compatibilism

[iambiguous]

What Is Free Will?
Grant Bartley wants to know what the problem with freedom is all about.

Compatibilism is so called because it maintains that free will is compatible with strong determinism, which in turn implies that moral responsibility is compatible with strong determinism.

Then my own predicament here. On the one hand, I believe the compatibilists are no less compelled by their brains to believe that strong determinism and moral responsibility can be reconciled. But at the same time I flat-out acknowledge that I have no way of thinking this through other than as my own brain compels me to. And then the part where all of us are confronted with "the gap" between what we think about all of this "here and now" and what we have no true understanding of [philosophically or scientifically] in regard to this:

All of this going back to how the matter we call the human brain was "somehow" able to acquire autonomy when non-living matter "somehow" became living matter "somehow" became conscious matter "somehow" became self-conscious matter.

Compatibilists argue that although our actions are entirely predetermined, we are nevertheless moral agents because our ‘choices’ are justified by reasons.

But if the reasons are in turn entirely determined by brains wholly in sync with the laws of matter, how is this not but another example of how nature "somehow" sustains but the psychological illusion of autonomy?

But to me compatibilism is the wolf of determinism in a sheepish guise of moral respectability, assigning moral responsibility based on the mere illusion of choice.

More or less my own conclusion. Assuming of course that any conclusion I do come to "here and now" is in fact the actual embodiment of my own autonomy.

But this is would be responsibility an illusion couldn’t have. Thinking that we’re choosing when we’re not doesn’t make us responsible for our acts, any more than we’d be responsible for them if we were hypnotised into doing them. There too we’re thinking that we’re choosing our actions when we’re not.

More to point here [mine] there's the profound mystery of dreams here. Night after night after night I am absolutely convinced that while dreaming, I am not dreaming at all. My interactions in the dream certainly seem as real to me "in the dream" as in my waking hours. But I am choosing only to fall asleep here. The rest is my brain doing its own thing chemically and neurologically.

For these reasons, the onus is on the determinist to demonstrate that physical causation is the only causation, before presuming there’s no such thing as mental causation, ie will.

Right. As though it is not the obligation of those convinced that mental causation is is within our reach autonomously to demonstrate this instead...beyond worlds of words here.

[iambiguous]

What Is Free Will?
Grant Bartley wants to know what the problem with freedom is all about.

Neither Determined Nor Random

Real choice must be reasonable choice. In order to be a choice rather than some arbitrary impulse, free will must operate under the influence of considered reflection.

Arbitrary impulse? Purely random interactions? How is that even possible in a wholly determined universe? Instead, every single interaction of every single material object is entirely sync with its own inherent fate in a wholly natural world. We just don't know what natural actually means for all practical purposes. Or, for others, how things like human brains can be anything but gifts from God.

Acting for no reason, or where reason is of so little influence as to make the choice practically arbitrary, is equivalent to behaving randomly.

No, as with everything else we simply do not understand about the human condition "here and now", the fact that we think we act arbitrarily in a universe where random interactions occur is just one more manifestation of the only possible reality. The fact that we think something does not necessarily make it true. Only that human psychology evolved with the capacity to delude us into thinking that everything that we think must be true. And that we will what we think of our own volition.

We could say, irrationality and random impulses are functionally and ethically equivalent. On the other hand, in order to be free, choice must also not be absolutely determined by anything, including reasons.

Again, what are these but a bunch of words the author put together in order to come up with a conclusion in a philosophy magazine about rationality, impulses and ethics. As though the conclusion itself "somehow" transcends the laws of matter.

And it well might. But just thinking it...believing it...doesn't make it true. Not necessarily.

If our reasons determine our decisions, we’re not in control, our reasons are. But for free will, it must be you, freely operating your will. This is why I call free will sovereign choice. Determinism by reasons we might call ‘logical determinism’. So we need our choices to be not completely without reasons, otherwise we’d be talking about only a random response to stimuli.

What we call things...the things we choose. The reasons we think up to do so. The fact that biological life evolved here at at all on planet Earth.

We. Just. Don't. Fully. Understand. Any. Of. It.

But we also need to avoid saying that our choices are determined by reasons.

By, of course, just assuming that "somehow" when the universe did evolve into us here on planet Earth, some of our brains just happened to acquire the capacity -- compelled or not? -- to avoid saying that.

Rather than either extreme, we can say that free will must be informed by reasons but not necessitated by reasons.

Same thing, of course. We can say what we do about these things but that does not demonstrate one way or another whether we opted freely to say it or were wholly compelled to.

Philosophy and free will in a nutshell?

To be free, your mind must not be forced to its decisions by the ideas it’s employing; but reasons nevertheless must influence your choice, even persuade it. Or, as Gottfried Leibniz put it: “The free substance” – the will – “determines itself by itself, following the motive of the good recognized by the understanding, which inclines it without necessitating it” (Theodicy, 1710, my emphasis). He means that reason inclines the mind towards a good choice, but its choice is not necessitated by reasons. We might say that in choice, your mind is the pilot of your will, and your thoughts and reasons are the wind to which you set your will’s sails.

Arguing free will into existence up in the theoretical clouds here.

[iambiguous]

What Is Free Will?
Grant Bartley wants to know what the problem with freedom is all about.

What Free Will Involves

In other words, you're a philosopher grappling with brain matter in a world of words. You sit back and you "think it through" to the best of your ability. Finally, you argue that free will either exists or it does not.

As though this part...

All of this going back to how the matter we call the human brain was "somehow" able to acquire autonomy when non-living matter "somehow" became living matter "somehow" became conscious matter "somehow" became self-conscious matter.

...really was not all that important to pin down. And even the brain scientists can't pin this down yet.

So your choice of next mind state being free requires that nothing ultimately causes the choice except you willing it. We could say, a choice is not a choice unless it is made by the chooser at the moment of choice. In other words, you make the choice, and nothing causes you to make the choice other than the fact that it’s your choice.

And around and around we go. Intuitively, we just know "deep down inside" that we are freely willing our next choice. But what if our knowing and believing this, i.e. what if human intuition itself, is no less but another inherent manifestation of the only possible reality? The chooser makes a choice that he or she was never able not to make.

In more jargony terms, at the moment of the decision, the choosing must be ‘causally undetermined’; or, for your will to be free, your choice must be an uncaused cause. That is, the cause of your willing is your willing it, and nothing else.

Then back to the part where Schopenhauer suggested that "you can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing.” How for all practical purposes is that applicable in our interactions with others?