, could just do something horrible without anything causing it. That would terrify the bejeezus outta me. That would be an expression of habit, which could be argued to be an example of determinism, or an example of free will, if people were willing to really get into it. Again, that could be because of a host of very complex, minute causes that were in flux. For example, your preference for a certain scope, versus the efficacy of that scope, versus mundane things like your emotional state at the time, the number of actions it takes to change the scope, etc.Complexity seems to be the major driver of the illusion, and in fact, in many interactions, complexity seems to overload the brain's capacity to understand something. But my presence was caused by previous actions. So, given my presence, the ball shattering is less likely, then there is the actual decision to catch the ball or not, on my part. What makes me decide to catch it rather than let it drop?I would be a very active participant in the action, and strongly affect the resulting future, but I would say that despite its complexity, if you break it down into all the little actions, my presence, my reasons for catching versus my reasons for not catching, etc, it begins to appear more and more obvious that it was predetermined. The difference is that, at least currently, robots are built to fulfill a function, and as such, you can very easily figure out what one will do. Now, we're on the cusp of creating robots that react to very complex stimuli, and therefore, we don't know exactly what it will do. DARPA, for instance, has a robotic "mule" to carry packs and equipment for soldiers. It's quite impressive how well it responds to walking over uneven terrain, or even being kicked or hit in order to stumble.But as humans, we're so complex, and so many of the causes are internal and otherwise not obvious, that even though you can think of us as very complex robots, isn't it at least interesting to see how you and everyone else will react to the world in the future? Quite often, I don't know how I'll react in a given situation until the situation presents itself, and then afterwards, I'm all, "Wow, I didn't expect me to do that."Every minute is another chance at discovery, and I for one, am incredibly interested in seeing what happens. But this is true of all animals, and even all objects. The ball would have shattered on the floor, except for the presence of the bed, which stopped it from hitting the floor, and cushioned its deceleration such that it didn't shatter.And don't forget the person throwing the ball. Presumably, if the person wanted the ball to shatter, he could easily figure out a way to do it.

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.

Maybe not a strong one. (If there can be strong and weak determinists, why not strong and weak libertarians?) I certainly behave as a libertarian. Most people I talk to certainly answer as a libertarian. They believe, or in cases like me behave, as if they can break causality, that they really do have options to do other than they did. I don't know. When you get into moral debates about something someone has done. It invariably includes the proposal that the person is morally culpable for what he did because he didn't have to do it. This implies that he was the prime cause of the actions, that it was consistent with the state of the universe just prior to the heinous act that he not do it. I think alot of people see major events as causing other major events, or even a lot of minor events causing a major event, but when you get down to the individual level, there seems ot be a disconnect. It's very definitely inconsistent, which is why I don't subscribe to the supposed cause of this disconnect.It's weird. If they see someone that's "normal" hitting a kid, they'll at the very least, feel strongly that the person is a bad person. If they find out that the abuser was abused himself as a child, they feel like th person is less of a bad person, but also many seem to feel that he could have oversome that former abuse, so he's not fully free of blame. And finally, if the abuser is found to have a severe mental handicap, then it quite often makes them feel as if the abuser is not really at fault, it's an effect of the mental handicap.So, yes, there is a major disconnect, and a lot of it comes from the fact that some cases have obvious major causes, and others are more complex, and complexity tends to overload the brain's ability to comprehend. Most people tend to view themselves as at least partially free from causality, that they can override mere causality and do something else, and unless they see an obvious reason another person can't, they tend to assume that of others as well. But I think that's exactly what he woudl do. He woudl point ot the handicapped person and say the action was determined. But the "normal" person did of his free will, i.e. it was his choice and was not caused by anything else.I really do believe that the average person sues free will as a shorthand for the perceived ability humans have to break causality, to be the sole cause of things they decide to do. Possible is a very difficult word. Most people use it to convey the fact that something is not directly ruled-out by laws of physics. But even here, it depends on how fine-tuned you get with those laws and how aware we are of the circumstances.For example, if you had just left the room, know there was no chair in there and that no one else could ahve moved into the room, you can say that a chair inside the room is impossible. But, if you moved farther away, the fact that no one entered the room is no longer somehting you know, so you feel as if the possibility has opened up, when in fact, the possibility is exactly the same, because no one entered the room.Essentially, people use possible to express how confident they are in their awareness of the situation. If something is possible, it just means they are not aware of anything that would rule it out. We wouldn't, necessarily. We weren't talking about how people talk at all times, and I've even said that I would act and say things thatare consistent with libertarianism in every day life. The question at hand is what MITS actually thinks about the situation deep down. To get to this, you might have to ask a few questions and dig a bit, but once you get his grand philosophical belief, it will probably turn out that he really believes that each route was exactly as possible as the other in a grand metaphysically robust sense. But would he also assume that that external causal factor was sufficient to determine the choice, or would he assume that, even given that cause, I could have decided to go the other way? I think, if we use the word free, it should be used as an absolute, but in that case, I'd be doign the same thing as the revisionists, and redefining the term away from how it is commonly used. Only if by "all possible choices" you mean "the only possible choice." And I could accept free will means I can only do one thing at any and all given times, but it would be a drastic revision of what I think of when I think of free will.

