attofishpi wrote: ↑Sat Jan 28, 2023 6:37 am
Yes, I knew from the outset what 'hard determinism' is, that free will is an illusion. That if you were born again into the precise same circumstances, you'd travel through life making the exact same choices.
Indeed, it would suggest that if all the Big Bang conditions existed again (precisely) that here we would all be, in a year called 2023, talking shit to each other on an internet forum!
However, either you are wrong about compatibilism or I am. My understanding is that within a determined universe, that our conscious mind determines its own will (not always) but that free will is not an illusion. That if all the Big Bang conditions existed again (precisely), that this conversation is highly unlikely to ever occur...(again).
Determines its own will?
Out of everything I've read about compatibilism, I haven't heard that idea suggested once, and for one good reason:
The idea doesn't work.
In order for a mind to determine its own will, it has to make a choice about that. To make a choice is to have a will. So did the mind determine its own will also before it made the choice to determine its own will?
You end up in an infinite regress. In order to be the ultimate source of your own will, your will would have to choose what it wills infinitely into the past. Otherwise, you would have to admit that at some point, your will was an unchosen facet of your mind, given to you and shaped by forces outside your control.
Now, as a common philosophical position, compatibilism has been written about extensively. So if you say either I'm right, or you are... Well, hopefully we can settle that with some light reading.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/
Compatibilism offers a solution to the free will problem, which concerns a disputed incompatibility between free will and determinism. Compatibilism is the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism. Because free will is typically taken to be a necessary condition of moral responsibility, compatibilism is sometimes expressed as a thesis about the compatibility between moral responsibility and determinism.
That's quite similar to my argument made prior, where I discuss free will as a relationship between control and moral responsibility.
Later on in the article:
For the classical compatibilist, then, free will is an ability to do what one wants. It is therefore plausible to conclude that the truth of determinism does not entail that agents lack free will since it does not entail that agents never do what they wish to do, nor that agents are necessarily encumbered in acting. Compatibilism is thus vindicated.
Here's another one:
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/ ... ilism.html
Compatibilists (or "soft determinists" as they have been known since William James) identify free will with freedom of action - the lack of external constraints. We are free, and we have free will, if we are not in physical chains. But freedom of the will is different from freedom of action.
Many compatibilists accept the view of a causal chain of events going back indefinitely in time, consistent with the laws of nature, with the plan of an omniscient God, or with other determinisms. As long as our own will is included in that causal chain, we are free, they say. And they think causality in nature is related to the very possibility of reason and logic.
You apparently think compatibilism is about creating some sort of exception to the laws of physics for the mind to work. But that's not compatibilism at all, that's simply libertarian free will. If someone needs determinism to not be true in the universe, anywhere in the universe, even if only in the brain, for free will to be true, they are not a compatibilist. For one clear and unambiguous reason: they're of the opinion that pure determinism is not compatible with free will. If they're of that opinion, they cannot be a compatibilist.
A compatibilist does not need to create arbitrary exceptions for determinism in order to accept free will. They can accept free will and pure determinism at the same time.
If you want to maintain that the compatibilist position means creating some sort of exception for determinism, I would be curious if you can find anything published on the internet elsewhere that explicitly says as much. Compatibilism is actually, among academic philosophers, the most common take on free will believe it or not, so it's been written about quite a lot. If you're correct, I believe it shouldn't be exceptionally difficult to find some sources.
