Simple answer: because “he” IS his electrons. That is WHY, in fact, we CAN put the blame on him. The thing that was him was responsible, even if we reduce it to the interaction of electrons.
And, as I’ve argued, I don’t think there is any other way things could be, logically.
So you can have your car any colour you want, as long as you want it black. Not too much of a choice.
You are telling me that those events (independent of the person) determine the choice. How is then the person responsible if the choice is determined independently of him?
Complicatedness IS irrelevant. When you flick a switch, you make the light go off. It doesn’t matter if you insert a Rube Goldberg machine in the middle, it still is your finger flicking that switch that is causing the light to go off no matter how many intermediate steps are there.
It is interesting that you choose begin alive as an example with life being an emergent quality of matter for which we can’t seem to agree on a working definition and all available have exceptions 
That said, life or morals are emergent qualities of matter. Emergent qualities even if unprecedented and unpredictable are still consequences of the properties of the components.
Take a look at Conway’s Game of Life. All the patterns that emerge although not a predictable consequence of the 4 rules, are still their product. No matter how many times you run a simulation, the same initial state will always produce the same final state after the same number of iterations.
Parallel identical deterministic universes following the same laws of nature would always produce John and he will always party instead of studying. John is not making a choice.
Randomness complicates the matter a little bit but it still leaves John with no choice.
Despite the vagueness you mention, the category “alive” admits very clear cases. My cat is alive. My (computer) mouse is not. Similarly, there are very clear cases of responsibility, despite vagueness. I am responsible when I lie to my wife. My basketball is not responsible when it rolls down the street.
I don’t disagree with any of that. (Did you think I would or should? If so, why?)
Here’s another bad argument that I don’t think you would buy: No individual cell in Life is self-perpetuating. A Gobbler (or whatever) is a collection of individual cells in Life. Therefore, Gobblers are not self-perpetuating. True premises, false conclusion, because an invalid argument.
Gobblers’ being self-perpetuating is a real property of real Gobblers as surely as my being resonsible for my own actions is a real property of my real self.
If you do not think Gobblers really exist, I imagine your argument toward that conclusion would also lead to the conclusion that I don’t exist, that my cat doesn’t exist, that balls don’t exist, and so on. If all of that is granted, then certainly, there is no such thing as free will. If you want to go this route, then I’ll amend my claim: Free will is just as real as, and no more real than, weight is, and free will is just as real as, and no more real than, my cat is.
-FrL-
This (and your previous post, for that matter) is a position I can understand, respect and even agree on. It is deeply utilitarian (Behaviouristic even) and not satisfying to an existential search but very coherent and logical.
I appreciate the bother you have taken for this discussion which, to me, has been very ignorance fighting.
Now wait a minute, what Apos said looks to me to be substantially similar to what I said here:
How are you interpreting us such that you think we are saying something substantially different from each other?
-FrL-
That last sentence really should have “responsibility” instead wherever it has “free will.” Sorry about that.
-FrL-
Your name is not a cool anagram of mine so I value his opinion higher.
I understand Apos’ position to be that the response to “my electrons made me do it” is “that’s fine but my electrons make me punish you in order to change your/other’s future behaviour”. It is electrons talking about electrons in the way electrons normally do.
As I said, it is not a satisfying answer for an existential seeker but it is coherent and leaves no loose ends. You may subscribe to it or dislike it but you can’t really break it. It is a naturalist response to a naturalist question. There is no logical contradiction. You can live a life by that canon.
As much as I respect it and admire someone’s acceptance of it, I am still stuck in wanting to find a meaning for life. I choose to be a supernaturalist (or maybe my electrons make me do it) and a theist. I devise means to explain how both realms effect each other even if I know there is no way I can prove any of it. It gives me solace and a pastime. I do not let it step on my scientifical thought, though. I still want naturalist answers to naturalist questions but I allow supernaturalist answers to supernaturalist questions.
I am not saying his answers are better or even different from yours. If you find your answers in full agreement with his, then that’s what they are. I actually like your answer a bit better since you explicitly agree that the cause of someone’s actions are outside that person while **Apos ** seems to focus more on the fact that that someone is the process that causes the decision. I am sure that if we continue talking about this long enough, the two of you will find yourselves in full agreement and the difference will be on how you present it.
And FTR, although it had been covered, yes, gobblers are real (gobblins are not) as is free will (no caps), cats and reason.
