Perhaps that just because I think free will is compatible with determinism doesn't mean I actually believe we do have free will.

As in, "there's a possible world where determinism is true and beings in that world have free will, this just doesn't happen to be one of them".

I'm certain the vast majority of compatibilists don't take a position like that though.

that's correct

I could probably be persuaded otherwise on some weird technicality but yeah, i think someone who calls themselves a compatibilist is almost certainly someone who believes humans have free will in this universe

your first question was how can the stance of compatibilism be compatible with randomness?

Why wouldn't it be? I don't know what's so unsatisfying about my answer to you, I feel like I'm answering pretty straight forward, but since that's not satisfying to you, let me know why you think a world with a little bit of randomness is necessarily contrary to a compatibilist idea of free will

is hard to answer a post with many questions while staying focused, I do prefer answering one question at a time. A failing of mine perhaps, I focused on the last one.

If the world has a little bit of randomness, that doesn't necessarily destroy the causality one needs to enact one's will. So that should be the answer to your first two questions, right?

i don't understand what you're perceiving as an ego battle. I genuinely tried to explain why compatibilists don't have to hard-commit to determinism. Can you explain what part of my answer feels like an ego-battle to you?

you asked "doesn't that then mandate compatibilism's "hard commitment to determinism" in the sense that everything is causally inevitable?" I explained why it doesn't.

if you know what the word 'compatible' means, you would understand.

None of which is a reply to what I asked. — javra

It's all explicitly a reply to what you asked.

No.

Incompatibilists say "determinism destroys free will". Compatibilists simply say "determinism doesn't destroy free will". They're not (all) saying "and that means determinism is necessarily the case" or "indeterminism destroys free will".

Just one simple thing: determinism doesn't destroy free will.

Basically, imagine I have a snow globe in my left hand and a snow globe in my right hand - in each snow globe a little handheld universe. Suppose I know the one in my left hand is indeterministic, and the one in my right hand, while looking at a surface level pretty much just like the left one, is deterministic. An incompatibilist would say "free will may exist in the left globe but not the right", a compatibilist would say "free will may exist in both".

Some compatibilists are definitely unambiguously determinists, and some believe free will is incompatible with indeterminism, but that's not a necessary feature of compatibilis.m

I don't think we have the same understanding of what compatibilism means. A being compatible with B isn't necessarily a claim that B is true. I could say "This TV remote is compatible with double a batteries". That doesn't mean it's only compatible with double a batteries. That doesn't mean it currently has double a batteries in it.

Compatibilism isn't a hard commitment to determinism.

yeah

What is the thing that you think I didn't understand? — MoK

Read the first 4 paragraphs of the op please. "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 what I meant by "the two options are determined or random", and that's what I was asking if you understood.

I asked you if you know why many of us think systems can either be deterministic, or must be in some part random - why many of us think those are the options for how a system can evolve. You didn't answer with a yes, or with any sort of explanation, so I guess your answer is no, you don't understand why people think that


Which is fine, not an insult, I don't understand why many people think the things they think.

ok I guess that's a no.

Do you know why a lot of us think the two options are determined or random?

nobody is saying anything like that though. Nobody is saying people decide things before being presented with options. I don't know why that's your question.

I don't know why that's a question. The question doesn't connect with anything to me.

The brain doesn't know ahead of time what it's going to do. That's not what causal determinism is about.

Well, if the mind was determined then you could not possibly decide in a situation with two options. — MoK

I don't have any reason to believe this personally

I'm not sure which part you think is an explanation for how it's not determined and not random.

you mean your explanation in another thread? No but I will if you link to it

I think we can eliminate all troubles if we accept a form of substance dualism — MoK

I don't think so. Whether it's physical or some other substance is just an implementation detail. That other substance faces the same determined/random dichotomy as physics

No, the description seems to rewind only the physical part of the state, not all of it, thus sidestepping the argument in the OP paper. It's two different initial conditions, so of course they're likely to evolve differently. — noAxioms

exactly. no one diagrees with that. if the starting conditions are different, of course something different will happen.

