Free will is ontological freedom in conjunction with will phenomena. — Terrapin Station

Free will is about control. If you don't have control over your action then the action is not freely willed.

Also, an intentional action, on the account I have been recommending, isn't a further act causally downstream from the act of intending. — Pierre-Normand

The problem is that I don't understand how you can control the intentional action if your intention doesn't influence it. The intention on your view seems to be just an epiphenomenon that is formed simultaneously with your action.

So, to refer back to my earlier trip-to-Cuba example, if I intend to go to Cuba next month, there this already existing intention can be the cause, in a sense, of my forming today the new intention of booking plane tickets. So, whenever A is a means of doing B, then what causes my intending to do A is my intending to do B. The sort of causation that is a play here might be called rational causation. It is because it is rational to do A when one intends to do B that one forms an intention to do A. — Pierre-Normand

This seems to be ordinary causation where a temporally prior intention (to go to Cuba) causes another intention (to book plane tickets).

There is no control over actions. There is an ability to attempt to move in a particular direction. Outcomes are always uncertain because of other constraints. — Rich

I don't necessarily mean complete control of the action, but the ability to influence the action.

So give an example of an action that you control without having an intention to do it.

Slipping on a banana is not something that you do intentionally, it is something that simply happens to you outside of your control. — Fafner

I agree but it is so because you don't have an intention to do it. If you do an action without an intention to do it, it is as if the action or event "happens to you", it is outside of your control.

prior "intentions to act" -- intentions for the future, we may call them -- stand in relation with intentional actions in the same sort of causal relation than intentions in action stand to intentional actions that manifest them. And this form of causation is quite different from event-event-causation where something that occurs at a time causes something else to occur at a later time (or maybe at the very same time) by virtue of some natural law. — Pierre-Normand

If the intention causes the action instantaneously via some different/timeless way of causation, we can still ask whether the act of forming the intention is caused (via this different/timeless way of causation) by an intention to form that intention, and if it is then the act of forming the intention is intentional too, but this leads us to an infinite regress of intentions in a timeless instant.

Rather the intentions themselves are manifestations of our acts of will. As Eric Marcus has put the point, it makes sense to say that, in the case of intentional actions, the whole is the cause of the parts. — Pierre-Normand

Are you saying here that our actions cause our intentions to do the actions? In that case it is difficult to understand how we control our actions. It is more like our actions control us.

You intentionally control your actions simply by doing them, and hence you don't need an intermediary in the form of a separate 'intention'. — Fafner

Simply doing an action is not enough to intentionally control it. You may simply slip on a banana peel, and it is you who is doing the slipping, but without an intention to do the action you cannot control the action.

Support? — Terrapin Station

Free will entails having control over your acts, which seems to be missing when your acts are unintentional. Like, slipping on a banana peel - an unintentional and therefore unfree act.

That's as it may be, but I'm not talking about the feeling or moral responsibility; I'm taking about the rational justification of the idea of moral responsibility. — John

The idea of moral responsibility must involve feelings, or else no one would care about it (to care means to have feelings) and it seems to me those feelings ultimately boil down to compassion. We regard a person as morally responsible for a sentient being when we feel compassion for that being and expect that person to feel such a compassion too and to benefit that being.

Without the assumption of radical freedom the notion of moral responsibility is incoherent; a human being responsible for an act reduces to the same kind of responsibility that natural phenomena and animals are thought to have for their acts. — John

Humans have a higher level of consciousness than animals, so we expect humans to feel more compassion than animals and to be more able to benefit other humans or sentient beings. Hence we regard humans as having more moral responsibility than animals (if we assign any moral responsibility to animals at all).

An act of will is a choice to move in a particular direction. That is all that it is. Perception are virtual actions or possible direction of movement. There is nothing free but there is choice. — Rich

You mean a choice such as the choice of a robot to move to the left rather than to the right because it is programmed to move to the left?

That's not the kind of freedom that makes sense of moral responsibility, and of praise and blame in general. — John

I think the feeling of moral responsibility arises from compassion, which is another feeling. Compatibilist freedom allows that.

Praise and blame can be seen as psychological motivators that evolved thanks to their usefulness. Praise evokes pleasant feelings and thus encourages an action while blame evokes unpleasant feelings and thus discourages an action.

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One way to block the regress is to say that an intention to act is not a separate event from the free act itself, and so there is no need to postulate a second order intention to explain the first, and so on.

