Oh, I see. Boring.
Boring, perhaps. But fatal to libertarian free will.
Boring because “libertarian free will” seems a linguistic conglomeration unworthy of my attention. It’s not you, it’s me.
I’m a little confused. What did you think “free will” was going to be that would have made it interesting?
Oh sorry, I do think free will is a bit interesting, but this conversation about “libertarian free will” seems to be leaning on that particular phrase and on adjunct assertions and assumptions of the kind of abstruse philosophical gmish that I find both uninteresting and reeking of red herring. Also, when I said “it’s not you, it’s me” I was telegraphing the fact that my lack of interest is just a (boring) fact about me that needn’t be further dissected.
“Libertarian” is just there to distinguish from “compatibilist” free will, which is a form of determinism. But it’s what most people tend to mean by “free will”. Perhaps you mean something else.
Daniel Dennett:
“The philosopher, Lee Siegel, is a Philosopher of Religion at the University of Hawaii, he’s also an expert stage magician and an expert of Indian street magic. And in his wonderful book Net of Magic he has a passage where he says I’m writing a book about magic and my friends say, real magic, by which they mean pharmaturgical acts, super natural events and so forth. He said no not real magic, stage magic, stage craft, sleight of hand, conquering tricks. And then he goes on to say in other words what they mean by real magic is the kind of magic that isn’t real, the kind of magic you can actually do isn’t real magic.”
“Well a lot of people feel exactly the same way about consciousness. If you explain consciousness as a bunch of tricks in the …”
Adobe file on Dennett interview:
Good luck to all the impatient ones …
1 Like
Soft determinism is a form of determinism, that maintains that despite nature being deterministic, there can still be a kind of free will. Compatibilists may take a position on determinism, but the primary argument is that one can devise a meaningful description of free will (or a framing of the discussion, anyway) irrespective of whether or not nature is deterministic. Affirming determinism is not a requirement or entailment of adopting the compatibilist position.
1 Like
George, thanks for sharing this. I read through it but he doesn’t mention free will at all, and the quote you gave earlier can’t be found anywhere. Where did you get that quote from?
3 Likes
I understood nothing of that. What is compatibilism compatible with if not determinism? How does one meaningfully describe free will? What would “a framing of the discussion” be?
My point was that compatibilism is not, as you said, a form of determinism. Compatibilism is not a position on whether or not determinism is true.
I don’t understand your point. What is compatibilism, then? What are the answers to my questions?
Compatibilism is the belief that ‘free will’ in some sense is compatible with determinism. You can be an indeterminist and still be a compatibilist (i.e., believe that free will is compatible with determinism). But I think @Gisteron’s disagreement with you is mostly semantical, since AFAIK anyone who believes in compatibilist free will is also a determinist. An indeterminist might accept compatibilism but still believe in libertarian rather than compatibilist free will.
I shall rely for this message on McKenna & Pereboom’s 2006 review book “Free Will”, as it summarizes much of the philosophical debate on the subject up until that point in its history.
Compatibilism is the thesis that it is metaphysically possible that determinism is true and some person has free will. (page 30)
The opposite of compatibilism is incompatibilism:
Incompatibilism is the thesis that it is not metaphysically possible that determinism is true and some person has free will. (page 30)
These positions are on the question of compatibility between determinism and the existence of free will. They are not positions on whether either of them actually exist. Positions pertaining to whether determinism or free will are actually true also exist, too, namely (page 31):
Libertarianism is the thesis that incompatibilism is true, that determinism is false, and at least one person has free will.
Hard determinism is the thesis that incompatibilism is true, that determinism is true, and therefore no person has free will.
Soft determinism is the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism, and determinism is true. (Authors’ note: An even stronger version of soft determinism includes the thesis that free will requires determinism (Hobart, 1934; Hume, 1748). The truth of indeterminism would, on this view, undermine free will.)
Lastly, to answer your questions from before:
Compatibilism is compatible with any and all positions that do not entail incompatibilism. It is compatible with the notion that free will exists in some form, that free will does not exist in any form, that determinism is true on some level, that determinism is true without any qualifiers, or that determinism is false, and with all combinations of answers to each of “Is there free will?” and “Is determinism true?”.
There are different ways of defining free will. Libertarian notions begin with something along the lines of an “ability to have done otherwise”. Some go the way of things like “being the ultimate / sufficient source of one’s actions”. Compatibilists typically focus more on moral responsibility, which some critics would say is a separate question. It was this alternative approach to the discussion that I was thinking of when speaking of its framing.
