I found an article that neatly describes my problem with libertarian free will

javra

Yea. I got that much.

flannel jesus

Anyway, the article lays out a clear scenario - a Bob1 and a Bob2 who are both entirely the same as each other and in entirely the same circumstances before some decision. Then, that decision comes up and, despite the fact that they're perfectly the same and in entirely the same scenario, they choose something different from each other. Bob1 choose a different thing from Bob2 in that moment.

Now, the reasoning in that article is pretty crystal-clear as far as I'm concerned: if we're accepting that Bob1 and Bob2 are the same, then the explanation for why Bob2 chose something different can't be found inside Bob. Because nothing inside Bob2 was different from Bob1. Right? Does that make sense? Like, even if you don't think it's true, do you at least understand the reasoning there?

javra

Right? Does that make sense? Like, even if you don't think it's true, do you at least understand the reasoning there? — flannel jesus

Yes. I do understand the reasoning. And it's that very non-teleological reasoning that I initially replied to. Somehow feel like we're going about in circles. So I won't repeat the summarized argument I previously expressed.

Do you still maintain that there can be no teleological reasoning or determinacy? If so, unless you can provide rationally justification for excluding the very possibility of teleological reasoning and determinacy, I'll maybe call it quits. I'm not intending to argue against unjustified affinities toward certain metaphysical outlooks that others nevertheless prefer to maintain - this despite their lack of justification.

flannel jesus

Do you still maintain that there can be no teleological reasoning or determinacy? — javra

I don't think I even know what you mean. What I love about the op article is how remarkably clear and unambiguous it is. I don't think you're making yourself nearly as clear as that.

Maybe take it 1 step at a time, talk me through why teleological reasoning means that the explanation for why Bob2 did something different from Bob1 is sourced in bob himself, despite them being perfectly identical. Pretend like you never said anything before, start from the beginning. Really from the beginning, pretend I don't even know what the word teleological means.

javra

↪flannel jesus

Can you please answer my question first. It still applies.

flannel jesus

↪javra

I would love to but your question doesn't make sense to me.

I can't maintain that if I don't understand what your teleological reasoning is.

javra

↪flannel jesus

Are you at all familiar with the notion of final causes?

In today's terms and commonly accepted metaphysics they're considered to not be causes but explanations. I term the process "teleological determinacy" to hopefully explicitly emphasize that intents/teloi/ends can and do in fact determine present motions - in the content of the OP, this as regards will.

If you're not at all familiar with this notion of determinacy which is more commonly termed final causation, then I get why the question makes no sense to you.

flannel jesus

↪javra

No, not familiar with any of it, that's why i'm asking you to explain it from the beginning my bro.

javra

↪flannel jesus

Ok. There's an intent, a goal, a not yet actualized end which you want, or desire, to make real at some point in the future. It could be a classic example of having made a statue, or it could be that intent os satiating one's hunger or thirst. Whatever it is, that's the end pursued.

So lets say you have a statue in mind as final product which you want to actualize. For as long as you move toward this - in this example - distal (or distant) end/telos you will likely make certain choices between alternatives (each being its own potential and more proximal end/telos) that best satisfies the accomplishment of you distal end.

The distal end, in effect, then to some significant degree determines which proximate alternative you will likely choose in your efforts to actualize the distal end.

The not yet actualized future actualized statue is then the final cause of your current actions, say chiseling a block of stone. Hence, the telos/aim/goal/end you actively hold in mind teleologially determines your current activities toward it.

So far so good? Or do you have objections?

flannel jesus

↪javra

it's very jargon heavy. "Distal end" sounds like a fancy way of saying end goal. Is that right?

What does "not yet actualized future actualized statue" mean? That's a very difficult phrase to parse.

flannel jesus

Honestly it just sounds like you can skip all the jargon and say,

You've imagined a statue that you want to make. It becomes your goal to make it. You make choices to achieve that goal. The desire to achieve your goal is part of what determines your actions, while you still haven't achieved it yet.

Is that right? Is that it in a nutshell? I'm gonna get lost in the sauce if you try to force in a whole new vocabulary, especially if there's no benefit to the vocabulary over just normal words.

javra

"Distal end" sounds like a fancy way of saying end goal. Is that right? — flannel jesus

Sure, but the "end goal" is almost always relative to context. For most any end goal invisions, there is almost always a more distant or abstract end goal to which the first plays a more proximate part. E.g., you're aim is to satisfy you're hunger, but this in itself can have the further down the line end goal of staying alive. Etc.

