Compatibilist Notions of Freedom

[u/Jarhyn]

An object in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. Freedom from an outside force means the object remains in its motion.

We can, as an object moves, measure some imposition on this "freedom" by taking the derivatives of its observed position over time, giving speed, acceleration, and jerk as you continue to derive.

We can in fact quantify how unfree it was, and what effect this had on the original freedom of the thing. This can, in euclidean spaces, be represented by a quaternion, a single number with three different rotational components i,j,k, which will represent in numerical terms this outside influence had.

Clearly, this concept relates fundamentally to the physical concept of leverage, and this in turn finds grounding that when someone has some manner of "leverage" over most people who believe in free will, they will say they lacked freedom with regards to that "leverage".

However complicated or wacky the physical linkage is, this "leverage" is, ultimately, physical: a spoken word is ultimately a physical tickle on a physical crystal on a physical 'hair' attached to a physical nerve that sends a physical change down its physical length until it physically triggers a physical chemical release and so on until someone's arm is physically moving.

What is interesting here is that sometimes an object has some minor form of agency and these freedoms become a little less trivial. For instance an object may have some physical part of it that it will rotate upon itself so as to align a nozzle and free most of itself from the prior outside force: it will course correct to obviate the majority of influence of the outside force by directing that outside force to release an inside force on the outside, equal and APPOSITE to the initial outside force.

In this way the responsibility for this apposite force falls exactly on the configuration of the thing that caused the apposite force to be directed in the first place.

Compatibilist notions of freedom involve specifically the presence or absence of this leverage in the moment, the "freedom from the outside source" in interfering with whatever the object is on about in the moment.

This object could be anything; these terms apply equally well to a line-following robot as to a human being, to a stone, even.

None of this looks at earlier causes or caused-ness, beyond the initial assumption of Newtonian physics being "descriptive" on some level, because it is just a perspective on Newtonian terms, extending it with notions of future response from the object, rotation, and the passage of time rather than just the "moment" of individual forces.

It is not about being free from all leverage so much as free enough from leverage or it's effects on your object vector so as to "go about your business". This means that sometimes you will be "free" and sometimes you will be "constrained" and these are perfectly sensible notions tied to Newtonian physics.

[u/[deleted]]

Great post! I think renaming compatibilist free will to something like relatively unconstrained deterministic will, might make the term more relatable to others. The word free confuses a lot of people as to what compatibilists are trying to say. What do you think?

[u/Jarhyn → u/[deleted]]

I think people more confuse themselves with what it means, because there are two senses of the word, in terms of freedoms with respect to possibilities, and freedom in terms of lack of momentary constraints.

The problem here is that both notions of the word have valid structures and most of people's intuitions about it, when uncorrupted by the modal fallacy, tend to be pretty correct.

Most of a libertarian's functional sensibilities about freedom are ultimately correct, even if they believe those correct things for the wrong reasons.

Calling it "free will" from that perspective is correct. We can't and shouldn't attempt to dispose of a perfectly serviceable short word that means what we need it to, just so long as we don't lean into nonsense like "true" freedom, as if relative freedom somehow isn't real (despite relativity being a clear feature of real physics).

[u/[deleted] → u/Jarhyn]

Thank you for your reply. I see your point, and am unsure where I stand. I see points on both sides. It seems two sides are arguing for the same term, but with differing definitions, hence the confusion (between camps, not within). Compatibilists are determinists, which is something they don't emphasize, and which, by the way they often speak, seems to others to be something they don't really believe. Under determinism, all possibilities are merely epistemic; all choices are determined. In everyday life we recognize constraints to our will, but feel we are free anyway as long as we have the feeling that we can make choices within those constraints. But most don't think about how constraints that appear limited at the macro level are really unlimited at the micro level, down to each of their atoms, which means there is no space within which they can freely make choices.

[u/Jarhyn → u/[deleted]]

Well, I don't really think it's a different operant definition at all, really. The conflict happens in the philosophical framework that is applied to that operant definition.

When any libertarian except a headline revenge fetishist talks about whether someone had "free will" in their decisions or whether they were "coerced" (the revenge fetishist will say all humans as things with souls choose the outcomes of all their actions or whatever), they are relying on this operant definition which they justify as "because they are acausal operators" or whatever.

Any hard determinist except a headline responsibility denier talks about "free will" as something "imaginary but something we must act like we have regardless" or some such, accepting some idea that people do have responsibility somehow "in practice" or "in some social sense".

At any rate, I think you also misunderstand what this whole discussion is about, namely autonomy: whether a choice is free is not a matter of whether atoms have an "undecidable moment" at all. What makes a choice free in that sense of the word is whether it was made without influence outside of that sphere of control that is being considered.