In other words, when you act freely, it is not because there's a distinct event which is your intention to act freely, that somehow causes your action; but rather the intention is an aspect or a property of the action itself, and thus not a separable entity. — Fafner

I suppose this means that the intention does not influence the intentional act and thus denies point 1 of my argument? If an intention does not precede the act then there is no time for the intention to influence the act.

The problem with such an intentional act seems to be that we lose control of the act and thus the act is not free. I think we control our intentional acts through our intentions - by influencing them by our intentions - but if intention does not influence the act then we cannot control the act. The intention then seems to be just an epiphenomenon that is formed along with the act, a feeling of agreement with the act even though we don't have control over the act (and over the intention).

Belief in freedom is fundamental, and you are, in fact, incapable of not believing in your freedom; whatever you might manage to convince your rational mind of to the contrary. — John

I can believe in the compatibilist notion of freedom - I am free when I can do what I want. What other freedom can we have?

That must be quite a terrible existence then for you, because pleasure is quite a fickle mistress, often attended by a harem of pain. — Agustino

Pleasure doesn't have to be carnal. It can also be gained from the worship of God. In general, it is simply "pleasant feelings".

An abstract four sided triangle can be itself, and is not itself only in a context where three and four have meaning and are not each other. — noAxioms

But an abstract four sided triangle is defined only in such a context.

The root definition of those concepts is 'stands apart', which is why I didn't like litewave's definition since I could thing of nothing that isn't identical with itself without first setting up a context with rules about what might make it not identical with itself. — noAxioms

Doesn't 'stand apart' mean 'being different from others'? That's part of my definition of existence.

I guess they mean the same thing.

Pleasure/happiness.

Fine, but that doesn't mean that there can't be hypothetical facts about hypotheticals, or that (to say it in another wording) hypotheticals can't be what facts refer to. — Michael Ossipoff

I agree. I just thought that your ontology was limited to facts but now it seems that it also contains other existent objects.

Do you advocate Physicalism? — Michael Ossipoff

No, I advocate the existence of whatever is identical to itself and different from what it is not.

The hypothetical if-then statements do have content. They're about relations among other hypotheticals, as I described above. — Michael Ossipoff

But if there are relations between objects then there must also be the objects. So it seems to me that the objects that constitute the content of facts are ontologically just as real as the facts.

Inconsistent facts can be ignored as soon as their inconsistency is pointed out. Do they "exist"? Certainly importantly. Not in a way that makes them useful or relevant. — Michael Ossipoff

I would say that the existence of inconsistent objects is absurd. These would be objects that are not what they are, for example square circles.

I know next to nothing about these probability calculations but apparently physicists consider various possible scenarios that a universe could be, subject to fundamental physics theories such as quantum mechanics and general relativity, and then they can calculate the probability of a certain type of scenario. The type of scenario that allows existence of life then seems to have a low probability. But if we assume that all possible scenarios are realized in different universes or in different domains of our own universe, then we necessarily live in that type of scenario where life is possible, even if the number of scenarios of that type is a very small fraction of all possible scenarios and thus that type of scenario is very unlikely. This is how Steven Weinberg relatively successfully predicted the value of the cosmological constant back in 1980s.

The idea that there are other (unobservable) universes raises doubts but I think it's a pretty natural metaphysical idea. Why should some possibilities exist and others not? Existence and possibility may actually be the same.

So sure, the facts exist, as facts. — Michael Ossipoff

And facts are related to other objects, at least, obviously, to those objects that constitute the content of the facts. You may take an arbitrary fact, for example an if-then fact such as "If I jump of out window I will fall", but would this fact have any meaning without objects like "I", "window", or (temporal) objects/processes like "jumping" and "falling"? It seems that if such a fact "exists" then those objects should "exist" too, or else the fact would have no content and thus no "truth" or "existence" either.

So I would say that facts (or if-then facts) are not the only objects that exist; that there are also other existent objects, and facts (true propositions) are just a particular kind of existent objects. The most general ontology I can think of contains all consistently defined objects.

But some Advaitists (mostly Western "Neo-Advaitists") say that the physical world is illusory, not really existent; and they can say that because they mean something different when (at least in that instance) they use "exist". — Michael Ossipoff

They seem to use a narrower definition of existence then. It seems to reflect their values, namely that the physical world is "inferior". According to the most general definition of existence (existence = logical consistency), only those things that are inconsistent do not exist.

