attofishpi wrote: ↑Thu Jan 26, 2023 9:29 am Well, that's dandy, since that where I was sitting in my compatilbilist head.
So, the question remains, how do you permit a conscious brain (mind) making choices 'freely' within a determined universe?
How do you comprehend the will of a conscious mind, the brain matter where the universe is determined. In such a scenario one cannot be 100% determined universe and 100% random.
Someone somewhere else said "compatibilism is just a semantic shift" as an insult. But she's right! It is a semantic shift, and a useful one.Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Thu Jan 26, 2023 9:31 am Making choices freely means being in control. Being in control relies on determinism, control is lessened by randomness.
You can only have free will because of determinism.
Free will, they say, is where responsibility comes from. We can't be held responsible without free will, they say.
Free will is multiple things, all rolled up into one. It's a feeling or an intuition, the feeling that "I could have done differently". It's also used to describe a state of affairs where you aren't being coerced against your will, at gun point, say.
The problem with free will, to me, is that people take these feelings and intuitions and decide that free will has to be defined in such a way as to be incompatible with physical determinism. They take "Free" to mean "free from determinism". But I don't think that's necessary at all - let me give an illustrative example.
A guy is driving down the street. He chooses to serve into a family and kills them all.
A different guy, an old man, is driving down a different street. He has a stroke in his car, he loses control, he swerves into a family and kills them all.
The first guy, they say, swerved into them of his own free will. He was in control, and he's morally culpable - he needs to be separated from society because he's dangerous.
The second guy, they say, suffered a stroke and lost control of his body. He's not morally culpable because he didn't choose of his own free will to do that. He should maybe lose his license, but we ought not throw him in prison for a terrible thing that he couldn't have foreseen or controlled.
So at this point, I have in my mind a triangle of ideas
Control
Moral culpability
Free will
I'm seeing a very tight knit relationship between these things. An action can only be done of your own free will if you had control. You can only be morally responsible if you have free will. And "free" doesn't mean "the will has freedom from determinism", it now starts to mean "the will has freedom to control the body, to determine the actions of the body". We are switching "free" from "freedom from" to "freedom to" - this is the crux of the mental shift.
Control, to me, starts to be synonymous with free will at this point.
So then now let's go back to people's intuition, that determinism is counter to free will. The extent to which a system isn't deterministic, it is random. So what relationship does randomness have with control?
Well, from the old man's perceptive, the stroke was pretty random. It was a random, unpredictable event that happened to him, that took control away from him, that took control of his body away from his will. He didn't will to run these people over, but control was taken from him, by randomness.
Obviously this is an extreme example, and calling it "random" here might not be the full truth - just because he couldn't predict it doesn't mean it wasn't part of a deterministic universe.
But when we look at hypothetical examples with real randomness, I don't see any place where adding in randomness adds control to the person, but I do see places where adding randomness takes away control from the person. We can go into that if you want, but I'll leave it for a later exercise.