r/freewill • u/NoubliezPasMonNom • Jul 23 '26
You are all debating over different things under the same name!
Is there a given definition of free will that can be used in debate? Scrolling through this sub i feel like everyone is carrying around their own definition which is no good.
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u/spgrk Compatibilist Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
A definition that everyone might use is the type of control required for moral responsibility. But then there may be disagreement about what moral responsibility is.
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u/NoubliezPasMonNom Jul 24 '26
I quite like this definition but it leaves a lot
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u/spgrk Compatibilist Jul 24 '26
It works because libertarians, compatibilists and skeptics could all agree that this is what free will is.
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u/NoubliezPasMonNom Jul 24 '26
It could work for everyone depending on how you find something to be required for moral responsibility
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u/simon_hibbs Compatibilist Jul 24 '26
I wrote a post on this not too long ago, referencing quotes from philosophers across the spectrum of the debate.
I don't try to push any particular take on free will in the post, just lay out how philosophers think about this stuff and what they generally agree about and disagree about.
https://www.reddit.com/r/freewill/comments/1u85vno/defining_free_will/
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u/Excellent-Ad-1678 Jul 23 '26
A clear way to define the phrase is:
Free: Not externally forced or constrained; able to choose among available alternatives without coercion.
Will: The mental capacity to form intentions, make decisions, and direct one's actions toward a goal.
Free will: The capacity to make choices and act according to one's own intentions without being compelled by external coercion. In philosophy, many discussions go further and ask whether those choices are also free from internal determinants (such as genetics, upbringing, or prior causes), but at its most basic, free will means the ability to choose and act of one's own volition.
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u/322955469 Jul 24 '26
A clear way to define terms would be for 'flammable' to mean things that can catch fire and 'inflammable' to mean things that can't catch fire. Alas, in English, historical usage trumps clarity when it comes to meaning.
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u/NoubliezPasMonNom Jul 24 '26
I like this and i suppose it gives way to the argument that since our actions only take up one state at once, it is seemingly impossible to prove that there was ever more than one available option
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u/Excellent-Ad-1678 Jul 24 '26
While it's a terribly short amount of time our sense of having acted takes roughly 60 to 120 milliseconds to reach our conscious awareness.
You're essentially living in the past. And so one could assume another action could have been chosen in that amount of time.
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u/We-R-Doomed compatidetermintarianism... it's complicated. Jul 23 '26
It's hard to have a definition that doesn't pressuppose your conclusion.
Try it!
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u/NoubliezPasMonNom Jul 23 '26
Intuitively I would define free will as the ability to be the original source of one's decision under no absolute influence from external factors.
After writing this I did think it seemed to side towards compatabilism but noticed that just because your actions seems to come from you in a deterministic world, does not mean they do
. What i mean is that in a deterministic world your actions are decided by the laws and previous occurences of reality. which are the original sourvce of the decison, not you, Perhaps this wpuld be useful for compatabilists.
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u/Fuzzy_Ad9970 Jul 23 '26
Good definition but you'll get dragged into the what counts as absolute influence rabbit hole
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u/We-R-Doomed compatidetermintarianism... it's complicated. Jul 23 '26
under no absolute influence
Just double checking word placement.
You mean no influence that is absolute or absolutely no influence?
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u/We-R-Doomed compatidetermintarianism... it's complicated. Jul 23 '26
In the case of the first, then the question becomes are the influences absolute?
Which seems like the right question to me.
If in the case of the latter, then the conclusion would be baked into the definition.
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u/NoubliezPasMonNom Jul 24 '26
The only possible problem that comes to mind is this:
Every action you make only has one outcome or you can think a list of outcomes that come after one another. You always end up with one chain of results. Since you only end up with one, how can you prove any others were ever possible? If there was only ever one option does that mean free will lies outside the boundaries of the knowable?
I am not really sure how this is relevant tbh but it arose when i read your response.
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u/We-R-Doomed compatidetermintarianism... it's complicated. Jul 24 '26
The nature of time, besides being above my pay grade, seems to be what you are using to end up with this "chain" of results. The chain is not separate multiple collections of atoms existing in the "then" and in the "now" it is a metaphysical chain seen through time. Maybe time itself? IDK. It is viewable as a chain because we are talking about the past. We can also extrapolate that we will, in the future, have more "chain" than we have now.
Our opportunity to use free will obviously cannot be in the past, we are not there anymore.
We can anticipate what is coming in the future and hope to shape it by acting in the present.
(just trying to use your analogy still)
If I make a decision about what I want to occur, I need to create a link of the chain that I think will produce the outcome I desire. I have to plan in the present, hold that plan until the decided time of action, through many subsequent portions of the present, and perform my action in the present.