Sapo, I’ve not been paying enough close attention to your exchanges with Apos et al. In fact, as I’ve scanned through point and counter-point, I’ve often been lost as to who was taking which position and which terms went with which definitions. Each time I thought I had it down straight, another paragraph would cast it all into doubt again.
But I did want to say that the above struck me with great clarity - I’d even say beauty if I didn’t fear going overboard. I attribute my confusion to the rarity of most folks to comprehend and accept as valid (internally consistent) an opposing argument while not fully embracing it. I commend you for having such ability.
Then I came to this next bit and I’m confused again. Perhaps it’s just a matter of terminology.
When you say “real” do you mean the physicalist sense that there is a material basis for a thing? Cats and thoughts are real in the sense that they are configurations of atoms. Seeing a cat is doubly real because there are atoms comprising a physical cat and our experiencing of it is something physically occurring within us. One real is mirroring the other real (though not very accurately).
If we’re on board together so far, consider a hallucination. Say you are now hallucinating seeing the cat. The “cat” in your brain is nearly the same as the “cat” there before. Both are real as physical configurations in the brain. Do we say in a more ordinary sense that they are equally real? It is in this sense that I say that free will is not real. I suspect that’s been your point all along.
Sapo,
If we’re still together on terminology. How can we say a goblin is less real than free will within the same use of the term? (This contradiction occurred to me just after my last post. I’m posting it now so you won’t think I’m playing “gotcha”.)
tPCa (and I must say that sounds really bad in spanish), thanks for the observation. I believe that the confusion lies in that **Apos ** and I both agree in that there is no room for a metaphysical Free Will in a deterministic universe but were struggling to agree on the terminology for the satellital details.
Yes, a hallucination is real in that it is an observable physical effect happening in the mind of the hallucinator (I presume). It is real in that it causes an observable reaction on the person living it and it is real in that I presume you could stick some wires in that person’s head and see the electrical activity in his brain.
That said, I am not sure the cat in the hallucination is real (or how real it is if reality admits degrees). The response is not to a cat but to a perceived cat that is not physically present. A third party observer perceives no cat although he perceives the reaction to the cat. The observation of the reaction validates the hallucination (as a phenomenon) but not the cat.
And if the person is hallucinating about a cat that is inside a box with a lethal device triggered by the decay of a radioactive atom, then it goes really crazy 
I would not equate free will with a hallucination. The stimuli that trigger the mechanisms we call free will are real. Some external (the circumstances) some internal (the desires) but all real and perceptible to our psyches and presumably, to a third party observer with the right equipment.
Maybe you could compare it to the reaction to a hallucination. The perception of the cat is there (just that it didn’t come from photons hitting the retina but from a different part of the brain) and the mind is responding naturally to a cat it is perceiving. There is no difference a real cat and a hallucination that they hallucinating brain can perceive. The brain is responding to a cat. But I am going out on a limb in this paragraph and I haven’t had lunch.
As for the goblin, got me there. It just popped into my mind after a million reads of the word gobbler. I said not real as in fantastical but yes, they are as real as any other human thought or creation. My bad for letting my humour take over
I wouldn’t separate the hallucinated “cat” from the hallucination. The “cat” is the hallucination, or at least part of it. I would equate hallucinations and free will as… hallucination : hallucinated “cat” :: free will : free will "decision"A few more quick thoughts (I’m going to try a new format just to avoid too much quote interspersing. We’ll see if it works.)
[ul]I don’t mean to imply that there are degrees of reality, only linguistic shades of meaning when we use the word real.[li]The stimuli that trigger the mechanisms we call free will are real and so are the stimuli that trigger hallucinations. No difference there in form, just detail.[*]The reactions to the hallucination and to free will are similarly observable as equal to the third party.[/ul][/li]“Validating” to the observer, I think, may be a key point in the sense of being opposite to “doubting”. We more readily consider free will to be real than we do goblins because we have less reason to doubt free will’s existence. To someone who who has no doubt of goblins existing, the difference is much smaller. To the third party observer, both might be doubtful and equally so.
PS. I clipped portions of your post for continuity to my follow on, not because I didn’t appreciate them. My cats should really reconsider their love of being in boxes. 
Thanks. PPS. Consider this another vote of encouragement for you to sign up. The Dope could use more folks like you.
Thnx for the encouragement to join. It came a bit too late, though
So… other than agreeing with your points and wanting to make the clarification that a reaction to a hallucinated cat is indistinguishable from the reaction to a present physical cat (to the hallucinator, at least), I am not sure I see how this analogy is going to help us understand the issue better. I have twice written a long reply to this and upon review they both looked like mincing words for the sake of mincing words (not that there is anything wrong with that).
