Summations Only

And there is the problem. The man-in-the-street doesn't have a realistic concept of will. His concept of will is subjective, dualistic, inconsistent, incoherent and all the rest of it.Which is why equating the sort of highly consistent and philosophically coherent form of compatibilism Dr A is advocating with the concept of "free will" that the man in the street holds is doomed to failure.Dr A's compatibilist definition of free-will is just too frikkin well thought out to be the same as that of the-man-in-the-street in the way that he is claiming it is.

"Causes" as in external factors - Yes. But "causes" in the sense of removing the existence of ALL other "metaphysically robust alternative possibilities" - No. And that is where the man-in-the-street's libertarianism manifests itself. He believes in the existence of "metaphysically robust alternative possibilities" of a sort that determinism denies the existence of.That is The Problem of FreewillEdited by Straggler, : No reason given.

You could. Or you could wrestle with him for control of the weapon. Or you could run away. Or you could pick the wrong shirt and defy him to shoot you. That would be you expressing your free will. I have no idea about what assumptions you are making about freedom or will, but I think Dr A and Mr Mits would both agree that coercion is a restriction on the freedom of will. Again, we can talk about marginal cases, but they aren't really the important consideration in the subject I am presently discussing. Either way, if someone is limiting your choices of travel - then your picking the route you did was their will, not yours. Given that it is someone else's will, that you are not given any choice in, it can hardly be said to have been a decision you made of your own freewill... you might choose, of your own freewill, to drive through a construction site. It only hampers your free will in a very minor and largely inconsequential manner. It does this my limiting your choices to one or a small number of possibilities. It isn't like I'm suggesting that it completely removes your free will, it just means that choosing the route you did was not entirely of your own free will. You are still perfectly able to stop for fruit along the way, of your own free will. You can even choose stay at home, of your own free will. But the choice to take Mornington Crescent rather than Baker Street was not one you made of your own free will. If you had free will to choose, you'd have picked Baker Street.

It would indeed be an act of free will, and I predict both Dr A and Mr Mits would agree on that.

ManA (who obviously has a slightly odd worldview) believes that clouds are white fluffy sky whales swimming around in the air.ManB (who has a more scientific worldview) believes that clouds are collections of water droplets.ManA points up at the sky and says Look. A cloud. ManB replies Yes. It is a cloud. I agree.Now as I understand your position here the use of the term cloud by ManA and ManB is A) Compatible and B) They are engaging in meaningful communication because they are both using the same word to apply to the same phenomenalogical event despite each applying completely different conceptual meaning to the word cloud.Is this understanding correct?Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

Kind of. I don't think the two people pointing to the same thing, and giving it the same name is superficially agreeing.Take fire for example. Just because I'm an ancient Greek and I think fire is some kind of ideal form or element, and just because you are a Rennaisance man and you think fire is something to do with phlogiston and just because Dr A believes it has something to do with excitations and energy states - it does not mean you are all talking about a different phenomena. You are all talking about fire, you are all in agreement about the way fire manifests in our experience. And the ancient Greeks had different beliefs about what 'fire' is. But when we read about ancient Greeks talking about fire, we can be fairly certain they are still talking about the flamy hot stuff that we all know and love.Dr A and Mr Mits are pointing to the same phenomena, as it manifests in the real world and giving it the same name. Sure, there are those borderline cases. But there's no real disagreement that I am a human, that you are a human and that Dr A is a human. Even though Mr Mits thinks that humans have souls and Dr A asserts he has no soul. We divorce beliefs about a phenomenon from the phenomenon itself all the time. As show by the example of fire - or indeed any phenomenon that has historically had strange beliefs associated with it such as lightning, killing animals before harvest etc.We don't assert that animal sacrifices don't exist just because there is no God to sacrifice to!Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

I think it's more where his confusion manifests itself. He needs to regard himself and others as uncaused beings in order to be a consistent libertarian. Most people don't think that they themselves are god. But I certainly agree that the MITS is not a consistent determinist either. So you don't really need to keep informing me that he believes in things that contradict determinism.My view of the Mr. and Mrs. Mits, the average of the views of the world, is that the Mits family does not have a consistent view, and cannot be described as libertarian, determinist or compatibilist.

Not A)
but yes on B)The compatible part of Compatabilism is that free will can be understood to be compatible with determinism...not that the metaphysical beliefs are mutually compatible.