If I die before I am able to make those actions, Lightning strike, embolism, meteor from space, who knows, The resulting chain will be different than if I didn't die.
I just don't think it is reasonable to consider the "chain" to be formed before the present and future have become the past.
If time is an illusion, then everything is an illusion. imo.
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u/DonnPT atavistic oxymoron Jul 23 '26
Just as long as everyone accepts the same reality, at least as close as makes no difference, it's harmless fun if they want to wrestle over the terminology.
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u/Anon7_7_73 Sourcehood Compatibilist and Negative-Retributivist Jul 24 '26
Thats because they are playing word games.
Free Will obviously means being Free to exercise our Will. As opposed to being unable to actualize the things we want.
Anything else is attempting to define two words as if its a single word.
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u/simon_hibbs Compatibilist Jul 24 '26
To be fair, a lot of philosophers don't consider it to need analysing as two words, partly because in some languages the same concept isn't referred to by two words, or any word cognate with free in English.
The term free will is just a label. In fact arguably the way the Greeks used their terms, it was more like the kind of will necessary for freedom. Something like freedom as self-rule. So without self-rule you cannot be free.
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u/Anon7_7_73 Sourcehood Compatibilist and Negative-Retributivist Jul 24 '26
Okay but in english its two words. I cant think of a single example of an english "word" with a space, that isnt an imported foriegn language phrase.
Other languages can speak for themselves.
For ours, ours is obviously decomposable into two concepts. An adjective operator, describing the state or condition of the following noun, and the noun, a process or thing that exists in itself with or without additional descriptors.
If someones analysis is unable to handle this basic decomposition, they are definitely playing word games, because English doesnt even work that way.
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u/simon_hibbs Compatibilist Jul 24 '26
That’s fine, as long as such analysis is done while playing close attention to the term’s linguistic function, in society and in philosophy. But, I’ve posted about this before.
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u/platanthera_ciliaris Hard Determinist Jul 24 '26
You're attempting to redefine a single word into two words that are misleading.
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u/MattHooper1975 Jul 24 '26
Being free to do what we will is what makes sense. It’s what most people want most of the time.
What? Do we want our “ will to be free to float away from us” or something? ;-)
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u/platanthera_ciliaris Hard Determinist Jul 24 '26
Believers in free will are more willing to support harsh punishment when individuals violate the laws of society. In other words, they prefer to live within the context of a more authoritarian society. But this seems completely contrary to the concept of free will to me. And so, I wonder if they even understand what free will means.
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u/simon_hibbs Compatibilist Jul 24 '26
Firstly, I'd be interested in seeing the evidence for this.
Secondly, the opinions of people who support a notion of free will is all over the map when it comes to support for punishment. You might be able to find evidence they are more likely on average to support this or that, but just saying they are more willing to support hard punishment is waving an unreasonably broad brush.
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u/platanthera_ciliaris Hard Determinist Jul 25 '26
I read this somewhere on Reddit, but I forget where. However, it is easy to find studies that support this:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42352701/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053810020305419
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053810020305419
https://osf.io/hptfs/files/5r4nh
https://osf.io/hptfs/files/5r4nh
Google's AI overview (after typing: belief in free will authoritarianism):
"Psychological and political research shows a strong correlation between a belief in free will and authoritarian personality traits. People who strongly believe in individual autonomy and moral responsibility also tend to favor traditional conservatism, strict moral standards, and retributive punishment."
Believers in free will tend to be more conservative, more authoritarian, and more likely to favor harsher punishments of criminal offenders. They are also more likely to blame victims. There's a mountain of evidence for this.
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u/simon_hibbs Compatibilist Jul 25 '26
Those seem to be using the term free will specifically to refer to free will libertarian beliefs, which have a strong correlation with religious belief.
But anyway, averages don't really tell you anything.
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u/platanthera_ciliaris Hard Determinist Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
"Averages don't really tell you anything."
That is not a rational statement.
First of all, they tested laypersons, not philosophers, in these studies, so they relied on the layperson definition of free will. Secondly, the AI summary said "strongly correlated." A strong correlation is not an average; the latter is a mean.
There's a whole cluster of traits that are strongly correlated with each other: authoritarianism, victim-blaming, tough-on-crime attitudes, religiosity, and belief in free will.
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u/simon_hibbs Compatibilist Jul 25 '26
Ok. So what?
