Logically, he would go directly diagonally across the field. Being tired he decides not to exercise his free will as to another path. I don't get it.

I'm not following your "shoveling" example.

Compatibilism makes the most sense to me: an agent's free willing (i.e. volition) is manifest within constraints of (a) deterministic conditions of and (b) consequences caused by those agent's actions which are not coerced by another agency.

Logically, he would go directly diagonally across the field. Being tired he decides not to exercise his free will as to another path. I don't get it. — jgill

So he goes directly diagonally. The covering is removed. Only his diagonal path is black. The remainder of the field has been painted white. Did he have free will, or not?

So paint-guy leaves the diagonal unpainted, merely playing the odds that shovel-guy would take the most direct route. Shovel-guy’s just following directions: go from here to there, don’t step outside your own track. Not much of a challenge, is it?

I don’t vote, and I don’t see will as having much to do with this gedankenexperiment.

it's a good example, that is co-related to the idea that the direction of causality is relative.

The classical conception of causality, which assumes that the causal order is independent of perspective, does not possess the notion of synchronized events, in which the existence of an event necessitates the existence or non-existence of another event, but without either event being alleged to influence the other.

If the notion of causality is adjusted so as to included synchronised events, we automatically get
1) The notion of non-local quantum entanglement.
2) A reconciliation of Bertrand Russell's view that causality doesn't exist, with the interventionist view of causality as used in the sciences.

So in your previous example, the man's path can be viewed as being synchronised with the independent observation that the rest of the field is white, even though neither event is the cause of the other.

I wonder if a fundamental cause of the controversies is that the concept of free will is poorly defined.

Absolutely. It's an even larger issue in theology.

I would just add that another element of the problem is the fact that people conflate determinism with "smallism," the idea that facts about larger wholes must be reducible to facts about small constituent parts. Then, because we generally assume that atoms and molecules lack intentionality, this then suggests that determinism requires that minds, beliefs, etc. can have no causal efficacy. After all, if all thoughts, beliefs, perceptions can be reduced to facts about mindless molecules, then such things must be in some way "illusory" vis-á-vis any causal explanation of phenomena.

But I don't think this is at all a consensus, or even a common opinion in philosophy. To be sure, reductionism and smallism are popular, but the concept that they are essential to elements of determinism is not. Rather, people seem more likely to embrace determinism because of smallism.

Part of this seems to stem from problems with viewing "natural laws," as extrinsic, Platonic forces that exist "outside" the universe, but act upon it. This is sort of the Newton conception of the "natural laws." This has been replaced to a large degree by Kirpke's essentialism, the idea that "laws" simply "describe" regularities that exist because of properties intrinsic to objects. E.g., water acts the way it does because of what water is.

Essentialism doesn't require smallism. We could as well say the world acts the way it does because of what universal fields are. However, it was originally framed in smallist terms, and so the two have become contingently wedded.

I buy essentialism more than the idea of extrinsic, eternal laws, but I don't think this requires explanations of facts grounded entirely in the properties of "fundemental" parts.

Your question seems more akin to earlier questions about free will and it's compatibility with divine foreknowledge. This is a nonreductionist conception of determinism, and I think it is perfectly compatible with compatibilist ideas of free will.

Is the man free? It depends, freedom is relative. But he is not unfree simply because it was possible to predict his behavior. If we are, as Plato and Hegel suggest, more free when we are more united and guided by reason, then in key ways our actions should be more, not less predictable as we become freer (so long as you have information about the freer person's beliefs, priorities, and the information they have access to).

Saint Augustine used this analogy. Think of a choice you made in the past. Can you go back and change it? No, your choice is now a necessary element of the past. Does that preclude your being free when you made the choice, at the point of becoming? Absolutely not. We only make choices in the eternal "now," not in the "already has been," or "not yet."