What does "not yet actualized future actualized statue" mean? That's a very difficult phrase to parse. — flannel jesus

OK, not written as good as it could be. End is a not yet actualized statue that you intend to actualize at some point in the future - otherwise you actualizing the statue you have in mind will not be a personal aim you actively hold (say you're only imagining a statue for the fun of it with no intention to bring about any such thing in reality at any point in your life).

javra

You've imagined a statue that you want to make. It becomes your goal to make it. You make choices to achieve that goal. The desire to achieve your goal is part of what determines your actions, while you still haven't achieved it yet.

Is that right? Is that it in a nutshell? — flannel jesus

That works. But to me it excludes things that are themselves important. Such that each alternative one chooses between, at the time of the choice making, is of itself a goal, or aim, one then chooses between.

flannel jesus

↪javra

mate, I can't do these crazy sentences. It seems like you're going out of your way to make the most basic concepts sound as complex as possible. You've just said a sentence that basically amounts to "each alternative you choose between, you choose between". My dude, I'm going to actually go crazy if your wording is going to stay like this.

You make choices to achieve your end goal, and some of those choices are themselves smaller goals. Is that it?

javra

↪flannel jesus

Alright. Maybe I'm tired and it shows in my expressions. Maybe you could bother to look into the rather basic wikipedia page of final causation I've linked to to better understand it. It's terminology and concepts that have a history of two millennia. Though not often addressed in today's materialist metaphysical understandings.

Thing is, teleology can easily reduce to basic concepts, yes, but - to my best current appraisal - to grasp the implications of teleology in the context of free will requires more than just today's basic concepts of causation and randomness. It's like discussing what fitness means in the context of evolutionary biology without any comprehension of the basic biological paradigm, a little like debating the issue with someone who replies "but the animal fits just fine in the box over there, so what do you mean it has no biological fitness if it never reproduces? And why can't you use ordinary language rather than a specialized meaning for 'fitness'. It fits in the box after all."

As I've said, maybe I'm largely at fault in my expressions, but I've got no problems in letting things be as they currently are, lack of common understanding on the subject though we currently have.

flannel jesus

↪javra

you really don't think I've captured just about everything you've said, much more succinctly and clearly, in my plain language paraphrasings? Dang dude. If I can't paraphrase it then I definitely am not understanding it.

javra

↪flannel jesus

This page seems to give a good overview of teleology, but is considerably longer than this page, which also give an adequate overview. Notice that I'm not linking to articles that further these concepts in jargon such as "distal", etc., but simple to understand Wikipedia pages written from as broad an audience as one can get.

A "final cause", aka "telos" is far more than what you've succinctly and clearly expressed in plain language paraphrasing - with the latter being only one subsection of the former. And I'm fairly sure that without understanding what a telos is it's going to be more pointless than not to engage in discussion regarding how free will can be neither deterministic nor random.

That's all I've got for now. Sorry dude.

NOS4A2

↪flannel jesus

However, since Bob1 and Bob2 have all of the same goals, beliefs, etc., there is nothing different between them to which we can appeal to explain why Bob1 chose to go the bookshelf at time T2 and Bob2 chose to go the kitchen at time T2.

There are plenty of differences. Two different worlds, two different Bobs, two different positions in space and time, etc.

tim wood

Ok, so now that you know it's a thought experiment, and not a real experiment, and nobody thinks it's a real experiment and nobody is suggesting we conduct it in physical reality, you're invited to actually think about the ideas he presented, in regards to Bob1 and Bob2, or... not. You may just wholesale decline the invitation. — flannel jesus

Free will and determinism. if I understand correctly, are in themselves contradictory and opposed. At a crossroads where I am presumably free to turn left or right, either I am free to make that decision and act on it, or it has always already been made for me and I am precisely not free to make the decision. In as much as I can at least at some level make a free choice, it seems to me determinism immediately trips over its own feet and falls flat on its face. In terms of any argument, is there any you can make at this point for determinism?

Patterner

Humans do what they do, make the choices they do, according to both these views because of factors outside of the agent’s control, e.g., upbringing, physiology, and interactions with others. On both views, if time were rolled back any amount and allowed to play forward again, the exact same events would occur.

If this is true, isn't everything outside of the agent's control? If we have all the thoughts we think, and do all the things we do, because of all those things, what is in our control? And what is the nature of that control?

