you ignored a number of posts which talk about how the idea of “choice” is not necessarily at odds with determinism. it’s the choice itself that was determined, the choice still exists and is made…determinism just says that only one choice can and will be made. still a choice.
Well yes, I don’t think your arguments are very compelling. Yet, anyway. So of course.
That’s fine, but that doesn’t excuse you from this, its just that you’re not understanding my arguments. Which is fine as well, but just making you aware of it.
I think the common person generally assumes that we all have some sort of soul, and make our decisions such that we are in some sense morally culpable for them as they are internally-generated. I may be wrong.
Sorry, I can’t follow what it is you’re saying here. Could you explain?
Around about the Enlightenment, people got the hang of cause and effect, causal chains and so on. Everything had a cause, everything was an effect of antecedent causes, and so on. Mechanics was born. People got to notice that other people weren’t quite so predictable, in fact downright unpredictable, so they assumed some internal cause must exist - in fact, this proved the Christian theology of souls. So they took concepts that people had no problems using - guilt, social responsibility, volition, and so forth, and tried to match them to parts in a causal chain.
If I say I want something, I’m describing my relation to that thing in terms of my dispositions to act in certain ways. But there’s no causal link there! So volitions became things that echo around in our heads, pulling us one way unless a greater volition pulls us the other. It’s ridiculous when you try and work it out in detail - if a friend asks me if I fancy a drink, my volition to go to bed early fights against my volition to agree and go with him - but is there also a volition to go for one quiet one and another to go out and get wrecked, or are these sub-volitions of the agreement volition? And what about my volition to stay up and post on ILP? These volitions must be countless, springing into existence each time they are needed to explain a pull, or maybe diving from our subconscious to our conscious. And these in turn have no causes, so we must have a prime volition-generator generating them. And by the cosmological argument, you’re led to a libertarian soul.
“I decided yesterday to quit my job and work in a charity” is not a sentence describing a physical state of the world, like “I see a cat sitting on my car” is. It’s not me talking about some process churning away inside my head called deciding, it’s announcing a change in my plans, letting people know I’ll be doing different things in the future. “He did that of his own free will” is not describing the operations of an acausal soul, nor is it describing a deterministic process of conditioned response to stimulus, but talking about something non-physical - the context in which we are to judge his actions. But philosophers see a noun and assume there’s some Thing to be said about it, because they spend so long analysing simple propositions. 
They see the library and the arts faculty and the science labs and the law halls and then go looking for the university.
Nice thread, by the way! I think the ironist outlook is a little like the universal doubt thing - it’s a useful tool rather than a final position on anything.
Yes well aside from the soul bit, which I find irrelevant, I am saying we do generate our choices internally, which as well as being affected by the outside environment.
Sorry about being unclear on that definition I posted, I was just stating I refuted the requirements for an incompatibilist viewpoint in the definition of free will I posted.
Just say “choice” where you said “free will” in the following statement of yours…
Determinism doesn’t care about inside versus outside.
Thanks! And I agree. I’ll study your post more closely when I have more time.
I’m not arguing against determinism.
Yeah, I understand that you might conflate choice with free will, an easy mistake to make. I don’t, though.
Ok, so you’re a determinist. And a “choice” is just what you necessarily had to do. So freedom, in your dictionary, means bondage?
I don’t conflate the two. I’m saying that from the point of view of determinism, choice and free will are both equally illusory.
EDIT: I’m also saying choice means you could have done otherwise. That’s what choice means. Determinists say you couldn’t have done otherwise.
I’m a determinist. We make choices. At least, from what I understand the word “choice” to mean, it’s not “illusory” at all, but maybe what I mean by “choice” is different from what you mean.
Allow me to attempt to explain:
One of the common analogies made in determinist/free will discussions is likening a human being to a falling rock. The rock will fall down a cliff according to the laws of physics. The rock has no choice in the matter, it will fall as it will fall, there is only one thing it can and will do, and it does it. It falls in exactly the way it falls, and it couldn’t have fallen any other way. Likewise, a determinist would say that all events, including human ones, are like that: there is only one thing that can possibly result from the current state and the current laws, and nothing else will or can happen. What makes a human’s action “choice” and a rock’s not is just a matter of categorizing: even though they were both completely determined by physics, etc, the category of “choice” applies to the actions of a body that were determined by a brain. The brain is just as pre-determined as the rock, but one is called “choice” just because that’s what the category called “choice” means.
That’s an eloquent description of the determinist position, and you say you are a determinist. So that much makes sense to me. But I think it’s strange to not, then, call choice an illusion. I understand that you are calling a certain category of determinism “choice”, but that’s not what nearly anyone means when they use the word.
There’s no need to label me as a determinist I already told you that’s irrelevant, for the 4th time. Free will is not freedom, you should not equivocate freedom with free will. Pure freedom doesn’t exist, anywhere, but thats another topic.
My point isn’t to label you, it’s to get you to see how inconsistent and ill-thought-out your ideas seem to be. Maybe it’s just a problem of expression, but that’s always the excuse, isn’t it? My own ideas on this are inconsistent as well (that’s why there’s a “problem”), but you seem to think you aren’t just relying on intuition to guide you. I think your confidence is misplaced.
You don’t seem to understand what the implications of believing versus not believing in determinism are. If you believe in determinism, there is no such thing as a choice. If you don’t, then how does the world work? How does a rock fall? Compatibilism is a misnomer. Compatibilists don’t actually believe that determinism and free will are compatible. Most “compatibilists” are determinists.
Please point out any inconsistency’s I have stated instead of trying to fish for them by labeling me. I am arguing for Compatibilism, that is all. You can label me a Compatibilist. Compatibilists do believe free will and determinism are compatible and I already explained how, probably 3 or 4 times as well. Determinism does not say anything about there being a prerequisite about no choice.
Wiki states: Determinism is the general philosophical thesis that states that for everything that happens there are conditions such that, given them, nothing else could happen. There are many versions of this thesis. Each rest upon various alleged connections, and interdependencies of things and events, asserting that these hold without exception.
O_H, would you say you’re saying the same thing as Flannel Jesus?
Just looking for clarification at the moment.
Five pages and you think all I’ve done is try to label you? Forget about it WW3, I give up. There is no problem for you.
I didn’t say that is all you’ve done. I was simply trying to assist you in critiquing me so I know how to respond to answer your critique more succinctly.