"What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind."
(Attributed to George Berkeley)

Ok cool thanks for breaking down that analogy further. So, what does Dennett have to say about unconscious choices dominating our free-will? Harris' has come from a background in buddhist meditation where it is observed through meditative practices that your sense of identity is basically an illusion. Tie this in with the neurological findings of unconscious decision making and it looks pretty solid, so how is Dennet refuting these findings with compatibilism?

Well, from my perspective it seems that the only way would be to say that you ARE your unconscious mind which makes decisions. Which, correct me if I am wrong, Dennett does. Well if you ARE your unconscious mind then why can't you account for why you chose one decision over another? Or why can't you just fall asleep at anytime in one second as you wish? This does not mean to say that people's actions shouldn't go unpunished or that they are not to blame, just that the observer is not to blame. Because the observer and the actor are somewhat segregated. — intrapersona

Your unconscious mind is a part of who you are, for sure. This includes most of your cognitive habits and abilities as well as the source of most of your "raw" motivations. Harris indeed has been, as you note, influenced by his Buddhist meditation practice in viewing the "self" from the stance of a passive observer who introspects her own states of mind and ponders over the origins of her random "thoughts". This is just about the worst possible stance for inquiring about free agency (or about knowledge, for that matter), which involves active involvement of an agent in the world (including the social world) and not a voluntary retreat from it.

Freedom is not to be found in the passive contemplation of one's own navel. The observer and the actor aren't two different entities. They are two different stances taken up alternatively (and oftentimes simultaneously within the normal flow of life) by the very same embodied human being. Also, the observer no more than the actor can be absolved from responsibility for what she comes to believe since she can reflect critically about the deliveries of her senses and memory. Harris often seems to think that the role of the epistemic "observer" (which he equates with the "self") is limited to her passively witnessing random thoughts popping up in her conscious mind as a result of automatic "free" association.

The main thing most would agree on is that humans have the right of self-determination to a degree we don't let that right detract upon that same right we grant others. — Gooseone

According to Harris the very foundation of this right -- the possibility of self-determination -- is illusory. This is why he also is pushing an utilitarian theory that has as its sole foundation the imperative to increase human "well being" regardless of the values people may endorse.

Incidentally, we had a discussion 10 months ago about this topic and Harris's view also was brought up.

Also worth noting, a couple years after Harris replied to Dennett's review of his book, Harris and Dennett had another conversation about free will in a podcast. This the the most recent episode of their dispute that I know of.

Yeah, of which Harris' has replied and showed how Dennett has misunderstood and misconstrued his statements. This is a great one: — intrapersona

Harris is painting himself into a corner here. In his analogy, Atlantis stands for the crudest from of "contra-causal" libertarianism, which very few philosophers endorse; while Sicily stands for compatibilism, which a majority of philosophers endorse in one form of another. Harris then complains that it's as if Dennett were accusing him of denying the existence of Sicily. But arguing that compatibilism is incoherent and not worthy of any serious consideration also is something that Harris attempts to do in his book. So, in the analogy, it's as if Harris was arguing that there really isn't any such place as Sicily and that it is a mythical place as well. Dennett complaint therefore is on target.

In his review of Harris's book, Dennett also argues convincingly that a view akin to compatibilist free will can ground our reactive attitudes (praise and blame) just as well as the crude form of libertarianism that Harris ascribes to ordinary people. There is a debate regarding whether ordinary people's intuitions about free will are more in line with libertarian or compatibilist theories. There is inconclusive evidence in the "experimental philosophy" literature on this topic. But Dennett also argues successfully, in my view, that it is of little significance how ordinary people *theorize* about the source of free will when pressed to do so. So long as they ascribe to each other abilities to freely chose among ranges of options in a manner that reflects well or badly on their characters there is no reason to charge them with irrationality just because they may have a tendency to come up with bad theories regarding the way human beings make choices. In fact, Harris himself is guiltier than most in producing flawed theories about the source of our sense of freedom and responsibility.

But how could we falsify "Free will is an illusion"? — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Short from showing that free will isn't an illusion, you can show that Harris's argument are unsound, inconsistent, and also that his conception of free will is some sort of a strawman. Daniel Dennett has written a devastating review of Harris's Free Will. (And Harris has replied here.) Although I don't endorse fully Dennett's own brand of compatibilism, myself, I think his view is much more sensible and sophisticated than Harris's. And also, he is fairly successful in pointing out the most glaring flaws in Harris's arguments.