Not necessarily. Hard Determinism is the belief that determinism is incompatible with free will. Soft Determinism asserts that free will is compatible with determinism (Dr. A is a soft determinist).If we allow quantum randomness, it still rules out free will, in my mind, so I'm still a hard determinist.It might rule out the possibility that every action could theoretically be predicted, down to atomic decay, but only at atomic scale or below. Up at the macroscopic world, including us humans, everything is cause and effect. I was merely stating that adding randomness into decision making is scarier than determinism. I don't think that randomness exists in decision making, and it seems pretty inescapable that we are not independent of previous states. Yeah, this is exactly how it feels, and why free will, as a concept, has persisted since time immemorial. The thing is, I could ask you "Why did you move your pinky?" And you would have an answer, maybe even as simple as "Because I wanted to." But then I could ask "Why did you want to?"For free will to make sense, there would have to be a spot, along that chain of quesitoning, where there simply wasn't an answer to "Why X?" If there's an answer, that's a cause.But, that doesn't seem right either. It seems like, if there's no answer to why, then that first action must be random, but as I've said, random doesn't help either.This is one of the things that Dr. A, and Straggler now, see as a reason to redefine free will; it's internally inconsistent or self-contradictory. Assuming free will, as it is seemingly understood, results in denying free will. In logic, this is a way to disprove a claim, asserting it ends up denying it.

There's going to be confusion whatever happens, in my opinion. They might call it supersight because that's what everyone has called this ability for however many years, they might call it supersight because they think the term is appropriately descriptive, they might call it supersight because they don't feel like re-writing all the works of philosophy that have used the word when justifying moral culpability or whatever. That is however, somewhat ambiguous. What exactly is the illusion? I say the illusion is the subject's perception that it is achieved through long distance sight. What is not an illusion is that he knows what is on the eye chart.I'm certainly not trying to say that you cannot say it is an illusion. But likewise, I am as equally well justified in saying that supersight exists, but it doesn't work in the way commonly thought.Let us simplify and say that there is a single Free Will Problem. The Stanford Encyclopedia give a good formulation:

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Some person (qua agent), at some time, could have acted otherwise than she did.
Actions are events.
Every event has a cause.
If an event is caused, then it is causally determined.
If an event is an act that is causally determined, then the agent of the act could not have acted otherwise than in the way that she did.

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There are several possible solutions to this.1. The first point is false (that would be a position you have taken.)
2. The third point is false (some events do not have a cause, such as those taken by an agent with free will, the libertarian position of Mr Mits). Alternatively we could argue that the fourth point is false.The Compatabilist solution is to argue, at the very least, about the first pointThey might say that when we say 'could have acted otherwise' we don't mean 'the laws of reality allow that a person has metaphysically robust alternatives'. What we mean instead is something like they had the capacity to make a decision between various conceived alternatives, the capacity to predict the consequences of taking those actions. I would suggest also that there be something in there about no coercive force making the consequences weighted so that only a small number of possible actions are psychologically feasible - covering the gunman type scenarios.You can choose whatever you like, but whatever you like is already determined. Yes you have a soul, but it's made of lots of tiny robots. Yes you are designed, but its by a blind uncaring material process.Anyway, the man in the street, if asked to describe free will would probably say something similar.

