I’m not trying to hijack the thread but I’m really curious about it now. It seems to me that libertarianism would lead to a lack of consistency. If given 100 opportunities to stab a stranger, I may refuse every time because I don’t believe in killing or I choose not to go to prison, etc. With Libertarianism it seems every opportunity would be a “maybe I will, maybe I won’t” probability.
That’s pretty much the story. (And I don’t think it’s off topic, because the way you define “free will” is integral to any discussion of free will.)
The history behind libertarian free will is that free will discussions back in the day were “Am I Zeus’s puppet?” The context of these discussions were stories like Oedipus, where the gods/fates/judgey external forces would point at a person, say “you are going to kill your father and boink your mother and there is nothing you can do to stop it. No matter what you try to do, I have set your path for you and you will follow it.”
Then time happened, and progress happened, and somebody came up with materialism. This was closely followed by a massive categorical error in the free will discussion, where people conflated “God is controlling me” with “I am controlling me” and somehow didn’t notice that the two statements aren’t synonymous. (To be fair some of these idiots might have been spiritualists doing a fallacious argument from absurdity to disprove materialism, and some others might have been bullshitting to have something novel to say to get them noticed.)
This categorical error is at the heart of the libertarian free will discussion - they’re still thinking in terms of “if anything is controlling what I do then I don’t have free will” even if the thing controlling your actions is you. And their litmus test for whether you’re being controlled is whether you’re predictable - because waaaay back in the day, if you were being predicted it was because your fates were being determined by an external agent.
It might be instructive to note that in a deterministic universe, people are only predictable because everyone and everything else is also deterministic. If a single nondetermined entity should appear and start interacting with the deterministic people then all the previously-sure predictions would immediately go out the window, because the only thing keeping my deterministic decisions predictable is the fact that my entire environment and sensory input is also predictable going forward into perpetuity.
For a cinematic representation of this ‘one man butterfly effect’ you can review the Back to the Future movies - keeping in mind that the gods of the BttF universe will intervene and re-determine the future back to something absurdly similar to what it previously was when the timeline is made ‘good enough’.
I’m not convinced that anything is as well defined as you are asking free will to be.
Do you categorically reject argument from evidence? “I have the experience of making choices, therefore I have free will.” How is that any different than “I observe the effects of gravity, therefore gravity exists.”?
In fact, it can’t be their fault at all - no other outcome was possible!
Umm…
I tried this line of reasoning with you earlier and you ignored/snapped at me. Ok, so now I understand that in your deterministic universe “the future is just past time that hasn’t happened yet”. Let’s talk about the past - as we are in complete agreement that that past time is time that has happened. Let’s say that yesterday you ate a ham sandwich. Can you today choose to have eaten a turkey sandwich yesterday? I’m open to hear your answer, but for me that would not be a meaningful statement. You can’t change the past therefore you can’t choose. Let’s say that today you have two sandwiches in front of you: turkey and ham. Can you choose between them? Recall that just a moment ago we said that in your deterministic universe, the future is just past that hasn’t happened yet. It seems to me that means that if you can’t choose to have eaten a turkey sandwich yesterday (given that you actually ate ham) then you can’t choose what you will eat today either you can only describe the fact that you eat one or the other.
This is kind of the kicker for me. We all behave (as far as I can tell) as if we have what you have called “moronic free will”. If we switched to something else, we would continue to behave the same way. So, your proposed philosophy adds no new insight, no new prescription, no new perspective. And at the same time it rather muddles up the question asked by the OP about whether we can hold people accountable for their actions. Why should anyone be convinced by you (unless their hand is forced by a deterministic universe)?
“I have the experience of feeling warmth when the sun strikes me, therefore giant robots exist and are currently destroying Chicago.”
People certainly make choices - and they certainly make choices in a deterministic universe. (Unless you’re using a supremely weird definition of “choice” with added crap in it that has nothing to do with the process of choosing.) But as amorphous and undefined as libertarian free will is, we know that it doesn’t just mean “makes choices”. A person flipping a coin and proceeding with a choice based on that outcome isn’t exercising libertarian free will.
Read for comprehension. According the the ‘worm’ argument you made, because the past is unchanging you didn’t make a choice at the time.