"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" -- Confucius (or maybe Buddha or Groucho Marx)

“When I came home I expected a surprise and there was no surprise for me, so of course, I was surprised.” -- Ludwig Wittgenstein

By the way, I just finished reading a nice short paper by Chris Tucker: Agent Causation and the Alleged Impossibility of Rational Free Action. It's just 11 pages long and quite on topic for this thread.

The account of agent-causation that Tucker develops is a little thin on my view, but, to be fair, it's only presented in order to highlight some shortcomings of Galen Strawon's "Basic Argument" against free will and responsibility. Strawson is of course a hard-compatibilist while you yourself are a compatibilist. But Strawson's argument is similar to your own regress argument. It is useful to see how Strawson wields his argument against both compatibilist and incompatibilist accounts of free will. If you attempt to expose flaws in this argument such that compatibilist free will can emerge unscathed, then you may find out that you also open the door to some forms of libertarian free will. And if, on the other hand, you attempts to strenghten the regress argument just enough to rule out agent-causal accounts of free will, you may find out that compatibilists accounts don't escape unscathed either.

And the acquisition of the habit was completely determined by factors that the agent has not freely chosen, whether those factors were intentions or whatever else. — litewave

I would rather say that the relevant factors -- in this case: the fact that the agent isn't engaging in the bad habit for the first time in her life but rather has a history of doing so -- is a manifestation of her free agency that is spread over time.

My main point was to question the picture according to which acts of the human will are decisions that occur in an instant or, at any rate, over a very short period of time when the agent was deliberating. Consider the case of a criminal who plots her crime over a period of months. It is not a good defense for her to say that after having gone to such great lengths to prepare her crime she wasn't emotionally free anymore to refrain from pulling the trigger when the time came. She is not just being blamed for not having changed her mind at the last moment but also for the whole sequence of events -- the premeditation -- that shows what the orientation of her will has been during the protracted period when she was in charge of laying down her own path, as it were, and mustering up the resolve to eventually perform the deed. The very idea that the agent's own character works behind her back, as it were, from moment to moment, to compel her into performing all of her habit forming actions precisely relies on the dubious picture of instantaneous decisions that is shared by many compatibilists and libertarians alike. The picture is dubious because it is separates the agent from the very features of her mind (i.e. her character and habits) that are constitutive of her power of agency. And to operate this separation is incoherent.

One does not always act merely on the strength of one's "strongest" antecedent desire, whatever that might mean.
— Pierre-Normand

Why else would he act then?

As I explained, she acts on the basis of reasons. That doesn't mean that she acts apathetically, as it were, as Mr. Spock maybe would. Rather, the specific desire she choses to act on, among many competing desires, need not be the desire that is the "strongest" when considered in isolation, but rather the desire that she judges to be the one that it is reasonable to be acting upon in the circumstances. And such a choice is a act of practical reason. This is why when you ask someone why they did something, they seldom simply respond trough mentioning a desire except in the case where nothing more than the satisfaction of subjective personal preference hinges in the balance (e.g. why did you choose this particular flavor of ice-cream?) It is not unusual to hear as a response: "I would have much preferred doing ..., but...". What figures in the place of the first ellipse might be what the agent desired most at the time of acting (because it is an intrinsically appealing act to her) and what figures in the place of the second ellipse is something that the agent "desires" to do because she *judges* it to be best to act in this way in the light of her duties, values, commitments, etc.

Rather, one acts on desires, values or considerations that one takes to highlight specific features of one's practical situation that are salient on rational and/or moral grounds.
— Pierre-Normand

Why would he do that? If he does it intentionally then he does it because of an intention to do so and that intention controls that action.

It is no *because* of an intention that an agent acts. The reason why someone acts often is, precisely, the reason. An action shows up as intentional when it is done for some reason or another. This is why when you ask someone why it is that she is doing something, she doesn't usually answer that she intended to do it. This is an example provided by Bede Rundle in Mind in Action, if I remember: Someone asks her neighbor why she is trimming some part of her hedge. The neighbor replies "because I intended to do so". The reason why the answer isn't satisfactory is because the fact that she was doing it intentionally was assumed by the questioner. What the questioner wants to know isn't what sort of thing (e.g. and intention or neural event or something else) causes the action but rather what is the reason the agent has to do what she did. It's only though the disclosure of this reason that the actions will show up intelligibly as the intentional action that it is.