I think some people think that libertarian free will is just another way to say they believe they have a nonphysical mind.

so are you or are you not also rewinding the will when your rewind the physical?

just to be clear, you're imagining a scenario where someone does some action, the physical world is rewound but their mental state, which is supposed to be different from physical, is not rewound so they're like... imagining themselves remembering what they did the first time, and then imagining themselves able to choose something different the second time, right?

yes, I've noticed this huge language disconnect. Some libertarians would actually argue that they could have done otherwise even if everything about their mind and agency was rewound too, but some do as you said and just make it about physicality. They present their idea as anti deterministic because they're convinced "determinism" means physical determinism.

But I'm not convinced of that, quite the contrary.

I guess part of it is, it's not freedom from, it's freedom to. At any given moment, you have the freedom to do whatever range of things, and which one you actually do isn't just random nonsense, the one you do is determined by your desires and wants and, in general, the decision making machine that you are at that point.

There's no need to be free from causality for that.

And in some moments, you're not free to do a lot of things. If you're currently leg-disabled, you're not free to run, but you're free to do other things

Ps my post is not excellent, it's unstructured, rambling, and I self admittedly have no idea how to express the ideas swimming around in my head.

Thing is, the argument linked in the OP also works against compatibilism, but only if free will is defined the same way. A compatibilist cannot claim 'could have done otherwise', — noAxioms

I think there's an interesting way to frame "could have done otherwise". The usual way libertarians frame it - in my experience - is in the way framed in the OP, where you really ontologically could have done otherwise, even if nothing in the preceding conditions were different. You can have other ways of framing that phrase, including compatibilist ways. Maybe I should start a thread on that, where people can pick apart my compatibilism without it becoming the central focus of this thread.

it's not inappropriate, I just don't want this thread to center on what I think about free will.

It'd be like a thread in a basketball forum about how bad the Timberwolves are doing this season, but instead of everyone talking about the Timberwolves, the focus on the OPs favourite team. "Oh you think the Timberwolves are doing bad? But aren't you a fan of the jazz?" Or something like that.

I actually think this is the far simpler conversation to have, because compatibilism is... weird. I think it's weird. I accept it but I understand why it's unintuitive to people, but you could never convince someone of it as long as they're convinced that libertarianism makes sense. So this has to be step 1. Talk about libertarian free will in isolation, and then separately (and preferrably with a mutual understanding that libertarian free will is out of the picture) talk about compatibilism.

is that what I mean by what?

The focus of the argument here isn't about compatibilism. Compatibilism is a related interesting side topic. I'm not even completely sure that, when I'm talking about compatibilism, what I mean when I say "free will" is the right thing to call "free will", but that's all a complete aside to the argument here, which is all about incompatibilist free will (or at least that's how I define libertarian free will).

, this change is not included in the concept of energy. Therefore such a change in distance would not change the object's potential energy. — Metaphysician Undercover

Seems like you're just ignoring the part where it explicitly is a change in potential energy.

just simply Google "does an object further from earth's center have more potential energy?"

don't think so, because a ball at 2m will stay at 2m, as time passes, unless forced to change. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ok you just be unfamiliar with gravity

However, the conception is deficient because it does not account for the true expansion of space. Then some energy must be said to get swallowed up by space — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm not sure about that. The potential energy between two objects *increases* with space. A ball 2m above the surface of the earth is said to have more potential energy than a ball 1m up. So perhaps it all adds up.

There would just need to be some kind of counterpart of e=mc2 for space.

yeah I think for the most part I align with most of what you said

I saw this thread title today, the day after I saw the (absolutely wonderful) play/musical The Book of Mormon. Serendipitous perhaps.

Mormons consider the Book of Mormon to be another testament of Jesus Christ. North and South America are central to this new New Testament.

I don't even think that solves anything personally. Like, so what, grant them spirits and souls - it's still either the case that a particular decision is a deterministic output of the full state of everything (everything including this soul realm), OR it's in some part random.

People think souls get past the determinist/random dichotomy, I definitely don't see it.

which allows it to swallow up energy without that energy having an effect on the void. — Metaphysician Undercover

Perhaps it does have an effect on the void. Space expands and light loses energy as it travels through expanding space. Maybe space expands proportionally to the energy lost to it

we cannot be aware of much less control those fluctuations — Janus

Exactly. If there's randomness, we don't have control of that.

making a new picture from a picture of a dog is an exceedingly different process from recognising that a picture was made from a picture of a dog.

I can try to ask the ai on my phone. Edit. Nevermind, I can't