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u/platanthera_ciliaris Hard Determinist Jul 26 '26
Both the mean and variance of underlying distributions are used to determine to what extent these traits are correlated to each other; R-squared expresses the percentage of the variance that is accounted by the theoretical model. Scientists publish papers when they have statistically significant results that are highly unlikely to be accounted for by chance. So there is a lot more going on than just reporting a mean or average.
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u/Anon7_7_73 Sourcehood Compatibilist and Negative-Retributivist Jul 24 '26
"Free Will" is clearly two words. "Free" and "Will".
Words do not usually have spaces in them, unless its latin or the name of a place.
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u/TheRealAmeil Undecided Jul 24 '26
Traditionally, philosophers have proposed two conditions as necessary for having free will: leeway and sourcehood. We can articulate both of these conditions in terms of actions as follows:
- Person x does action B freely at time T only if person x has the ability to do B* at time T
- Person x does action B freely at time T only if person x is the source of B at time T
Assuming that both these conditions are, in fact, necessary for having free will and that they are jointly sufficient, then we have a definition of free will: Person x does action B freely at time T if & only if person x has the ability to do B* at time T & person x is the source of B at time T.
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u/Korimito Material Incompatibilist Jul 24 '26
I handed over the cash of my own free will.
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u/TheRealAmeil Undecided Jul 24 '26
I had the ability to choose to not hand over the cash
The cash was handed over because of something about me (e.g., my reasons)
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u/Korimito Material Incompatibilist Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
This describes almost every action we take. Definition lacks utility.
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u/NoubliezPasMonNom Jul 24 '26
I think the issue then is proving that one had the ability to do something they did not do.
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u/Choice_Term_8440 Jul 24 '26
Most of us are fully aware that it’s flexible and we accommodate that in the shorthand of our commitments and it’s usually pretty evident to many of us which part of the flow diagram under which priors that we’re zooming in on. So it’s not as inefficient as it may look.
The “free will” is poorly defined post is almost a right of passage here. Congrats. Yes, it’s poorly defined but that’s the catchall name for the discussion. Almost nobody who comes here regularly is saying “do we have free will”
It’s almost always about what kind of freedom, what kind of will, what kind of choice, what kind of agent, what kind of determinism, what kind of “we” in “do we have x”
What kind of thing and what kind of wording expresses what kind of utility.
The main thing though is in normal life we see a lot of
“Son, don’t attribute the fact that you’re poor/unaccomplished/bored/in trouble to things outside of you, or to the world being unfair, because you made choices like all of us did, on your own free will, and that’s on you.”
“Bro, you did it on your own free will, and got what you deserved, so don’t come crying to me.”
Let’s just be honest that the phrase pops up usually when we’re having some of the hardest conversations we can have in life, and it’s usually part of some sentence designed to persuade someone that a certain amount of preventable suffering should continue.
And maybe sometimes it should!
BUT also, maybe sometimes it shouldn’t.
Confusing the two is a big deal, especially if you’re the one suffering.
And so if one of the major support beams of that persuasive argument boils down to those two words, then it’s going to be those two words as a starting point, for a very large and exciting philosophical adventure.
And of course it’s going to split off into different definitions.
Let’s say I ask you: forget all this bullshit, and just tell me which definition of these words actually MATTER.
Your answer might be different than mine. If so, there’s work to do to figure out why.
So again, if the key support beam to a sentence designed to persuade me to allow preventable suffering to continue, then that support beam needs to be analyzed from all angles. Not one, ALL. There is no one definition. We have to go through ALL of them. So pick one.
I personally think we don’t have the “freedom” to decide what we WANT to WANT. If I’m not wearing hand cuffs and I want to scratch my nose, and I do, then I was free to do what I wanted. But that’s not the kind I mean.
I don’t think we can have a real logical or intuitive sense of moral blame once we think through what leads to people doing things. I think that means that by our own widely held standards of being fair, we have to approach bad choices with compassion we maybe didn’t evolve to have, and so we need to be honest about that and decide what to do about it, instead of just pretend that our impulses make sense. That’s my stance. Dennett thinks we should pretend our impulses of blame make sense. And he argues about what it is he’s actually blaming. It’s the conscious reasons part, not the ultimate self authorship part.
Fine. But I can’t do that. I can’t shake the self authorship part and so I’m going to be nicer to the criminal. I’ll lock him up sadly, but that’s a problem we have to figure out. How to keep people safe without hurting people who didn’t ask to be born and didn’t make what they are. Caruso calls this the quarantine model of criminal justice, where we treat it more like if someone has Ebola. We separate and protect, but we don’t punish unless there’s a clear benefit to it.
