Determinism-Free Will as Duck-Rabbit

No it’s not.

No, the classical definition (inherited from the Scholastics) was the one you dismiss as illogical/impossible. The compatibilists “solved” the problem by changing free will to mean unconstrained- as opposed to acausal choice.

You’ve spent a lot of posts saying there’s no debate, and don’t seem to have convinced anybody else that the case is closed. The fact is, there is a debate whether or not you’re not interested in entertaining it.

My view is that it’s a confusion about categories. There’s nothing non-physical at work, you’re just not describing physical, causal processes when you talk about making decisions. It’s a confusion of language more than concepts.

A superior form of justice would cure bad will and it would be seen as a disease.
Genes, experiences, education, etc. These could all be rewritten or done over until the will is better.

The Will is a form and a compound. It is not an essence and it has no essence.
Will only exists when worlds diverge. Will requires the world and the body.

Well, with my specific meaning of the my sentence it is illogical as the “problems” I’m referring to are identical, (not different issues). But that is just a minor quibble with nothing to do with this thread, if we’re going to argue inane semantical points may as well be related to free will as opposed to argumentative logic, as there seems to be enough pickings there.

Very well its an argument over religious doctrine nonetheless, free will initially was much vaguer. Thanks for pointing out that the Scholastics provided the version of free will that incompatibilists use, I’ll have to revise my argument. While that is a philosophical dilemma, commonly free will never meant that, the common person who utilize the term don’t ponder much on it. Certainly then free will in that sense was to support religious doctrine and crystallize it as a sacred gift from the creator. I don’t think this sense was utilized much, there is a history of the term preceding the philosophical discussion and it was non specific.
This one however:
free will
n

1. (Philosophy)
   a. the apparent human ability to make choices that are not externally determined
   b. the doctrine that such human freedom of choice is not illusory Compare determinism
   c. (as modifier) a free-will decision
2. the ability to make a choice without coercion he left of his own free will: I did not influence him

Still goes along with what I have stated as I have already discussed these points that Determinists state are the reason this type of free will does not exist.

Everything has an essence

WW3, are you really a determinist at all? Again…

Or put another way, whatever it is you chose, you could have not chosen otherwise.

With this conception of determinism, there is no choice at all. It is not about some arcane religious debate. You don’t seem to understand the philosophical question. The question of how much power you have relative to your context is hardly a philosophical question at all, imo.

To be as clear as possible: my own “compatibilism” consists of denying both determinism as conceived above, and free will as conceived in the way that offends you. I think those conceptions of how reality works are incompatible, and each is mistaken in at least some significant way. But it’s easy to see problems with existing paradigms and much harder to express something more correct. If I have any sense at all of a more correct view, I can only express that view indirectly - which I tried to do to some extent in the OP here (and elsewhere).

And as an aside, Searle was describing a typical compatibilist position, not selling it. He says, “according to the definitions … that I am using, determinism and free will are not compatible”.

WW3, when I was looking up Searle just now, I found an academic paper describing his own position. The introduction to the paper serves as a good introduction to the free will versus determinism debate:

According to Searle, we have two convictions concerning the world and ourselves, that cannot be
reconciled1: First, we think of everything in nature as determined, which means that every event that
occurs has antecedently sufficient causes – it just had to occur, given a cause plus certain
conditions. To put it more bluntly: If we knew everything about the state of the world at t1, and had
complete knowledge of the laws of cause and effect, we would be able to predict the state of the
world at t2. As this determinism is hold to be true for nature, it is also to be hold to be true for us, for
we are natural beings. Following Searle’s biological naturalism2, our mind – including our will –
makes no exception.
This leads to the second conviction, which contradicts the implications of determinism in nature:
We consider ourselves to have a free will, based on the experience of not being compelled by our
reasons to arrive at a certain decision. Furthermore, our decision doesn’t force us to initiate the
action we decided for. At last, even while performing an action we decided for, we can stop that
action or complete it, which demands a permanent confirmation of our decision to act. Searle
denotes these three experiences as gaps in the course of acting and takes them as an indication for
gaps in the course of cause and effect, which usually determines nature. The gaps we find at the top
level, which includes our conscious process of decision-making and action, must be found likewise
at the lowest level, otherwise they are just an illusion: „If freedom is real, then the gap has to go all
the way down to the level of neurobiology.“3

One way to handle the problem of free will is to argue for compatibilism, which is the view that
determinism and human freedom do not logically exclude each other. All actions are as determined
by sufficient causes as every other event in the world. A free action, according to this view, is an
action which is caused not by external force but exclusively by internal causes, amongst which are
rational considerations, desires, aversions and some such.
For Searle, compatibilism doesn’t address the true problem of free will. The crucial question that
troubles him is rather an empirical one: “Is it the case that for every human action that ever occurred
in the past, is occurring now, or ever will occur, the action was caused by antecedently sufficient
conditions?”4 If the answer is positive, then human freedom is an illusion: we just have the strong
feeling to be free, but this impression is unjustified. If on the other hand the answer is negative, we
are truly free, as we are able not only to act on reasons and deliberations, but purely out of our own
will. Apparently, the compatibilist’s conception of freedom is much weaker than Searle’s, who is
dedicated to the stronger conception of freedom as free will, whereas the compatibilist clings to
freedom as free action. One might say that in the first case, I can want what I want, and in the
second case, I can do what I want, but what I want is determined.

source (pdf)

I wouldn’t say I’m a determinist or not but that is irrelevant to my argument anyways.