I suppose it could be argued that even plainly false statements and propositions exist as false statements and propositions. I mean, are there false statements and propositions? Sure. — Michael Ossipoff

A proposition may be false in some context (possible world) and true in another. I see a proposition as a kind of property, so if a proposition is false in some context it just means that the proposition is not instantiated in that context (is not a property of that context). The proposition itself may exist but is not instantiated in that context. A proposition that is false in every context is inconsistent. Such a proposition does not even exist as a false proposition because it is nothing. (a proposition should not be confused with statements in the sense of utterances or ink marks on paper though)

I'm not denying that existent things relate to each other. But that relation (you haven't stated what that relation is) is not existence in itself, which as I recall you had defined as the property (not relation) "is possible" which eliminated almost nothing and thus made it hard for existent things to stand apart from the nonexistent ones. — noAxioms

I defined existence as logical consistency (possibility), which I summed up as "being identical to oneself and different from others". This means that every thing has an intrinsic identity (being what it is) and an extrinsic/relational identity (being different from others). Being different from others entails having relations to others, and the most fundamental relation is similarity (difference), which is necessarily connected with two other fundamental relations (which are simultaneously special kinds of the similarity relation): instantiation and composition, because if two things are similar to each other then they instantiate some same properties and some different properties, and they also automatically compose a collection. Every thing has these three relations and any other relations are reducible to these three.

So, existence entails having relations.

An ontology that allows everything that is logically consistent is surely vast, but it may seem vaster than it actually is because many things that seem logically consistent to us may actually be inconsistent and therefore don't exist.

Had you asked this question of me, I'd say facts exist in the same way anything exists: within some context. Are there no objective facts then? Not even the paradoxical "There are no objective facts"? This is a good way to destroy my definition of existence requiring a context. If no-context is a valid context, then there is objective existence. But the fact must be demonstrable without any empirical evidence at all. — noAxioms

Every object, including facts, exists in relations to all other objects, even in objective reality. For example, a fact exists in relations to the objects it explicitely refers to: the fact that 1+1=2 exists in relations to number 1 and number 2. Or you can always define a collection of which this fact is a part, for example the collection with these two parts: "the fact that 1+1=2" and "London Bridge". So the fact exists in the context of this collection.

1. Metaphysics is about what is. There is a wide diversity of metaphysicses, and no proof of which of them is right.

2. The words "Exist" and "Real" don't have agreed-upon metaphysical definitions. — Michael Ossipoff

You said that there are certain facts. Isn't it the same as saying that there exist certain facts?

I hope you're referring to the statement "There are no abstract facts other than this one", or "The only fact is the fact that there are no other facts", or "There is only one fact", etc. — Michael Ossipoff

Yes.

If I understand you right, you're saying that the concepts used in that statement imply the many other abstract facts that the statements claims that there are not. — Michael Ossipoff

Yes.

I would say that to exist as an abstract object means to have instances/examples, to which the abstract object is related through the relation of instantiation. The instantiation relation seems to be primitive, just like the composition relation (relation between part and whole/collection).

For example, the abstract circle, which can be defined by the equation x^2 + y^2 = r^2, is instantiated in particular circles.

Abstract objects seem to be features of objective/external reality but in our minds they may be represented by concrete typical/paradigmatic examples. At least for me, I am not able to imagine/visualize an abstract object such as an abstract circle, only concrete examples. But the specific similarity between concrete circles evokes in me the feeling or idea that there is also an abstract circle (the property of circleness), although I cannot perceive it directly.

In my view everything exists timelessly, as logical necessities. But among these things are certain arrangements/orders that we experience as temporal sequences. These arrangements must satisfy certain conditions, for example (but perhaps not necessarily) theory of relativity.

In any case, I have formed the view that the laws of logic, natural numbers, and many other things of that kind, are in the general class of things that are real but not existent, i.e. they don't exist as objects of perception, but are aspects of both thought and the world, and without which rational thought and language would not be possible. — Wayfarer

Or you could say that they exist as abstract objects. They satisfy the identity condition for existence: they are identical to themselves and different from others.

There can certainly be, as an abstract object, the statement "There are no abstract facts other than this one." — Michael Ossipoff

I think this statement is inconsistent, because it needs a logic that generates also other facts. For example, it uses relations of abstraction (instantiation) and other-than (difference/similarity), which generate a vast world of possibilities.