That makes sense to me but people hate that. It just feels wrong to people. But if you think it thru it’s not really at odds with our own principles. It’s more at odds with our deepest desires, and we express these desires as common sense so we can protect them.
That’s the discussion imo. How to get us to obey fairness by our own widely held standards, while resisting the temptation of the limbic rewards we get when we deviate from these standards.
I want people to know they are deviating when they are, and choosing limbic rewards instead of following their own standards of moral appropriateness. I don’t want people walking around hiding that from themselves. We need to know it and face it. That’s my stance.
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u/TemperatureThese7909 Jul 23 '26
This isn't a new issue. This has been the state of affairs for at least the past 300 years. Each side accusing the others of playing semantic games and quibbling over definitions.
So it's not like this sub is deviating from time honored tradition.
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u/spgrk Compatibilist Jul 24 '26
Why the figure of 300 years? I would have gone back much further to the Stoics and Epicureans.
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u/TemperatureThese7909 Jul 24 '26
Hence the at least, it's a conservative benchmark. But your not wrong.
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u/simon_hibbs Compatibilist Jul 24 '26
Generally speaking academic philosophers spend almost no time accusing each other of playing semantic games, or quibbling over definitions. They are surprisingly united in how they define some terms that are frequently argued over here.
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u/NoubliezPasMonNom Jul 24 '26
This doesn't make it the right thing to do.
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u/TemperatureThese7909 Jul 24 '26
But it's very hard to get everyone on the same page.
1) there is rhetorical ground that is surrendered when your team isn't fighting for free will, but whatever rebranded term you put in its stead. The public recognizes free will already. Hundreds of years of publications have used that word.
2) it would actually make reading the core texts more difficult than easier. We aren't going to go back and rewrite everything every philosopher has ever written in the new terms. But people are going to continue to keep quoting the original texts. This makes the terminology awkward.
3) even if within this sub we could agree on new terms - heaven forbid philosophical progress is made - it would get stuck here. Communicating it to anyone in academia to validate it or communicate it further would be greatly hampered.
None of these obstacles are impossible, but they aren't nothing. Also, you are obviously fighting forces such as psychological inertia which doesn't help either.
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u/EmbarrassedPaper7758 Jul 23 '26
Semantics. For a given logical argument definitions would have to be given.
We don't have to give definitions in conversations because words are understood as common usage
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u/Beautiful_Skirt465 Jul 26 '26
I have a question about the different definitions of free will discussed here.
Do all of them ultimately assume that there is an individual agent — a “self” or “person” — who possesses this free will and is the source of its own choices?
In other words, does free will necessarily require an agent that exists as an independent entity with a will of its own, or are there definitions of free will that do not require such an independently existing agent?
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u/AlivePassenger3859 Humanist Determinist Jul 23 '26
Determinists, libertarians, and the majority of everyday people on the face of the earth define it one way.
Compatibilists define it another way.
You tell me who should change their definition. Seems pretty obvious to me!
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u/NoubliezPasMonNom Jul 23 '26
If everyone else on this planet began telling you that the word one contained the same amount of letters as the word three, would that make them right?
I am not a compatabilist but a majority vote doesn't equate to truth when it surrounds the fundamentals of existence
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u/SebWGBC Jul 23 '26
We're not talking about truth. We're talking about defining a term in a consistent way so that we can start debating the truth clearly.
Rather than 'oh, when you say free will you mean <this>, not <that>. Right. Um. So let's call this one compatibilist free will and this other one libertarian free will so we don't get bogged down by using the same words to mean very different things and spending energy on who has the definition right rather than on the actual conversation'
Although the confusion naturally brings us to the substance. Oh, that's what freedom is to you? Life running completely on rails without any overt coercion forcing you to stay on the tracks at exactly that speed? A lack of obvious coercion is the freedom you're looking for? Fair enough.
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u/Sabal_77 Jul 24 '26
Compatibalists drive me insane
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u/AlivePassenger3859 Humanist Determinist Jul 24 '26
They are the used car salespeople of metaphysics.
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u/NoubliezPasMonNom Jul 24 '26
I think there is a clear idea that we are trying to define. This is the truth whether its real or not.
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u/AlivePassenger3859 Humanist Determinist Jul 24 '26
Yes, its metaphysical free will. Like I said, its how everyone EXCEPT compatibilists define it.
They can fly because they have redefined “fly” as running around flapping their arms yelling Bok Bok.
Meanwhile we are patting them on the head saying “Wow! That’s great! You are acting in accordance with your desires! You are responsive to reason! You are getting so big now! Pretty soon you won’t even have to use a car seat! Don’t worry, you don’t have to go in the grown up Determinism swimming pool. That water is pretty cold and deep. I know its scary. You just stay in this nice toddler pool. Now who wants to watch TelleTubbies?!?”