I am missing any real disagreements that we should be discussing?
Perhaps it’s me. Your not wanting to equate hallucinations with free will seemed to be coming from the idea that one or both is not the sum of its elements. I would equate hallucinations and free will as similar kinds of illusions: perceived as reality without any other correlation to a physicalist reality than existing as a brain configuration. The only difference between the two is in how much we believe in them.
We can leave it there if you wish. Either way, I’m glad you’ve joined up. Welcome. 
Hello there. I saw this thread and couldn’t help myself. Anyway, let me postulate a hypothetical experiment for you guys to interpret -
Let’s say I need a pencil to do my homework with (being still of a sad, homework-doing age). I walk to my study and find two laid out side by side on the table. Since they’re new, they’re pretty much exactly the same, no visible difference (and who really inspects pencils before use anyway). What then determines which pencil I pick up? Since the two are in every way the same, discarding any bias due to the relative positions of the pencils (ie if I prefer things that are on the right/left/top/bottom more), my decision would be rather random in a way wouldn’t it? There’s nothing to push my judgement towards picking up any pencil more so than the other - so, won’t this be a case of free will?
Not in the sense most people would use the term “free will”. We may never be able to determine the reasons for a given action but that doesn’t mean the action wasn’t determined by something (it wasn’t free). Or maybe it was just completely random (there is no will). Free will is usually described as the part of an event that was neither determined nor random.
No, this is not what I am arguing. I am arguing that there is no coherent concept behind “Free Will” period. The idea makes no sense. It doesn’t matter in the slightest what ones metaphysics are.
No, again: things like moral value have meaning. “Meaning” is something that very particular arrangements of electrons can do: not just any old collection of electrons, and not just any old machine made out of electrons. This is where you go wrong: you see the ability to reduce the mechanisms of something down, but in doing so you completely loose sight of the overall specific things that are being done. We aren’t punishing people “just cus” We ARE punishing them because we have moral values against what they did and we want to deter others from doing those things as well as prevent the person in question frmo doing them again.
Well, no. In the case of the hallucination, there is an internal stimulus that the brain perceives as an external stimulus. In the case of free will, there is an internal stimulus that the brain perceives as an absence of stimulus (producing the impression of spontaneity)
ok, ok. No Free Will period, then. Metaphysical or not. My bad.
I think you are just taking my figures too literally. I am not saying any electrons, nor I am saying “just cus”. I am saying that our morals are the product of a natural process. Do we agree on that?
So, what if it is taken to be a purely hypothetical situation, with all the variables balanced between the two pencils? In fact, with two pencils laid out in front of anyone as I’d decribed, to how much detail would one analyse the environment/pencils before picking one up?
I think it’s possible that though there may be many minute differences between the two, they’re not taken very much into consideration when one chooses any of them. After all, to one’s mind thus far the two pencils are just abstract, generalised, pencils and are not recognised as individual pencils with distinguishing properties. Of course this is an unproven statement, but it does seem to be so from a purely anecdotal viewpoint.
If the above is taken to be true, it would seem as though the two pencils are recognised as being identical representations of pencils. I would argue that thus there would be no bias for either pencil.
Or better yet, what if I’ve two objects (I’m sick of pencils ) for one to choose, but laid sufficiently far that one can just distinguish the bare outline of them. There would be insufficient visual information to bias one towards or away any of them then. I could postulate many examples- the point I’m trying to make is that I’m sure that to bring abstractions to reality, it is possible to establish a situation when two objects are similar in everyway to the mind.
With such a situation then, decision making would be then down to either random picking, or free will. I’m not sure how one’s to distinguish the above two, but anyway, I’ve got to head off to the library for a full, exhilarating, day of memorising bacteria.
p.s. Sorry for hijacking, Sapo and Dio.
welcome in, exar. your question (aka the rational donkey) is a classic on discussions of both for free will and rational thought. We face that kind of decision fairly often. We are somehow capable of making “random” decisions for choices where the alternatives appear indifferent. I don’t think it isn’t too strong an example of free will since there is no significant consequence to choosing one alternative over the other.
I like it better as a case for rational thought. If you have to equivalent choices and no reason to choose one over the other, you would just stand there unable to make a choice. It makes the case for us not being totally rational machines.