Fafner had usefully explained in an earlier post why actions and the intentions that they manifest are internally (conceptually) connected rather than them being externally (causally) connected through contingent laws of nature that we don't control.

And I agree that disjunctivist could possibly respond by giving some sort of contextualist account - but this was my point, it doesn't look that the disjunctivist has any inherent advantage over other accounts simply by virtue of being a disjunctivist. — Fafner

Well, you had suggested rather more strongly that barn facades are "particularly problematic" for disjunctivist accounts of the fallibility of knowledge. And I agree that it might look, at first blush, that they are. On my view, disjunctivism recommends itself quite appart from the way it deals with Gettier cases since it is an account that jettisons the old empiricist conception of beliefs and justifications qua internal representational items the epistemic subject can be fully acquainted with irrespective of the "external" world doing her any favor. It just so happens that, on my view, disjunctivism *also* deals rather elegantly with barn facades through distinguishing much better than empiricism does between (1) the conditions where epistemic powers can be ascribed to subjects from (2) the conditions when those powers are successfully exercised.

I can grant you for the sake of argument that epistemic contextualism could also be made use of by an epistemologist who doesn't endorse disjunctivism in order to deal with Gettier examples. But I am unsure how successfully such an epistemologist would deal with the barn facade case. I haven't done a literature search for this and I have rather produced my own account from scratch in order to bring disjunctivism to bear on issues that were puzzling me. And I have found out that it throws light on the contextualism/invariantism debate regarding knowledge attributions. I also don't think this account produces explanations any more complicated than is warranted by the contrivance of the cases it is brought to bear on. But since this discussion about epistemological disjunctivism is veering off from the topic of this thread (my fault), I may start a new one regarding contextualism and barn facades.

So how would you describe the famous fake barn facades case? You are standing in front of a real barn, and therefore you are directly aware of the barn, and so it seems that your are maximally warranted to believe that there's a barn in front of you; but you don't know that there's a barn in front of you (since it is the only real barn in that place, and you found it by mere chance). It seems to me that the disjunctivist will also have to admit as well that it's a case of a true justified believe that isn't knowledge. — Fafner

Thanks for bringing that up. This is a problem that I have thought long and hard about. I have imagined lots of puzzling scenarios where commandos are being unknowingly parachuted in Barn Facade County in the vicinity of a real barn, in an area within Barn Facade County where most barns are real, etc.

I think most of the problems that arise in such cases stem from presuppositions that are intimately connected with "highest common factor" theories. And those are presuppositions that epistemic powers of human beings aren't merely supervenient on their "internal" constitutions *and* actual favorable epistemic circumstances, but are independent of the range of counterfactual circumstances where those powers might be expected to be realized. What is peculiar about those ranges, properly defined, is that they always must be relativized to a specific practical context. This is in line with contextualist theories of knowledge according to which what counts as possession of knowledge by an agent whose epistemic powers are fallible is the practical considerations on which the possibility of failure are practically significant (and not merely probable in a statistical sense). Hence, for instance, you may count as knowing that your wife is home while you don't count as knowing that the lottery ticket that you bought is a losing one even though the probability of the former belief being mistaken is much higher than the probability of the latter being mistaken.

And the reason that I think this case is particularly problematic for the disjunctivist because in this case your evidence consists in precisely the fact itself that you believe to be true, so we are not assuming here anything like the 'highest common factor' view of evidence, or anything of this kind.

When the ineliminable contextualist constraints on ascriptions of epistemic powers to individuals are taken into account, then, it seems to me that disjunctivism deals correctly with barn facades. That's Because what is "taken in" as evidence isn't merely the actual object of cognition (a real barn, say) but also relies for its status as good warrant on one's epistemic powers not being suppressed by a contextually relevant range of possible (countrafactual) errors. Since those context can vary according to the perspectives of agents that are differently positioned, this means that the belief expressed by an agent as "there is a (real) barn in front of me" may count as a case of knowledge relativized to one practical context and not to another.

Here is an example. Suppose you are traveling with a friend to Barn Facade County (where most "barns" are actually mere decoy facades) and she knows this to be the case whereas you don't. Suppose then, that you stop by a real barn. The barn thus appear to both of you to be a real barn but only your friend knows that she doesn't know it to be a real barn (since she knows the probability for this to be quite low). According to the standard accounts of such situations, you don't know either that this is a barn since your "justified" true belief that this is a real barn isn't actually justified. And this is because you are mistaken about the objective probability of your experience being an experience of a real barn.

