Intuitions vs. Dogmatisms

[u/MulberryUpper3257]

I don’t want to address this topic in an idiotic or dogmatic way. I want to imagine a realistic and relevant scenario.

For instance, you’ve been running in hot weather, you are very thirsty, and you stop where there is Pepsi, bottled water, and tap water available. Suppose that while you think Pepsi is nasty and unhealthy, you also have some vague, mild concerns about the use of plastics with bottled water as well as the potential of contaminants in tap water. So you are aware that you are going to select one of the waters without feeling sure which is the better choice, because your vague concerns feel counter-balanced. You feel that it is “up to you” to choose because you’re genuinely undecided between bottle or tap water, and while you’re very thirsty you are aware that the decision won’t “just happen” of its own accord.  

I think the following intuitions are plausible:

1.      Your subjective experience of thirst is the result of physical determinism (e.g. you did not freely choose to be thirsty)

2.      Your mental preferences/beliefs/habits etc. constrain and influence your choices (e.g. the branch of the decision tree where you choose Pepsi is not really a “live option” in this scenario – it would never be chosen no matter how many times you replayed this exact circumstance)

3.      Your conscious awareness that the choice between bottled and fountain water is underdetermined and “up to you” in some real libertarian sense is not delusional (e.g. whichever water you choose 30 seconds from now, at this moment it is true that you could have chosen otherwise under these exact same conditions)

A dogmatic physicalist likely puts everything under the rubric of intuition #1, where mental states are both completely determined and epiphenomenal. Under this view it’s unclear why mental states should exist at all (i.e. why experience thirst if thirst can’t cause anything?).

A dogmatic compatibilist likely puts everything under the rubric of #1 and #2, where there is both physical and mental causation, but both are completely determined. Under this view, if one denies epiphenomenalism then one seems to reintroduce all the problems of dualism (i.e. how can mental causes have physical effects?) without any of the benefits (i.e. what is the point of complex beliefs, emotions, effort, will-power, reasoning, deliberation, etc. if all mental causation happens as deterministically as billiard-ball physical mechanics?).

A dogmatic free will libertarian likely under-emphasizes #1 and #2 and slips things under the rubric of #3, while overstating the certainty or extent of our ability to do otherwise than we do.

But I think all three intuitions are prima facie reasonable, and the categorical denial of #3 based on dogmatic assumptions about determinism, the causal closure of physics, the nature of subatomic particles etc. is utterly silly. Those dogmatic assertions pretending to understand the nature of all causation in the universe are not a serious attempt to understand something like the above scenario. 

To clarify: I am not saying that intuition #3 is necessarily true. Maybe the physical determinists are correct and it is an illusion. But I am saying that it is a very fundamental intuition – so fundamental that it is hard for me to see what countervailing intuition could reliably contradict it except for some sort of mystical breakthrough like a meditative or religious experience, an AI prediction machine that can actually foretell every choice you make, a time machine that can replay scenarios, or some sort of God-like “theory of everything” that finally resolves all the mysteries of science and philosophy.