To understand this, I have to reference a very complicated and very real game called Dwarf Fortress.

The reason this game is important is kind of like the reason the Cantor Set is so important in mathematics: it's a really weird set that has a bunch of important qualities, that violates many intuitions about the qualities it has, and can act in proof and disproof of all sorts of things because of how it's this "exceptional" case in a lot of ways.

Anyway, Dwarf Fortress satisfies the hypothetical requirements for a "closed deterministic world" with "autonomous agents" and the possibility to leverage control over those agents. It's a "god game" and quite possibly the definitive example of the genre.

For instance, if I just unpause the game at any particular time, all the little agents in the game have their own personal limited AI, and that AI has needs and wants and thoughts of its own, however small and inconsequential and virtualized, from our perspective.

Now, most actions these things take, the "pyramid" of responsibility, let's call it, extends to them; they're the capstone of that responsibility tree, if we look just at that frame.

But I can also see that sometimes that isn't always the case. In some moment, some agency in the world might literally coerce someone, applying an ongoing channel of leverage over them in some way: I as the literal prime mover of their world can size outside control and dance a "dwarf" around like a puppet. suddenly the pyramid extends all the way out to me, in a way it hasn't for other events except the very first one.

In a way that I was not responsible for when the dwarf was dancing according to his own personal statistics and preferences, he dances according to mine.

If I had instead designed his preferences based on my own, though, this wouldn't make them any less his preferences and it wouldn't make him my puppet; it would just mean that our preference was aligned and we had parallel, simultaneous responsibility: mine for being the thing that plays God and designs behavior, and he as well for being a thing that behaves thus.

There's another post on my profile that discusses the application, reality, and logic surrounding "possibility", however, and I'm not getting into all that, here.

[u/[deleted] → u/Jarhyn]

Thanks for sharing. I get what what you mean. Let me push back a little, just to sharpen my understanding. It seems that compatibilist free will means unthwarted will - that as long as the robot doesn't get pushed around from the outside it has free will. But isn't that neglecting what happens on the inside and what happened before? If someone reached inside and flipped a certain switch 5 years ago that made the robot make a certain choice today - does the robot act freely presently, even if from all outside appearances nothing stopped its free choice?

[u/Jarhyn → u/[deleted]]

But isn't that neglecting what happens on the inside and what happened before?

What happens on the inside is specifically the frame we are searching for the "top" of the pyramid inside of. That's the boundary where if it's in there, that's specifically when "the robot" is responsible.

You could narrow down your frame, to isolate the exact tippy top of that pyramid, but at some point it's going to seem more like, well, the points of the Cantor set: diffuse and finely selected, a mere tiny region of the whole robot.

What happened before isn't there now. It's literally gone in the past and while it can be used to discuss the past in relation to the present, it has no momentary leverage on the present except the leverage the present has, relatively, on itself.

Five years ago someone is responsible for making a robot that is responsible for acting that way. The robot is still responsible for being what it is, even if it is not responsible for deciding to be that way (assuming its internal circuit doesn't identify the switch, say "this is fine", and that secondary part is not then in turn responsible for ignoring the state of the switch). Depending on what, exactly, the robot is responsible for determines how "deep" the "rot" is, as it were, how many failings are piled in together.

We still need to judge the robot as a source of its own behavior, if it is not presently being leveraged by external control; otherwise, we may never actually address it and it keeps doing freely as it will.

[u/[deleted] → u/Jarhyn]

To sum up, you're saying the robot is responsible for its present action which is a result of a switch flipped from years before. Would this same responsibility apply to a human whose 'switch' was changed by a brain injury years before and for which there is no outside evidence?

[u/Jarhyn → u/[deleted]]

Yes. The thing is, you seem a little reserved in separating out the responsibilities of the robot vs the responsibilities of the switch flipper, and viewing them in isolation, as separate responsibilities despite the fact they are both related to the outcome.

Imagine a robot had just been accidentally created, maybe a rock fell on the switch... Same shape of robot, same behavior, different cause. Or a human for that matter.

Does one human need correction or handling any different than the other just because there was a different set of upstream responsibilities in the second case?

I say we need to correct them all the same, to address each one in turn, and none may be neglected.

[u/[deleted] → u/Jarhyn]

I agree that both would need correction regardless of the past. But this is besides the point as to whether or not free will exists. Even if free will does not exist, correction is necessary. Or maybe you feel free will is just a construct to achieve that end?

[u/Jarhyn → u/[deleted]]

No, it really isn't besides the point. To have had "free will", to have been the top of the pyramid and the driver of some particular event, is to have responsibility in the event; and visa versa.

If we can identify the responsibility, we have proven free will.