A logically impossible situation is not even a situation. It is nothing. Contradictory descriptions describe nothing.

That's what makes the situation fully hypothetical. Yet you talked about the situation and described it and imagined it. — BlueBanana

That's what makes the situation impossible and therefore such a situation cannot exist. I just wrote a collection of words on the screen that refers to no situation.

Your hypothetical situation is:
1) I can imagine the concept
2) I can not imagine the concept
3) 1&2 do not contradict each other — BlueBanana

But 1&2 contradict each other in any situation.

You're assuming that triangular circle exists (as in exists physically). It doesn't and can't exist in our universe. — BlueBanana

It can't exist anywhere, not just in our universe.

Within where a circle that is not a circle exists, yes. The concept of a circle that is not a circle exists within my imagination, not physically (because it's logically impossible for such a thing to physically exist). — BlueBanana

Your word "concept" seems key here. When you imagine a circle that is not a circle, in your imagination is a collection of thoughts that refers to nothing, because a circle that is not a circle is nothing. If you don't assume that this "nothing" exists, you can be consistent.

Secondly, if I could abandon the principle of non-contradiction within our physical reality that'd mean my arguments would also automatically not refute themselves. — BlueBanana

I don't think that works. If you abandon the principle of non-contradiction within something, what is the difference between "within" and "without"? From a contradiction, anything (and the opposite of anything) follows.

Thirdly, you yourself have shown to be capable of imagining the abandoning of the principle of non-contradiction — BlueBanana

I don't think I can imagine that. It would be to imagine nothing.

By the way, it has been asked if there could have been a Nothing in which there weren't even any abstract facts.

But It's been pointed out that there couldn't have not been abstract facts, because then it would have been an abstract fact that there are no abstract facts. — Michael Ossipoff

Well, I have made an argument that if there were absolutely nothing (absence of everything) then there would be the fact that there is absolutely nothing and a fact is something, which refutes the premise. Absolute nothing is therefore incoherent/impossible, but you can still have nothing in a limited sense, as the content of an empty set (the empty set itself is something - a thing without parts).

Even if it's a tautology, and so it isn't useful or necessary to say, it's still one of the valid abstract facts.

...which maybe can be said about my answer, too.. — Michael Ossipoff

But if there is a fact that "if A then A", then there must also be A, the element of the fact "if A then A". But only consistent As are something; inconsistent As are nothing. So there are all consistent As.

But there is — BlueBanana

A triangular circle is a circle that is not a circle, so a circle and a non-circle are the same thing: there is no difference between a circle and a non-circle.

Non sequitur. That "if-then" is incorrect, you can't conclude that. What you can conclude from that I can imagine a circle being non-circle, is that I can imagine imagining equaling not imagining. — BlueBanana

Once you assume the existence of a circle that is a non-circle you abandon the principle of non-contradiction. From that moment, all your arguments automatically refute themselves.

I can imagine the concept — BlueBanana

So you cannot. Because if there is no difference between a circle and a non-circle then there is no difference between imagining and not imagining.

You can imagine a circle that is not a circle? If you abandon the principle of non-contradiction, then you cannot imagine what you can imagine.

Someone could say that any proposition exists as a proposition, meaning only that it is a proposition. Then every false proposition exists, such as the proposition that circles (by their usual definition) have four sides, or the proposition that if all Slithytoves are purple, and Joe is a Slithytove, then Joe is yellow, or that the shortest distance between two points on a Euclidian plane is along a semicircle. — Michael Ossipoff

An inconsistent proposition is not true in any part of reality, but that means that it is a property that is not instantiated in any part of reality - a property without a thing it would be a property of - and so it is a property that is not a property - it is nothing.

What if you took an arbitrary statement A and formed a compound statement "if A then A"? It would be always true, a tautology. (same for "A if and only if A") What would that mean in your view?

A statement (proposition) can be viewed as a complex property with a subject-predicate structure and even with logical connectives such as "if-then". A statement is then true in that part of reality where this property is instantiated, and a true/instantiated statement is a fact, a property of that part of reality in which it is instantiated. But if a statement exists or is true (and if it exists then it must be true at least in some part of reality, because a property is always a property of something and so must be instantiated), then its structure and elements must exist too. This holds for any statement, not just for statements with the "if-then" connective.

For example, take a simple statement like "John is running". If this statement is true in some part of reality, for example in New York's Central Park, then John must exist (in that part of reality) and he must instantiate the property of running.