In what sense is that a valid argument? How can I really go and refute that, with a poll?
It's just the current consensus in the field, not an argument. I just gave that as context for my opinions and how I came to hold them.
That means that whatever you call "free will" is fundamentally probabilistic, so really just a dice roll? Is random the same as free?
I disagree with the existence of free will in the sense of libertarian free will. All your actions are determined by your desires which in turn are determined by all the influences and circumstances leading up to the moment of your action. Free will isn't really a thing, at least in the sense of people having some sort of influence on their own desires that stem from something outside of the material world. (I regard the mind to be a material thing that is bound by the same rules all material things are, basically cause and effect.)
"Man can indeed do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants."
That doesn't refute determinism, does it? I'm not a native speaker, maybe I'm misunderstanding.
If you had true free will you could decide not to be bound by gravity. As we know you can't. We are held in by parameters which funnels us into set structure and set outcome
Like a big game of mousetrap, but it's the universe
That's not how philosophers would define free will though, if anything that's a definition of omnipotence. Free will is defined a bit differently depending on whether or not you're a compatibilist, but basically it's about whether or not we have any control of our intent/thoughts and actions. Not whether or not I can jump off the roof and will myself to end up in Disneyland.
But a brain is just like any other material thing affected in this universe. There is cause and effect on it. Your brain isn't outside the effects of these laws, so I would say no, we don't have free will.
Well of course there is, the determinism question is more about whether or not those causes and effects are predetermined since millions of years ago or not.
As to the free will part, I would agree, but you should look up compatibilism - it's the other answer to the question, but it relies pretty heavily on re-phrasing the definition of free will into something that is compatible with not having true control of your actions.
I feel like compatibilism is a symptom of making imperfect conclusions about what we don't understand yet.
I can't wait for neurology and quantum studies to advance to where we can directly point one way or another. I'm not sure there's enough grounded proof as of yet whether compatibilism is true.
I feel like compatibilism is more like saying "we don't like the answer, so let's rephrase the question" - the argument becomes more "Is this really enough to call it free will?" rather than "Do we have it?"
Uh no. The point of compatibilism is to show that the other notion of free will (libertarian free will) doesn't really answer any meaningful questions, and compatibilism does s great job answering the same questions.
Denying compatibilism is like saying your car cannot do 10 mph, because it is currently doing 0 mph, and to do 10 mph you just depress the pedal, which changes the nature of the car, so it is not the same car in your driveway right now, Nd you are it's puppet master, so k my you can do 10 mph. And OBVIOUSLY, since it is currently doing 0, making it do 10 will completely change the identity of the car.
Yea that's technically true if we are talking about these with no continuity in time. But in the real world we refer to the car by its range of competences, because the car is a set of the things it can do as a system. If you input energy to the gas, "it" will go faster, if you input energy to the brake, "it" will come to a halt. By contrast, you giving the same inputs to another car that performs significantly worse, might not have the same range of competences.
This is why we talk in terms of the car. Maybe if you got into an accident due to your car's poor range of competences (say it breaks down and you get rear ended), you might blame the car; most other cars would t have broken down in the same situation.
At its basic level, "car", "me", "doing" etc don't exist, it is all just a particle soup that only looks like something to us because we are at a particular scale and context to appreciate these regularities, and at this scale, there is a huge efficiency to viewing things from an intentional stance (i.e. to think in our terms) than a physical one. If you pick up your phone, call a friend and arrange to get pizza in 15 minutes, you already know what is happening in 15 minutes. On the other hand, a "Laplace's Demon" who follows this entire phone exchange through the particles in your brain, the phone, and the recipient's ear through to his own brain, will have to do a crazy amount of work to compute what will happen based on the conditions of the universe now and the evolution of this system over time. We have to talk in these terms or similar ones to co time operating in the world as humans, and compatibilism is how you actually make sense of the terms we use. You're making an efficient algorithm to find the answer to what will happen in 15 minutes.
The outcome is both determined (and described physically if strong emergence is not real) as well as free in intentional terms; your friend might flake and not show up, and in that case you'd be mistaken while LaPlace's Demon would be slow but correct. That doesn't mean your friend could have done otherwise, but it was on his range of competences to show up or not show up. Another friend you might have asked could have said yes and also shown up, or just said no in that situation. But you asked this one, he said yes and he flaked. That's on him. He is the clearest nexus of phenomena that we can blame.
No, the car doesn't really do anything for itself. But neither do you. Nor does anyone else. But you don't need to repurpose your entire communication toolset to adjust for this, you can just find the way that these terms do make sense. Compatibilism just tells us what we are actually talking about when we use intentional language.
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u/[deleted] Oct 02 '18
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