I made a recent thread about my reasons for rejecting libertarian free will here. I had quite a few people trying to probe into my non libertarian beliefs so I thought I'd make a thread about that specifically.

My aim in this thread is not to convince anybody I'm correct. If anything, over the past years on philosophy forums I've come to the conclusion that it's borderline impossible to do that. At best, one can express their thoughts and hope one of the people listening can convince themselves. And I'm not even certain my take is correct, so the last thing on my mind is changing your mind.

This is more of a journal of sorts. I'm writing this on the fly in between sets at the gym.

My journey of thought about free will actually starts with something like the train of thought illustrated in the above linked thread. Either we live in a world that evolves towards the future according to strict rules, rules about how things relate to each other in space and time, how energy transforms matter, transfers between matter, things like that, OR the rules aren't quite so strict, and some random things happen. That's the basic dichotomy that started my journey, but I had all of those thoughts while pretty much not having heard much about quantum physics at all. And with no awareness of quantum physics, I didn't find any reason at the time, all those years ago, to be anything other than a determinist. In my early years in philosophy, the debate was framed as "determinism vs free will" and I accepted that framing, and happily just ended up being a hard determinist.

The first time I heard about compatibilism, I thought what most people seem to think: that's just silly, if the world is determined then you can't really have done otherwise, there's no room for free will there. Compatibilists are just playing goofy word games. I still thought at that time that even if the world weren't deterministic, that just means random, and random is no more free than determined. So I guess at that point in my life, I would have been a "hard incompatibilist".

I don't actually know when or why I changed my mind about that. I don't know if I read an article - could have been this one - or if it was purely based on a sequence of my own unprompted thoughts. In either case, I came to view myself as a decision making machine, and furthermore that those decisions are -real- , at least in some sense.

That's actually the center of compatibilism to me. I have conscious experience, and I may not have full sourcehood-control of my thoughts, but my thoughts do seem non-epiphenomenally connected to the things my body does. Even writing about consciousness, about the ineffable nature of it, about the richness of the qualia of colour, seems enough evidence to me to say "it's not epiphenomenal" - why would my body be writing the words that can only be conveying the things I'm consciously experiencing, even trying to convey the ineffable parts, if those ineffable parts weren't causal in some way? So, even if I can't explain why or how, I feel compelled to conclude that they aren't epiphenomenal.

But if they aren't epiphenomenal, how do they actually relate to the rest of my world view? This part is much much harder to explain. I believe that emergence is required here, but I don't have the vocabulary to bridge the gap. I believe that I, as a decision making machine, am most likely fully and completely implemented by my physical makeup. Furthermore, I also believe that even if I wasn't, it wouldn't really matter, because whatever else I was composed of would still have to be some kind of process-oriented "thing" evolving into the future based on past states and new inputs. Physical or not doesn't really matter. So I might as well be physical, positing anything else doesn't seem to go any distance towards answering any questions. So my body is physical, every element of it behaves in just the way physical things behave - I don't believe the matter in my body or brain behaves in fundamentally different ways from anything else - and so... how can my conscious experience be efficacious? It must be, and yet it seems so impossible to understand how.

My current view is that I think of our minds, and this world stage in which many minds can interact with each other, are just physically implemented manifestations of almost some kind of semi-platonic semi-ideal. So it's not so much that our minds are CHANGING what happens in the physical world, per se, but our minds are an emergent part of the physical world and the physical world is the very thing that enables us to have minds to think things. I'm sure there's someone out there who has expressed what I'm trying to express in much more eloquent words than I am right now.

I don't know if the world is deterministic or indeterministic. I lean towards deterministic but QM gives me some reasonable doubt. But I don't think it matters in either case, for the question of free will.

When we hold someone morally responsible, we're judging them as a decision making machine. The same way a machine that, say, produces fabric can be malfunctioning or just not working well enough to fit into the assembly line, so too can a human beings decision making apparatus be malfunctioning, or not working in anything close to a way that makes it compatible with the rest of society. So other decision making machines say "this decision making machine needs to be separated, corrected, or maybe even destroyed".

And that's where the compatibilist "could have done otherwise" comes in. Some decision making machine does something, some other ones say "I hate that he did that, if he wasn't malfunctioning as a decision making machine, or if he was a better designed machine, he would have done something different". So one can imagine replacing his decision making algorithm with their own, prior to the offending decision, and if one can be convinced that under those circumstances, ones own decision making apparatus would have done something different, one may think that the person being judged was "in the wrong". They could have done otherwise, but not in the libertarian sense - with no change whatsoever - but in the sense of swapping out the decision making machine for a better one. If you swapped it out, this other one would have done something better.

But there are subtleties to that. For example, you could come up with a situation where some other decision making machine could have produced a more desirable result, but for reasons that aren't generalisable to producing generally more desirable results. It's tough. And I don't have all the answers.

I've been rambling aimlessly for long enough. I hope no one reads this.