The reasoning in the linked article is why I believe libertarian free will doesn't make sense - even if we live in an indeterministic world. — flannel jesus

If the choice of book or water, or even which book, is not determined, and it's is not the result of free will (whatever that is), then how does the one happen instead of the other? Is it random?

flannel jesus

↪tim wood

That's not what the article in the op is about

flannel jesus

Is it random? — Patterner

In my view, yeah, that's really the alternative to determinism. If we have a system evolving over time, it seems to me that any given change in that evolution must either be determined or be at least in part random.

Pierre-Normand

In my view, yeah, that's really the alternative to determinism. If we have a system evolving over time, it seems to me that any given change in that evolution must either be determined or be at least in part random. — flannel jesus

This issue, spelled out in more details in the short essay that you linked to in you OP, is commonly recognized in the literature on free will, determinism and responsibility. Robert Kane dubbed it the Intelligibility problem for libertarianism. He himself advocates a sophisticated form of libertarianism that purports to evade this issue. His account doesn't fully satisfy me, although it has some positive features, but I also endorse a form of libertarianism, myself, albeit one that doesn't posit free will to be inconsistent with determinism (and causal closure) at the micro-physical level where the material realization of our actions and (psychological) deliberations are realized. This means I am not a rollback-incompatibilist. I don't believe free-will, and correctly understood alternate possibilities for an agent to have acted otherwise, require that, if the universe would be rolled back to an earlier stage in its history, its evolution could have unfolded differently. So, my account doesn't suffer from an intelligibility problem either.

flannel jesus

↪Pierre-Normand

what makes your view libertarian, instead of compatibilist?

Pierre-Normand

what makes your view libertarian, instead of compatibilist? — flannel jesus

Excellent question! I don't believe microphysical determinism to entail universal determinism. Mental events aren't physical events, on my view, even though they are the actualizations of cognitive abilities of rational animals (human beings) who are entirely made out of physical stuff, and mental events can be acknowledged to supervene on the physical. I think it is almost universally agreed among philosophers and scientists that microphysical determinism and supervenience (thereby excluding dualism) jointly entail universal determinism. But I think this is wrong and it overlooks the fine-grained structure of rational causation in the context where cognitive states and rational activity are multiply realizable in their physical "substrate" and it is the general form rather than the specific material constitution of those states (and processes) that is relevant to determining what the causal antecedents of human actions are. This is all very sketchy but spelling out intelligibly the details of my account required much space. I wrote two unpublished papers on the issue, and have explained many features of it to LLMs mainly to help me clarify my formulations, most recently here. (As a follow-up to this background material.)

flannel jesus

↪Pierre-Normand

It sounds like you think, given the same state, the same future will follow. And it sounds like you believe we have free will anyway. I guess, to me, that just tautologically looks like what it means to be compatibilist. I accept that you interpret it differently though.

Pierre-Normand

It sounds like you think, given the same state, the same future will follow. And it sounds like you believe we have free will anyway. I guess, to me, that just tautologically looks like what it means to be compatibilist. I accept that you interpret it differently though. — flannel jesus

I think rational agents have the ability to determine, by means of practical deliberation, which one of several alternative possibilities will be realized whereas the prior state of the "physical universe," characterized in physical terms, although it is such that knowing it precisely would in principle enable someone to predict with perfect accuracy what action the agent will actually choose to do, fails to make it necessary that the agent would chose to perform this action. I acknowledge that this claim sounds counterintuitive but maybe I could challenge someone who hold the opposite (and very commonly held) view to demonstrate its validity. Jaegwon Kim (with his Causal exclusion argument) and Peter van Inwagen (with his Consequence argument) have tried, for instance, and failed in my view. Furthermore, the demonstration of the flaws in their arguments are richly instructive in highlighting the peculiar structure of rational causation whereby it is sensitivity to rational norms of practical deliberation that primarily explains human action, and this sensitivity consists in the acquisition of cognitive abilities that are irreducible to law governed material processes.

flannel jesus

whereas the prior state of the "physical universe," characterized in physical terms, although it is such that knowing it precisely would in principle enable someone to predict with perfect accuracy what action the agent will actually choose to do, fails to make it necessary that the agent would chose to perform this action. — Pierre-Normand

Wait, it could be predicted with perfect accuracy, but it isn't necessary? Are you sure this isn't a distinction without a difference?

If something has 100% chance of happening, to me, that's what it means to be "necessary". I don't think there's a difference between those two things. If Y follows from X 100% of the time, that's the same as saying Y necessarily follows from X. No?