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Free will? Oh, er, well it's when I have several possible choices, and I'm free to choose whichever one I want, so I weigh them up in my mind and pick one and then I act on it.

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If pressed, he may hint that he thinks there's some freedom from determinism going on, but in the broad strokes and translating a little from Philosopher to Layman, they appear to be talking about the same thing, on the whole. There's only one property about it that they dispute, all other properties they seem to be more or less in agreement about.I mean, obviously there's more work needed for it to be defensible as a superior solution to the Problem, but those that have studied the work in much more depth than I have tend to think that it is, for whatever that's worth.

True. I'm just of the opinion that there is less confusion to do it my way than the compatibilist's way. I may be wrong. It certainly confuses me less, but frankly, who the hell am I? And I say this is the important part of the definition.Likewise for free will, there is a lot that is part of the definition that is agreed on between Mr Mits and the compatibilists, just as there is a lot that is agreed on between determinists and libertarians. I just think the part they disagree on is a fundamental part of the definition, and removing that part removes much of the essence of the term.Again, I guess it is reaosnable to disagree with me on that. In fact, the fourth point is the one I feel has the most chance to be wrong as it relates to free will. I don't believe it is wrong, but when I'm at my weakest, I entertain the possibility that it's not wrong, and I really do have alternatives.IMHO, arguing that point 3 is wrong isn't sufficient. It could open the door to quantum effects or chaos theory, neither of which gives us free will, and in fact, as I said to Catholic Scientist, a universe where my actions aren't caused is probably one of the scariest universes I could imagine. I'm just not convinced that this really reflects the essence of free will, as I said above. Again, that's just my opinion. This debate has been raging (or at least whispering angrily) for a very long time. I'm really not sure that there is a good solution, because it essentially comes down to language trying to describe phenomenon that we all just sort of feel we have. Language is almost a roadblock in this debate, but it's difficult to think of a way to have the debate without language.

That's basically the answer, as you've said the region could be very small. If you do the calculations it turns out to be very small indeed, atomic scale. So the quantum effects don't really show up outside the atoms and molecules themselves. Which is basically no different to what goes on when you drop a stone. There are quadrillions of quantum entanglements inside a stone, but due to interaction with the environment they never grow larger than the individual atoms and molecules. So quantum mechanics is necessary for the chemistry of atoms in the stone but not for the evolution of the stone as an object itself. It's the same with the brain.

Quite. No, what I'm doing is like saying: "of course tigers still exist, even though they evolved; they're exactly the same thing whether they were evolved or created or anything else".I am disagreeing with Mits on the cause, I am agreeing with him on the phenomena.Whereas Straggler's position is that of someone who'd say: "But if you disagree with Mits on the causation, you should stop calling them tigers".

And phenomenologically we just do. And our names for things are attached to the phenomena and not to other concepts.Let's try another example. Conceptually I differ from someone who thinks that Obama is a foreign-born Secret Muslim Communist who Wants The Terrorists To Win and who raised everyone's taxes. And yet he and I could both recognize the man if we saw him. He's that black guy with prominent ears who lives in the White House, we've seen him on TV. If I tried to express my disagreement with the wingnut by saying "Obama does not exist", then he would not understand me as denying his crazy ideas, but as putting forward a conspiracy theory that would put all his conspiracy theories in the shade.

Exactly. And you're a determinist. And you're a MITS. So it's very hard to tell what the MITS view is, partly because of people like you (and me, for that matter).There's probably no such thing as incompatibilist determinist behaviour. There's only libertarian and compatibilist behaviour!The world's a stage, and all the MITS merely players, but we have to play our parts, and one MITS in his time plays many parts. Although most modern philosophers are compatibilists, I think compatibilism is probably the most counter-intuitive of the three common positions.Your determinist will is both caused and a causal agent. If it is free, it can only be free to be itself, not to be a fictional uncaused will believed in by libertarians. If it could become that, it would be dead, not free, because that fiction is not 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.