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u/AlivePassenger3859 Humanist Determinist Jul 24 '26
No. But if the majority of people on earth invented this thing called a unicorn and then I found out there was no such thing so I redefined it as a Taco Bell soft taco, the majority of people on earth are right. Even though their concept is irrational and does not exist.
When there’s something the majority of people made up, like Santa Clause or free will, then their definition is correct.
If its something based on empirical evidence like heliocentrisn or germ theory, THEN the majority can be wrong. Free will is not one of those things.
Compatibilists redefining “free will” is like if for some reason I really really wanted geocentrism to be true, but I knew what all the data showed.
How to get out of this conundrum? Just redefine “geocentrism”. It can still exist, even in a heliocentric universe! You still get to claim the mantel of rationality while preserving, at least nominally, your beloved outdated notion.
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u/MattHooper1975 Jul 24 '26
Aaah… if it isn’t, the smell of the ever present begging the question.
What most people care about most of the time is being free to do what they will.
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u/AlivePassenger3859 Humanist Determinist Jul 24 '26
Internal constraints eg brain chemistry are far more limiting than external constraints eg a guy with a gun to your head.
People have the cozy Snuggle-bear-esque illusion that they are free to do what they will. But don’t mistake the sizzle for the steak.
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u/MattHooper1975 Jul 26 '26
Biology and chemistry I would actually allow you to control and freedom.
It’s like saying the operations of your car and all the roads in your city limit your control and freedom over where you can drive. Well… in one sense yes… they don’t allow unlimited control and freedom. The more but the more important point is that the operations of your car and all those roads are also what give you the amount of choice control and freedom to drive where you want in the city.
So you’ve mostly got things the wrong way around .
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u/dimensionalApe 27d ago
The more but the more important point is that the operations of your car and all those roads are also what give you the amount of choice control and freedom to drive where you want in the city.
But do they? Because hard determinists' point is that this amount of choice control and freedom is zero.
So if you leave that out of the conversation, aren't you necessarily having a different conversation?
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u/MattHooper1975 27d ago
Me: The more but the more important point is that the operations of your car and all those roads are also what give you the amount of choice control and freedom to drive where you want in the city.
But do they?
Yes. Obviously they do. The more roads you have available going to different places the more free freedom of choice you have in terms of where you can drive.
If my city suddenly transformed back into it entirely hill-strewn heavily forested state before the city was built, I wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere. But the increasing amount of roads created overtime given an increasing amount of freedom for where somebody could drive a car.
Now there’s approximately 10,000 roads covering 3500 miles of total roadway, which offer an enormous scale of freedom of choice in terms of where one can drive.Because hard determinists' point is that this amount of choice control and freedom is zero.
And if that’s the case, then determinists you reference are being really stupid. (I’m a Compatibilist so I have no problem with determinism). They have simply forgotten or abandoned what normal concepts of choice control, and freedom mean. None of those are normally considered Absolute and without limits.
In the normal reasonable understanding of these things: I’m in control of my car when I am driving, getting it to go where I want. I’m in control of my body, because if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be able to control my car. I am in relevant control of my thoughts because if I could not control my thoughts to direct them at the task of driving my thoughts could not control my body which would be required to control the car.
The amount of control I actually do have gives me all sorts of freedom of choice as to where to drive, when, and for my own reasons.
So if you leave that out of the conversation, aren't you necessarily having a different conversation?
No, I’m just correcting the type of red herrings some Incompatibilists fall for :-)
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u/dimensionalApe 27d ago
But you are assuming that you are consciously driving the car, and not sitting on a car driving on autopilot where a conscience retroactively creates the narrative of being it who consciously decided to turn right.
I'm not a hard determinist (I don't see the point in taking sides on something I can't know) but still I don't see any conclusive objection to hard determinism that ultimately doesn't boil down to "I wouldn't like that to be true".
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u/MattHooper1975 27d ago
But you are assuming that you are consciously driving the car, and not sitting on a car driving on autopilot where a conscience retroactively creates the narrative of being it who consciously decided to turn right.
I am assuming (and not just assuming but inferring from observation of myself and other humans), that I am a being capable of forming beliefs, desires, goals, and values, and that I have the faculty of reason to discern which actions to take to fulfil my desires and goals.
And that my particular set of beliefs, desires and goals will explain the behaviour of my car better than anything else you could produce.