Pierre-Normand

If something has 100% chance of happening, to me, that's what it means to be "necessary". I don't think there's a difference between those two things. If Y follows from X 100% of the time, that's the same as saying Y necessarily follows from X. No? — flannel jesus

When you perform an action for good reasons after having correctly deliberated about it, then your performing this action isn't something that "happens" to you. It is something that you make happen. Among the many things that you considered doing, only one of them was done because (maybe) you deemed it (though exercising your powers of practical reasoning) to be the right thing to do or the only reasonable thing to do. In that case, the past physical state of the universe (P1) didn't make you do it. A (universal) determinist might argue that P1 deterministically caused P2 to occur and since the choice that you actually made, M2, supervenes on P2, we can say that P1 caused you to do M2. In that case, the physical past and the laws of nature precludes you from seeing to it that you don't do something else, such as M2*. For M2* to have occurred, the physical past would have had to be different—P1*, say—such that P1* deterministically causes P2* and P2* is a material realization of M2*. That is true but all this means is that if, counterfactually, P2* had been the case, then you would have seen to it that M2* is the case. And that's not because P2* would have "made you" do M2*. It's rather because, since M1* intelligibly rationalizes your doing M2*, you would have seen to it that, whatever antecedent physical state P1* realizes M1*, P1* would necessarily cause some P2* to occur that realizes a mental state (i.e. a decision to act) M2*.

Likewise in the actual sequence of events, P1 didn't cause you to do M2. It is rather because P1 happens to realize M1, and you saw to it that, in light of M1, M2 should be done, your deliberation ensured (thanks to the proper formal/functional organization of your cognitive processes) that whatever P2 would be deterministically caused by P1 to occur would be such as to realize M2. So, it is you (by means of the free exercise of you rational cognitive powers) that ensured that you would do M2. P1 only had the physical power, as it were, to determine that P2 would occur, but not that P2 would be such as to realize some action M2 that is intelligible in light of M1.

Note: You'll find below how Grok 3 proposes that I reformulate my response above for the sake of clarity.

Grok 3's enhanced phrasing

When you perform an action after carefully deliberating and choosing it for good reasons, that action doesn’t just “happen” to you—you make it happen. Among the many options you considered, you selected one because, through your powers of practical reasoning, you deemed it the right or most reasonable thing to do. A standard compatibilist might argue that the past physical state of the universe (P1) deterministically caused the subsequent state (P2), and since your chosen action (M2) supervenes on P2, P1 ultimately caused M2. They’d say that the physical past and laws of nature ensured you couldn’t have done otherwise—say, M2*—because M2* would require a different past, P1*, leading to P2* that realizes M2*. That’s true as far as it goes: the physical chain sets the stage.

But here’s where my view diverges: P1 didn’t force M2 upon you. While P1 deterministically causes P2, it’s your rational deliberation—starting from your mental state M1 (e.g., your beliefs and reasons)—that ensures P2 realizes M2, the action you judged best. Consider a counterfactual: if your mental state had been M1*, rationally justifying M2*, your deliberation would have ensured that whatever physical state P1* realized M1*, it would lead to a P2* realizing M2*. In the actual case, P1 happens to realize M1, and through your reasoning, you determine that M2 should follow. Your cognitive processes then ensure that P2, caused by P1, aligns with M2. So, it’s you—via your rational agency—who ensures M2 happens, not just P1.

Now, to your challenge: you’re right that if Y follows X 100% of the time, Y is necessary given X—in a physical sense. If P1 guarantees P2, and M2 supervenes on P2, then M2 was inevitable once P1 occurred. But for free will, the question isn’t just whether the action was physically necessary, but whether you determined it through reasoning. In my view, the physical necessity (P1 → P2) provides the mechanism, but your deliberation decides that P2 realizes M2 rather than some alternative. This makes the action a free choice, not a mere physical outcome.

Thus, P1 has the “physical power” to ensure P2 occurs, but it doesn’t dictate that P2 realizes M2 specifically—that’s your doing. The physical chain makes something inevitable, but your rational agency makes it a meaningful, chosen action rather than a forced event. This, I think, marks the difference from standard compatibilism: your freedom lies in shaping the action’s rational content, not just in its alignment with your desires or its predictability from P1.

flannel jesus

↪Pierre-Normand

I think we just have a difference in vocabulary, because my beliefs are really similar to yours, but I just call it compatibilism.

I found an article that neatly describes my problem with libertarian free will

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