First off, I disagree that eyesight is abstract. But that's a minor quibble.The main issue is that Compatabilists would not believe in Supersight, as understood by the Man in the Street. They would reject that people have the ability 'read a full eye test chart, top to bottom, from 50 yards, unaided.' This is the equivalent of 'My decision making breaks from determinsm' A belief that Compatabilists must necessarily reject since they are determinists.However, if it turns out that people do commonly posess the ability to know the contents of eye charts even from long distances - then I'm sure the Compatibilist would agree that humans possess this ability. They may even call it 'Supersight', but they might argue that despite popular beliefs it is not a feat that can be achieved 'unaided'.For instance, we might habitually memorize eye charts, without being aware we're doing it. We might experience recalling the contents as seeming to us as if it was reading it off the chart. But this feeling that we are gaining the information through reading rather than by recall is the illusion of Supersight.

Fair enough. In this sense you seem to disagree with Dr A that his compatibilist use of the term "free will" is also the same as that of the-man-in-the-street. It seems quite clear to me that Dr A and the man in the street are applying very different conceptual meaning to the term "free will".

I agree.Which is why I think revisionism is the way forwards. Work out what the best and most reconcilable-with-reality definition of freewill is and then seek to revise the common conception of freewill accordingly.That is what I have been advocating here.

They are pointing to the same phenomenon and using the same term whilst having very different conceptual meanings as to what the thing in question is. A la the cloud example. Message 305Because we know god-concepts do exist!! Likewise we know that concepts of free-will exist. And the concept of freewill held by the-man-on-the-street is not the same as the eminently sensible one being put forward by Dr Adequate.What I don't understand is why he keeps insisting that he and the man-in-the-street mean the same thing by "free-will" when conceptually they quite evidently just don't.Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

As I mentioned when you asked previously: Picking shirts. By constraints I don't mean 'influence'. I mean rigid determining factors. A gun pointed at me, might constrain me into picking red. This is different than my wife liking red, and this influencing me to pick red.It's all about where the proximate or determining factor for the decision is being made. If it is happening in my mind, it might be free will. If it is happening outside my mind, then it is definitely not free will.

Sure. Like the Greeks have different concepts of fire than you or I do. But we're both still talking about the same red flamy stuff that we mutually experience. Right, I'm not denying that god-concepts exist. I was talking about god itself - Ding an sich. The way it appears to us is different than the way it actually is. It might appear to us that sacrificing to the god's helps our crops, but just because we later find out that it doesn't, that does not mean that 'sacrifice' does not exist.The Incompatabilist might get haughty and say 'But a sacrifice is definitionally a killing of animal with the result of improved crops...if there is no improvement in crops, then there is no sacrifice - therefore sacrifice does not exist!'The Compatabilist simply says 'It appears we were wrong about sacrifices. It seemed to us that they improve crops, but they actually do not'. And the Greeks had a different conception about fire: But when they say their boat burned down in a fire, they mean the same thing that I mean when I say the same thing even though my beliefs about fires are quite different. They may think that fire is some fundamental element of nature and I don't - but we both are talking about the same thing when we say 'fire'.I'm not talking about the concepts. I am total agreement that Dr A and Mr Mits conceive of free will differently to one another. But they both, more or less, are talking about the same phenomenon when it crops up. Mr Mits may conceive of fire differently to Dr A, but they both are referring to the hot burny thing with flames.And that's where they agree with one another.I know perfectly well where they disagree.

"Can be called tigers"? Anything can be called a tiger. Why did you decide to call these particular things tigers? Oh yes, because they're tigers.---No-one does in fact communicate like that, do they?For example, when Galileo discovered that the moon was not a perfect sphere, that's what he said.He did not say: "I have made two important discoveries. Firstly, I have discovered that what people call the moon does not exist; secondly, at exactly the same moment, I discovered the existence of something which can be called the moon."Instead, he announced that he'd found out something previously unsuspected about the properties of the moon, which he had.Now, if you can give me a single instance of anyone making such a discovery and describing it in Stragglersprach, then ... then I shall be surprised. I shall eat my hat, having first purchased a chocolate hat.If you can't, then you will excuse me if I don't adopt Stragglersprach to describe my ideas about free will.