Yous ay whatever it is you choose you could not have chosen otherwise, which means there is no choice at all. That doesn’t make sense. Hindsight is 20/20. You chose. Given that you couldn’t have chosen differently (due to your genetic make up as well as the culmination of your experiences to that point of the choice) doesn’t mean you didn’t choose.

I disagree with Searle’s requirements for Free Will and his idea that compatibilism must stick to that definition.

Then your choice is completely impotent, which is no choice at all. “Illusion” is the word many determinists use. But you now say you don’t agree with determinism. I can’t figure out your position on this.

I don’t necessarily disagree with you when you get right down to it, but it seems to me you’re not actually addressing the problem at hand.

So you don’t share the two convictions presented at the very beginning of that introduction? If not, what specifically about those convictions do you not hold to?

A choice is not impotent, it results in something very real. It is a choice.

I don’t subscribe fully to determinism but I don’t disagree with it either. My position on it doesn’t matter.

O_H, could you say more about your view here?

How is it a choice if you couldn’t have chosen differently? And, “my position on it doesn’t matter” indicates a kind of fatalism that aligns itself with the view that choice is an illusion. But maybe I misunderstood what you’re saying there.

I agree that will has no essence and is not an essence, and that will requires a world and a body.

Can will be rewritten or done over until the will is better? I think it can, personally.

If determinism is true I have no problem with conviction #1. Whether I believe in it or not is irrelevant.

For Conviction #2.

“This leads to the second conviction, which contradicts the implications of determinism in nature:
We consider ourselves to have a free will, based on the experience of not being compelled by our
reasons to arrive at a certain decision. Furthermore, our decision doesn’t force us to initiate the
action we decided for. At last, even while performing an action we decided for, we can stop that
action or complete it, which demands a permanent confirmation of our decision to act. Searle
denotes these three experiences as gaps in the course of acting and takes them as an indication for
gaps in the course of cause and effect, which usually determines nature. The gaps we find at the top
level, which includes our conscious process of decision-making and action, must be found likewise
at the lowest level, otherwise they are just an illusion: „If freedom is real, then the gap has to go all
the way down to the level of neurobiology.”

• I don’t agree that we consider ourselves to have a free will based on the experience of not being compelled by our reasons to arrive at a certain decision. This is ridiculous. Why make choices that are not compelled by our reasons? If we do act “on autopilot” or rather, unthinkingly so to speak, we still did so on our free will. I don’t see how changing our mind matters in this debate as well either.

A choice doesn’t require to have the will, desire, or biological makeup as well as experiential influence to choose differently given an identical situation (which is impossible, nonetheless,) but it does require the ability to make a preferred action in a given situation.

That depends entirely on how you define ‘choice’.
You are in a room with 3 doors. The door that you open is determined by your past experiences. If you consider ‘choice’ to be the set of options before you then you have ‘a choice’. If you consider ‘choice’ to be some final result or destination then you don’t have ‘a choice’. The expression ‘you can’t get there for here’ applies when you are looking at the doors. Based on your past experience, two of the doors are inaccessible to you.
Practical application : Mental functions are exploited by magicians and mentalists to do entertaining tricks. These tricks are based on standard human assumptions, reactions and distractions. It is often difficult to do the same tricks for adults and children. A child may not be distracted by the same effects as an adult because they have not yet learned a certain reaction. Similarly a trick that works on a child may appear to be obvious to an adult.

Free will is critical to some of the moral arguments in religion. It doesn’t make much sense to punish someone with hell or reward someone else with heaven if their actions were determined since the beginning of creation. Religion uses free will to load people full of personal responsibility and guilt.

So if determinism is true it’s true and if it’s not it’s not? Umm, I agree.

With determinism, our choices are compelled by our reasons, and our reasons are likewise compelled by other things. It is all compelling, all the way through. It doesn’t matter if you have “reasons”. The inside/outside distinction that many compatibilists think is important, is philosophically negligible. A deterministic universe doesn’t stop at some arbitrary threshold. If everything is determined, then everything is determined.

With hard determinism there is no such ability.

I already addressed this, simply because the preference is determined subconsciously or unconsciously doesn’t mean it isn’t your preference.