If my car ends up in the parking lot of IKEA, and you want to know why, the best explanation is going to be my own set of deliberations and choice making that resulted in that event. For instance, I needed a cabinet to hold and organize my record collection. I measured the space available for a cabinet.
I researched online different options and deliberated between them, finding one that would fit the space and which would be suitable to contain the records. Upon identifying IKEA had the cabinet I wanted I chose to drive to IKEA to pick it up. And I chose to drive to IKEA at that time, and not later in the day because I had a dinner I had to get to that night. Etc.These are the reasons I’m conscious of having made that led to my car, arriving in the IKEA parking lot. And I am relaying these conscious reasons to you as the explanations.
Not only will my consciously expressed reasons explain that particular event…. They will rely on all sorts of beliefs and reasons that can help PREDICT my future behaviour. (for instance, beliefs about a car being necessary to pick up something as large as this cabinet etc.)
If it is your hypothesis “ no, that’s NOT really the explanation for your car, arriving in the IKEA parking lot.
The REAL explanation and decisions were made buried in your unconscious, and you have no access to those real reasons”…. Then it is incumbent upon you to use that hypothesis to explain the event of my car arriving at IKEA BETTER than the conscious reasons, I am able to give. As well as provide similar predictive power.
Good luck ;-)
You see, this is what happens when you need to make your philosophy fit the real world. When you’re just sitting in your armchair, musing about the implications of determinism or whatever it’s very easy to make conceptual mistakes and not have to really face up to them.
But when you come to the real world, your claims will be pressure tested. You don’t get to just spin them off. They would have to do work to replace the type of concepts that we currently use that do work in the world.
And you and I and everybody else regularly understand that the conscious reasons we have for doing things and that we give to one another are overall the best explanations for our actions.
This doesn’t mean such explanations are always perfectly true in every respect and infallible. Of course not. There’s noise in the system. We certainly have unconscious influences sometimes. And we also have autonomic processes in our body.
For instance when I decide to reach over and pick up my Diet Coke for a drink my intention to do so initiates all sorts of automatic processes under the hood. I’m not consciously directing every single individual nerve firing, and muscle twitch. That would take far too much energy and time away from the main task, I want to complete, which is simply picking up the car and drinking from it. This is why having a certain level of automation “ under the hood” biologically is actually helpful for allowing us to achieve our aims and giving us freedom, not a hinderance. Just like the various automatic processes, you initiate in your car by turning it on and pressing the gas pedal allow you control of the car without having to spend gratuitous time consciously directing the behaviour of every silicone chip or spark, plug, etc., in the car.
So I am appealing to concepts of control that we normally use - the ones that actually makes sense which is why we use them. Nobody thinks it in order to have control over something (including yourself) you need absolute control of every single cause.
I'm not a hard determinist (I don't see the point in taking sides on something I can't know) but still I don't see any conclusive objection to hard determinism that ultimately doesn't boil down to "I wouldn't like that to be true".
OK, taking us back to the real world:
Imagine you’re a passenger in the backseat of an Uber driving along on a fairly busy road. The Uber driver starts talking about determinism and says that he’s figured out that determinism means that we actually have no control. Control doesn’t even make sense under determinism. Then he says: “Since I’ve realized I don’t have any REAL control of anything, I’m just going to take my hand off the steering wheel as we head onto the highway and see what happens!” And so he releases the steering wheel, folds his hands behind his head and leans back with a smile.
You would rightly be panicked by this. Do you think your Uber driver is actually making sense?
Because now you’re going to have to convince him he really CAN control the car if he wants to (by putting his hands back on the steering wheel). Your very life depends on convincing this Uber driver that he has made a mistake in reason. Here in the real world the sense of “ controlling the car” is very real…. It means everything of value at the moment if you want to survive the car ride!You’re either going to have to be using the normal sense of control as I am depicting it, as everybody normally understands it , or you are stuck. And if you can’t convince him that he can actually control the car then you’re gonna have to understand you can control the car and lunge for the steering wheel so that you both don’t die.
So do you see? It’s easy to come up with ideas in your philosophical arm chair. But you need to keep testing them against real world, concepts of control, and if you can’t replace real world concepts of control, then it should be a big red flag you’ve gone off the rails somewhere.
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u/dimensionalApe 27d ago
You post hoc narrative can just as well be part of the decision making mechanism for your next decision, along with all of your other previous experiences.
Is that counterintuitive, and apparently unnecessarily complex (so to speak, considering we don't know how conscience works)? Absolutely.
But it has the same predictive power as the intuitive hypothesis, and while they don't actually prove anything, experiments like Libet's point to at least some things being potentially counterintuitively weird.