I did not understand that scenario at all. The field is black, but yesterday it was painted white? I... don't understand

Edit. I understand. You're saying, in a very hard to follow way in my opinion, that the previous day it was painted as if the person painting it knew exactly the path this guy would take - he predicted it perfectly so the guy would only see black.

I don't really see what this has to do with free will at all tbh. The scenario tells me nothing about it the guy had free will or not. Knowing how other people answer this question doesn't really tell me much about what they think of free will either.

Neither the shoveling man, nor the painting man had any free will. Both were constrained by some common factor that yielded the ultimate pattern on the field. The two complimentary events were "entangled", and so the case must be that neither had the choice to deviate from the predetermined pattern.

Mentalists or magicians do this sort of thing all the time:

An excellent example of the burden for Determinists to disprove Free Will. Hence why Free Will is not disproven.

Free Will is not disproven. — LuckyR

Santa Clause hasn't been disproven either, so he must be real. Is this a valid conclusion?

I don't get how your mind works. "Not disproven" doesn't mean: "proven", it means: "possible".

That's right, the example is nonsense, because it has not been proven that the perfect prediction of an individual's actions which is described by the example, is even possible. @Art48 might just as well have described a world in which all actions are completely predetermined due to causal determinism, and asked if there is any free will in this world. So the question Art48 is really asking is whether free will is compatible with determinism, and the answer is no it is not.

That's right, the example is nonsense, because it has not been proven that the perfect prediction of an individual's actions which is described by the example, is even possible. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, surely it's possible just by pure chance. If I asked a hundred people to guess a number between 1-100, I might guess the number they guessed correctly once or twice - that's not impossible by any means. He didn't really clarify how the painter got it right, he just said he got it right.

So the question Art48 is really asking is whether free will is compatible with determinism, and the answer is no it is not. — Metaphysician Undercover

Or alternatively the answer might be yes it is.

"Not disproven" doesn't mean: "proven", it means: "possible". — LuckyR

That depends on what sort of possibility you are referring to.

https://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-logical-possibility-and-vs-metaphysical-possibility/

Well, surely it's possible just by pure chance. If I asked a hundred people to guess a number between 1-100, I might guess the number they guessed correctly once or twice - that's not impossible by any means. He didn't really clarify how the painter got it right, he just said he got it right. — flannel jesus

Notice though, that the only way you make the correct prediction possible is by restricting the possible choices of the agent. The more you restrict the possibilities of the agent, the easier it is to predict. So when you change the perimeters to 1-50, or 1-10, you make the prediction easier, but if you change to 1-1000 you make the prediction more difficult.

So in reality, in this type of scenario, the agent's actions are only becoming predictable by forcing the agent (contrary to free will) to make a choice within a specified range of possibilities. In the op, the agent must clear a line from one corner to another, and this denies the agent's free will, as a premise. So the op denies the possibility of free will, by starting with a premise that the agent must do as he is told to, thereby denying him the free will to do what he wants to do.

Or alternatively the answer might be yes it is. — flannel jesus

Sure, if you have free will, you might answer as you please.

bingo bongo. Hell, people without free will might answer as they please too.

I wonder if a fundamental cause of the controversies is that the concept of free will is poorly defined. — Art48

No, the reason is that people cannot cope with the fact that we don't have free will. It's an existential threat to their very experience of being. It messes with the concept of justice, the concept of agency, of identity and so on. Even for people who understand the logic of determinism it is hard to wrap their heads around the experience of it, because it feels so alien to the way our consciousness behaves.



It's not that free will is poorly defined, it's that determinism isn't well understood.

No, the reason is that people cannot cope with the fact that we don't have free will. — Christoffer

So, do you believe that the man in the OP does not have free will? At the moment, the poll is 80% does not have free will and 20% other.

Models of causality that are "compatibilist" are those which appear to be retro-causal due to rejecting the antecedent-precedent distinction. These models aren't built upon the directed conditionals of the form A --> B, but upon bi-conditionals of the form A <--> B. In other words, these are models whose logic is called "circular reasoning".