This is of course wrong, because your argument is wrong. No matter how wormy your path through the space-time continuum is, the fact that it looks wormy in the past and the present and the future doesn’t mean that choices weren’t being made at that point in the timeline.
I’m not familiar with this type of argument from non-sequitur. Can you clarify what it is that you are trying to say here?
A person choosing to allow a decision to be made by coin flip is exercising free will when they choose to flip the coin, when they choose how to flip it, and when they choose to act on its outcome. I still have no idea what your point is.
Like I explicitly said, “libertarian free will exists” does not logically follow from “we make choices”. This is obvious based on the definitions - despite all the dodgy attempts to avoid admitting what the definitions are.
As is plainly obvious, I was pointing out the rock-solid admitted-by-everyone-including-you fact that there are ways to make decisions that don’t employ/exercise libertarian free will.
Which of course must be true, because libertarian free will continues to be an incoherent concept. It’s “making decisions not based on reasons (and also not based on reasonless randomity).” How somebody can claim with a straight face that doing thing without reason is an exercise of will (free or otherwise) will always elude me.
Your hostile tone really doesn’t do your argument any favors you know.
But I think we’re actually getting somewhere here. Yes, it follows from my ‘worm’ analogy that “choice” is impossible. How do you resolve the contradiction?
I say it does. QED.
I could swear that I just said the exact opposite of that. To be clear: I am saying that there is no way to make a decision that does not employ free will. Yes, things can happen that do not constitute making a decision, e.g., a marble can fall to the floor under the influence of gravity. But in the absence of free will “making a decision” is just as incoherent a concept as you are claiming that free will is.
Simple - I note two things:
1: Your worm analogy isn’t an analogy - it literally describes the past. We are talking about reality here, and if the worm argument really demonstrates that there’s no such thing as choice, then there’s no such thing as choice no matter what sort of free will you believe in. Therefore it’s a pressing problem for your free will argument.
2: I note that my definition of “choice” is different from yours. In my free will argument, the word “choice” already describes a process that not only is compatible with determinism, but basically requires it. In my understanding of how choosing works, a choice is made by assessing the existing options based on the current knowledge, opinions, and emotional state, and based on that assessment determines what the output is based on those inputs - what the decision is is based on what you know, want, and feel.
Looking at that conception of choice, you’ll note that both the options being considered and the knowledge, opinions, and emotional state that are effecting the decision are are fixed at a specific point in time - they’re what’s going on and what’s in your mind at the time the decision is made. And the cognitive process for assessing things is causal and deterministic, because you can’t make decisions caused by what you need and want and know via a non-causal method. Which means that the process of choosing is entirely happy to be existing over a series of moments in time in a deterministic space.
All of which means that, if I look back and observe that my brain was dealing with a choice at the time, and at the time had a specific mental state, and then followed its decision-making process at some point in the past, that what happened back then was, in fact, me making a choice. This fact is entirely untroubled by the fact that, looking back, the outcome of the decision is known.
But I can say that because I’m not arguing for libertarian free will. Per that libertarian business, if one looks at a decision made at a specific time made by a person with a specific mental state, then the fact that the outcome can be known means that there was not libertarian free will occurring at that time. Which means that you, not I, have a problem.
It’s worth noting that the ‘worm analogy’ explicitly applies to all of time in the christian theology. God is often described as existing outside of time, seeing all of it at once, and there are several points where he or his agents are described as predicting the future, in things that involve human choices and behavior, dozens or hundreds of years in advance.
Which makes it odd that calls for libertarian free will often seem to come from religious quarters - their god already knows what they will do. What part of that is compatible with libertarian free will?
There you go using the word “mechanism” again. Either you’re begging the question—insisting that it must be mechanical—or making an unfortunate choice of words.
So you’re only going to be satisfied with a definition that is self-contradictory or impossible? Now there’s a sucker’s game!
I suspect that what you consider self-contradictory or impossible is really just incompatible with the materialist, mechanistic worldview that you are philosophically committed to.
Or, given the other position, if you’re a materialist your position will be to freak the hell out over the notion that you do have a supernatural soul?
Mechanistic, algorithmic, following a process, functioning at all via any conceivable method.
Cognition is, very obviously, a complicated and multi-step process. We experience many different steps in the process of decision-making. This isn’t credibly disputable.