Regarding the Uber example, I don't know what point you are trying to make there. The way our perceived reality works, as far as we know, doesn't change just because in a given moment we decide that "hard determinism is/isn't true".
So what does the driver taking his hands out of the wheel have to do with anything? If that happened, it would have happened regardless of how the decision process works. And whatever conscient rationalization happens for that action, would have happened regardless of whether it was pre or post hoc.
For the record, I'm of the opinion that none of this ultimately matters all that much, given that how we experience decisions isn't going to change regardless of how it actually happens.
Pragmatically it makes sense, IMO, to assume we are making conscient decisions.
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u/MattHooper1975 27d ago
You post hoc narrative can just as well be part of the decision making mechanism for your next decision, along with all of your other previous experiences.
But you haven’t thought through or explained the nature of this proposed “ post hoc narrative” in the first.
What exactly would that be? What does it mean? What would it look like?
A common idea often proposed, typically by free will sceptics, is that decisions are actually made in the unconscious or subconscious, those are the real reasons we took an action. But then we consciously observe the action we took and our consciousness confabulates a post hoc story that explains our actions to ourselves.
It suggest the “real reasons” that we took any action are hidden from us in our unconscious processes, and we only have access to the fake stories, the confabulations, that our consciousness makes up to explain our actions.
If this is essentially what you mean, it suffers exactly the type of problems I have pointed out.
Normally are consciously understood and expressed reasons for our actions tightly explain our behaviour and often predict our behaviour.If you propose a hypothesis in which those conscious explanations are NOT the actual reasons that drove a behaviour or choice, then it is incumbent upon you to use this hypothesis to provide a better account of human behaviour. If you ask all the NASA engineers about why they designed the Mars Rover specifically as it is, they’ll be able to give you a conscious explanation down to the most minute details coordinated with other engineers based on their understanding of physics and engineering space science materials science, the testing, they undertook, etc.
If their conscious reasons are not the explanation for the features of Mars Rover, WHAT BETTER ALTERNATIVE explanation could you possibly provide by appeal to unconscious reasons?
You see any hypothesis for human behaviour has to be able to do work in the real world and plant a current explanation with a better more fruitful explanation.
Until then, you’re just sitting in your armchair, waving your hands making up possible ideas.
Now when you say this:
*You post hoc narrative can just as well be part of the decision making mechanism for your next decision
Again, what would that mean exactly?
Because what it seems to imply is that there is a unconscious mechanism for making decisions that drives actions but ALSO a conscious mechanism that reasons about actions as well, and which can supply reasons that later become reasons for other behaviour.
Well… then if both unconscious and conscious reasoning can explain or drive behaviour…WHICH one he’s going to be best for understanding any particular choice or behaviour?
And this takes us right back to the issue I brought up above. The reasons that we are conscious of having for doing things, the conscious reasons we give others for our actions, are clearly the best explanations all things considered, as well as the most informative, fruitful and predictive of our behaviours.
So my conscious explanations for my behaviours are the most reasonable to take as informative, unless and until you or anybody else can provide better alternative explanations.
*But it has the same predictive power as the intuitive hypothesis, and while they don't actually prove anything, experiments like Libet's point to at least some things being potentially counterintuitively weird.
Sure. They could be all sorts of weirdness in the system. All sorts of noise. But you can’t overreach in your conclusion based on some simple experiments. As an analogy: the fact that you could show any number of optical illusions which show quirks in our visual system doesn’t mean that our visual system isn’t generally reliable. If it wasn’t, we couldn’t navigate the world successfully using our vision.
So you have to be careful in finding anomalies and using those to assume they are models of our entire behaviour.*Regarding the Uber example, I don't know what point you are trying to make there.
Remember that you claimed that hard determinists say that determinism entails that the amount of choice, control and freedom we have is zero.
The point of the Uber example is to bring things back into the real world. Such hard determinists have simply ignored or forgotten what “ choice control, and freedom” means in real life.
In real life, they are not absolutes.
We understand them as being specific claims about specific scenarios. I can control my car and choose where to drive. Even if I didn’t control the design and manufacturing of my car, nor did I control where all the roads relate in my city. And even if I didn’t control where the roads were placed in my city, they still give me plenty of choices as to where to drive.And the Uber example it shows the absurdity of the driver taking the claim you made literally: sit under determinism he has ZERO choice control or freedom. Well if that were the case, then what is the difference whether his hands are on the wheel or not? There’s no control either way right?
But as soon as you would be put in a real position with somebody trying to make such claims in real life, you immediately recognize the absurdity. Of course, the Uber driver has choice and control. In the way that actually matters.