To give a simplified version of OP's thought experiment, let

A := Alice's secret prediction on Monday, concerning what Bob will do on Tuesday

B := Bob's actions on Tuesday, without Bob knowing about Alice's prediction, which he later learns about on Wednesday.

Suppose that Bob believes from past experience that

1) Alice's secret 'predictions about him are always true.

2) Her predictions cannot be explained by a hidden confounding variable that influences both her prediction and what he does.

As a result, Bob accepts a conditional of the form A --> B. If Bob is to be a compatibilist, then he must also argue for a "retrocausal" relation of the form B --> A. This means that Bob must assume that from his perspective, Alice's "prediction on Monday" actually occurs on 'Bob's Wednesday' when he learns about her prediction, which is after he dug the path. Thus B --> A refers to Bob's actions "causing" Alice's "earlier" prediction. Since Bob only observes Alice's prediction after the facts of his actions, this compatibilist interpretation is perfectly consistent.

Models of causality that are "compatibilist" are those which appear to be retro-causal due to rejecting the antecedent-precedent distinction. — sime

What does "compatibilist" mean in this sentence? It doesn't look like it means the usual free-will/determinism kind of compatibilism, but I'm stumped at what else it could mean.

Pray tell, in which possibility is Free Will not possible? BTW if you're going to throw out conclusions, you're sort of obligated to back them up (oh and your citation doesn't address Free Will).

So, do you believe that the man in the OP does not have free will? At the moment, the poll is 80% does not have free will and 20% other. — Art48

No one has free will. Doesn't matter how people try to phrase things, we're not detached entities from the universe in which we exist. Everything in this universe is acting within deterministic laws, but somehow people's decisions aren't? If anything, that sounds more like human arrogance and ideals about humanity as something uniquely special in this reality. So far, all actual evidence we have point towards pure determinism while there's no actual evidence for free will at all, outside some pseudo-religious hogwash that people interpret out of trash science magazines that have no idea on how to present actual research paper conclusions without introducing speculative nonsense into the mix.

The bottom line is that if everything points towards determinism, then the burden of proof is on the one claiming there is free will to prove how human decision making is possible outside of that universal law. It doesn't matter how elaborate of an example someone tries to write out, it's not getting around the basics of it all.

I wonder if a fundamental cause of the controversies is that the concept of free will is poorly defined. — Art48

Not poorly, but not universally, unanimously. You can see already from people's definitions of "free will" or from the experiments with which they propose to test it, whether they believe it exists or not. Libet, for example, makes absurd demands on what a will would need to be like in order to be free.

But the field had already been painted. From an objective viewpoint, how could the man have truly been free? — Art48

That the field was painted in a particular way is irrelevant. Free will applies to his sense as to whether he felt he had a choice to partake in the experiment or not. Free will doesn't pertain to the parameters of the experiment. If he felt he had a choice whether to partake in the experiment or not, he had free will; if he didn't feel he had such choice, he didn't have free will.

But what about situations where we have been manipulated? In those cases, it seems like we are making a free choice at the time, but we come to find out that we made choices we otherwise wouldn't have.

But if the antecedent state did not cause the resultant state, that's not Determinism.

I wonder if a fundamental cause of the controversies is that the concept of free will is poorly defined — Art48

I’ve been following this discussion with some bemusement. Would one of you be willing to put forward a target definition of “free will” -- one that makes sense to them – so that we can have some idea what we’re debating, and all focus on the same concept?

Remove your body from the equation and tell me how well you will. Also record us your will typing out your reply free from your body. — Vaskane

What?

I don't get how your mind works. "Not disproven" doesn't mean: "proven", it means: "possible". — LuckyR

Don't feel bad about it, you're not the first or the last. How is free will possible, or at least how do you think it might be possible? Do you think that Santa Clause is possible?