1 Like
I find a lot of odd weasel-words in all of that. What does “metaphysically true” mean, for example? And why all the mentions of “some person”? It seems that many attempts at clarity in philosophy just result in effective obfuscation. What does “determinism is true on some level” mean?
Presumably they don’t end there, because that doesn’t appear to mean much. If I consult a random number generator before every decision, then I could have had a different random number and thus would have decided differently. But is that libertarian free will?
And what does that even mean? It just seems to restate the question.
1 Like
Oh brother! You DO find the reference to Magic, right?
THIS is why I asked for a little time from you and your fellow abusers.
Was the YouTube video I watched on consciousness? Or on Freewill?
Did Dennett overhaul the anecdote on Magic for a discussion on Freewill?
Im in no hurry to rush my conclusuions into the embrace of people who are happy to bite my ear off and kick me in the gonads (so much for earning my trust).
Recall my opening statements: Dennett’s talk INSPIRED me. Whether his talk was principally about consciousness or freewill, knowing what he said is more about satisfying intellectual curiosity than about checking certain boxes of logical reasoning.
Im quite sure you won’t be happy with the reasoning.
How should the rest of us know that? You did not link it. You were asked to, of course. That was the very first reply to this thread. You chose to acknowledge the query by quoting it and replying to it, and then to do nothing about its actual content.
Then sfmatheson asked where the quote you put in your message came from, and then misterme987 went out of his way to try and find your source himself based on the quote you gave and failed.
And then you came back with passive aggressiveness about impatience - as if you had been put under any pressure past the simple query for the source you said you were pondering over already - after linking a piece completely unrelated, and now you are openly calling people names, all because you continually choose to not engage with even the conversations you yourself begin.
3 Likes
Frankly, I share your frustrations with philosophy and often times, too, feel like there is too much jargon for its own sake, rather than to service effective communication of ideas.
By “metaphysically possible” I typically understand it to mean something quite like “not logically contradictory”. I’m sure an actual philosopher could try and correct me on this, and clarify how metaphysical possibility is distinct from mere logical possibility / conceivableness. I reckon I can only have arrived at my impression because such differences, if there be any, were so subtle as to escape the notice of someone as unqualified and poorly read as myself.
What I meant by “determinism [being] true on some level” was that determinism would be either entirely true for at least some systems, or that it would not be actually true, but that reconstructions of histories of systems under deterministic assumptions would be so similar to the respective systems’ actual histories, that one could rely on them in practice anyway.
If this ability to have done otherwise is how a libertarian defined free will without any further nuance, and if one was willing to be particularly literal about it, then yes, I suppose one could interpret it that way. Personally, I would try to be more charitable than that, and assume that the most literal face-value reading of a phrase like that does not fully reflect all the nuances a libertarian had in mind when they proposed it. And you too caught that there is more to it by my saying that something like that phrase is how the description begins. If I were asked to recommend a more comprehensive essay on libertarianism, including a treatment of various criticisms, Robert Kane’s chapter in the 2007 book “Four Views on Free Will” is a lengthy but well digestible read.
As for being one’s own actions’ source, I disagree that this is the quite the same as having the ability to do otherwise. There is no logical conflict in supposing that one was, say, caused to pick one option over its alternatives, without having a say in it, but that someone else would have equally un-freely picked another, had they been faced with the choice. In that case one could arguably be named the reason events afterwards unfolded as they did, even without having personally had the (libertarian) freedom to choose a different path at that juncture. Likewise, as with the random number example you gave, such things have the ability to end up one of several things, but there is an argument to be had whether what they do are actions of the same kind as the acts of agents are, and in particular, whether it makes any sense to assign responsibility to them the way one might want to do to agents.
1 Like
You typed a sentence surrounded by quotes, and put it in bold. Maybe it’s time to admit that the quote was from you, not from Dennett or anyone else, and that you heard something like it in one of the many videos on which Dennett is featured. It’s okay to admit that. If you had the slightest respect for the rest of the forum, you would do it.
FWIW, the quote does sound (conceptually) like Dennett.
Now, if you think that a person who asks for the source of a direct quote is an “abuser” then you should leave the forum as quickly as you can, since it is either full of “abusers” or is populated by one person who doesn’t know how to act with basic respect toward others.
2 Likes
Settings Slow Mode until I can get caught up.
1 Like