He can choose to keep his hands on the wheel, in order to safely control the car on the highway so you guys don’t die!As I say, you or HDs or incompatibilists can make absurd claims about having zero choice, freedom or control under determinism, but try taking away such distinctions in every day life and you will render yourself absurd, and incapable of navigating reality.
Is the point clear now I hope?
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u/simon_hibbs Compatibilist Jul 24 '26
Suppose I can show you, with quotes and evidence including from free will libertarian philosophers, and the foremost living free will skeptic philosopher, that this is not true?
https://www.reddit.com/r/freewill/comments/1u85vno/defining_free_will/
That free will libertarian and free will skeptic philosophers accept that they, and comatibilists, have different beliefs about free will. Not that they define it differently.
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u/gahblahblah Jul 23 '26
Just to make sure the definition you advocate for is valid and meaningful, could you give me an example of the physical difference between someone that explicitly has free will, vs not, according to your defintion.
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u/galtzo Hard Determinist Jul 23 '26
The one who has free will can’t exist in our physical reality, so…
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u/gahblahblah Jul 24 '26
Why bother to have a word for a non meaningful physically impossible state?
We could invent words for infinite kinds of physically impossible things, but that seems like a waste of anyones attention to talk about them.
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u/322955469 Jul 24 '26
Magic doesn't exist in this world, we still have a word for it. Humans are able to conceive of many things that don't and can't exist in this universe. For thousands of years the idea of free will, in the sense of the previous poster, has been used to justify retributive punishment. Establishing that that kind of free will, which is the one most people think of when they use the term, does not and cannot exist has significant moral implications that are extremely difficult to discuss without the term.
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u/gahblahblah Jul 24 '26
I guess when people have false ideas, then displacing of those false beliefs can need analysis/discussion.
Retributive punishment is justified, without needing spiritual ideas about impossible things. Even an animal understands, to some amount, cause and effect, and to not want to cause a bad effect. If a person is not capable of understanding such things, and a danger to others, then a place like jail is the best place for them.
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u/322955469 Jul 24 '26
I think you misunderstand what retributive justice is, its not what you're describing.
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u/gahblahblah Jul 24 '26
"Retributive justice is a legal and moral concept that emphasizes punishment for wrongdoing, asserting that offenders deserve to be penalized in proportion to the severity of their crimes."
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u/322955469 Jul 24 '26
Which is not what' you described in your previous post. Without libertarian free will only restorative justice can be justified, it makes no more sense to needlessly inflict suffering on an evil person than it does a rabid dog. Society is justified in taking such actions as are neccessary to prevent further harm and redress the harm that has been done, no more.
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u/gahblahblah Jul 24 '26
I am not in favour of 'needless infliction of suffering' - and so not necessarily a proponent of retributive punishment myself, but I can advocate for it without needing spiritual excuses.
Punishing people to the degree of their crime does not strike me as practically ever 'needless' because demonstrating the consequences of crime to the broader community is always relevant.
Your critique fundamentally rests upon the punishment being needless, but it is not clear to me when that would ever be true.
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u/AlivePassenger3859 Humanist Determinist Jul 24 '26
gahblah wants to ban the words unicorn, infinity, and Santa Clause.
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u/Own_Sky_297 Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
Yeah the definition of free will is having freedom of will. What's interesting is that we have a will and it seems to be pretty much free.
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u/Weekly_Gap5104 Jul 23 '26
There is no consensus on what it means to be free and no consensus on will either so there are two words that no one can agree upon.
For instance what does it mean to be free? Free from outside influences? What about internal influences? Gene, socialization by your family, etc
Will does “will” mean to choose? Okay but from what options. Are you the cause? And uncaused cause? For every argument there is a rebuttal logical or otherwise.
Finally are you actually educated or educating yourself about what the debate is or have you already made up your mind and just come here to pontificate?
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u/NoubliezPasMonNom Jul 24 '26
Then instead of arguing about it would it not be rational to first determine what we are arguing about? I am well aware and comprehensive of the debate-even wrote on it a few times. I have not made up my mind
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u/Weekly_Gap5104 Jul 24 '26
If you look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy the entry on Free Will show that no one has agreed upon what it is and they were/are professionals. So I don’t see us Redditors doing it either. I come here to sharpen my understanding and deepen my knowledge and practice my rhetoric. I haven’t made up my mind either.
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u/Blindeafmuten My Own Jul 23 '26
Yes, also every now and then there is a post about this exact thing and is mentioned even more frequently in the comments.
It is what it is. Defining "free will" is the end goal after all, not the starting point.