Libertarian free will seems insistent that decisions are made without going through a process. Which is of course both counter to our personal experience, and absolutely required for them: processes are, by definition, deterministic. (As in, one thing follows from the previous.)
I however will always reject an argument that posits a type of free will that cannot possibly occur, because there is no method/process/algorithm/mechanism by which it could possibly occur.
I am indeed committed to the idea that if this libertarian free will stuff is supposed to be making decisions, it should be possible to explain how it is making decisions in some sort of functional way. However you’ll be hard-pressed to hear a libertarianist even admit that their opinion about strawberries even factors into their decision whether or not to eat strawberries!
On the contrary, earlier in the thread I’ve cheerfully stated that if souls actually existed they’d have to actually function in some way, and that having souls is no escape from the inherently mechanistic/algorithmic/causal/deterministic nature of decision-making itself.
I think if you can give a reasonable, non-self-referencing explanation for the “x-factor”, you have solved the dilemma.
If you can’t then you might as well just substitute “magic” or “soul” and call it a day. 
I have an analogy that might provide an alternative way of looking at things.
Say I have a black box that if I type in an integer, it will output TRUE or FALSE.
The box has two and only two possibilities if it is functioning properly. It can output TRUE or FALSE. It is not determined which it will output at any given time.
The box may use a computer program that determines if the integer is prime, in which case it outputs TRUE. Or the reverse. That certainly is not free will. Since the answer is not known without knowing the complete state of the input, and inputs vary, I define that as a choice.
The box may use quantum driven random number generation to determine the output, ignoring all other input, i.e. exhibiting no reasoning in selecting the output. That also is not free will. Is that choice? To me it seems it is not. I realize that is an arbitrary boundary, that choice involves some minimal processing of inputs, but that is where I think it makes sense. YMMV. In actual human choice, there is always some processing of inputs.
Lastly, the box may contain a human who decides what to output. But inside the human brain is essentially a black box. Is it driven by a deterministic program? Quantum randomness? Or “something else”?
If you can’t define the “something else”, then you have nothing to say that will provide a cogent argument for libertarian free will.
Even this much is fraught. The past is as dynamic and uncertain as the future, and we are constantly altering it. I easily can choose to have eaten a turkey sandwich rather than a ham sandwich yesterday, and if the content of the refrigerator today does not contradict me, it was a turkey sandwich that I had.
The past is what we understand it to have been, and sometimes parts of that understanding changes. The literal reality of what actually happened is unimportant as long as the boundaries of the narrative conform reasonably to the evidence. What matters to us is not the strict reality of past events but what we understand it to have been, because that is what influences how we act. The foundation of reality is as solid as a pool of lava.
Now, that is at least an interesting perspective. Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I’m not sure that I can. It’s something I “know” to be true based on my first hand experience of it (or really that I have such a thing as first hand experience at all). But I can’t prove it from first principles. Most of my conversation with begbert2 here is just me trying to point out that the negation of “free will exists” is at least as nonsensical as its assertion.
You’re making the assertion that my worm analogy (fyi, it’s an analogy because we’re not literally talking about worms) is hard fact. I was trying to show that assuming it to be true leads to a contradictory, or at least undesirable, outcome.
That may well be the answer to why we’re talking past each other. Can you answer plainly whether a marble released above the ground “chooses” to fall rather than hover? Or, if that’s too simple, does a marble “choose” it’s path through a complicated pachinko machine?
Ok. But what I don’t get is why that “specific point in time” is privileged in a deterministic universe. In fact, it seems to me that all the things that went into the decision making were “fixed” as of the Big Bang. You said earlier, that if we were able to rewind and replay the decision would play out the exact same way each and every time. I hear this and it’s as if you are telling me that every time I Google a picture of the Mona Lisa, she “chooses” to give me that little smile.
But that only makes sense (to me) if you believe that at the time the decision was made the future was unknown and unknowable. But that’s simply not the case in the deterministic universe that I understand you to be describing.
If you agree with my definition of “choice”, I think the negation is sensical.
Brains are unreliable things. See “black/blue or white/gold dresses”, “laurel/yanny debate”, or the McGurk effect. There are things you “know” to be true based on your first hand experience, but deeper thought and more reliable sensory events point out the error, or the ambiguity of reality.