The problem faced by disjunctivim, it would seem, it that it wrongly would conclude in your having knowledge on the ground that circumstances are favorable, in this particular case, for your epistemic abilities being exercized. All that would be required (seemingly) is that this particular barn is real.

However, when suitably conjoined with a contextualist account of knowlege, disjunctivism would not render a unique verdict in this case, as it indeed shouldn't. The mistake that must be avoided is the idea that there is a unique objective probability of the perceptual experience being an experience of a real barn independent of the characterization of the epistemic power being exercized. How might this probability rather to be evaluated? What contextual range of counterfactual circumstances is it that might relevantly be taken into consideration for purpose of determining whether or not your belief that there is a barn counts as knowledge? I'll let you think about it a little before I propose my own suggestion.

Sorry, but I don't really see how disjunctivism helps here. How does a theory on perception address Gettier's original two formulations of justified true belief that can't reasonably be considered knowledge? — Michael

Disjunctivism isn't merely a theory about perception. Disjunctive theories of perception and epistemological disjunctivism are two separate topics, though they are very intimately related since they have the same general structure and are animated by the same motivation to root out some of the resilient Cartesian presuppositions that infect both theories of perception and traditional theories of knowledge.

And, of course, disjunctivists agree with Gettier that the JTB account of knowledge can't be correct. It goes further in pointing out how many attempts to buttress the JTB analysis with the addition of supplementary conditions are doomed to fail.

Forget what I say, now on second thought I don't think that disjunctivism can actually solve the Gettier problem. Never mind. — Fafner

I think it does actually, since it provides a conception of indefeasible warrant that can be substituted to the misguided notion of merely "internal" justification that makes the construction of Gettier examples possible. And it achieves this consistently with the correct intuition that our epistemic powers are fallible. Although, rather than saying that it solves the Gettier problem, it might be better to say that it makes the problem go away since it undercuts the motivation for providing analyses of knowledge in terms of capacities or concepts that don't presuppose it.

Take it both easy, then, and everything's gonna be fine ;-)

One cannot believe both 'X' and not 'X'. Thus, disjunction does not warrant/justify belief in both. — creativesoul

That's not what "disjunctivism" means in the context of epistemology or philosophical accounts perceptual experience.

In the second case, being a disjunctivist means that for one have a visual experience of a red apple (or its seeming to one that the apple is red) ought not to be construed as one being acquainted with a mere impression: a "common factor" between a veridical experience and a mere illusion, say. It rather must be construed as the disjunctive claim that *either* one is perceiving that the apple is red *or* it merely seems to one (albeit mistakenly) that one is perceiving that the apple is red. The central commitment of the disjunctivist is that in cases where the first disjunct holds -- i.e. when one isn't under any illusion -- then one's perceptual experience puts one into direct contact with the world, and not with a sense datum or some such "internal" experience.

Extended to the case of epistemology, disjunctivism means that when one's warrant to believe that P is good enough to secure one's knowledge that P, and there might be cases where one mistakenly believes that P on (what appears to be) the very same rational grounds, then that doesn't mean that one's warrant is defeasible and hence insufficient on its own to secure knowledge. It rather means that *either* one's warrant is good and sufficient to ground knowledge *or* one mistakenly takes oneself to have a good warrant. As applied to the aforementioned example, this would mean that in the case where there seems to one that there is a red apple in from of one, and one isn't under any illusion (and also, one doesn't have any good ground for believing that the circumstances of observation are abnormal, or that one is being tricked, etc.) then that one experiences the apple to be red is sufficient to secure knowledge since it is (in that case!) an undefeasible warrant for it.

In short, disjunctivism strikes at the ordinary conflations between defeasibility (of "internal" justifications) and fallibility (of epistemic powers). Our epistemic or perceptual abilities are fallible, but their fallibility isn't such as to make the successful exercise of them impossible.

Please do translate for us. — Nils Loc

Frankly, although I had to read the OP three times before it was clear to me, I am usure if I could much improve on the formulation without producing a much longer post. It seems to strike a just balance between concision and readability (although, as I said, I'd like to see it broken down into separate paragraphs). The topic is difficult, for sure, but maybe it will become clearer in the context of discussion.

It's every choice a moral choice? Is deciding whether to eat fruits or vegetables a moral dilemma? I believe that when one frames Choice as an intention of action in a direction, then it is possible to see that it can be without moral connection. — Rich

The OP's point seems to be, not that every choice is a moral choice, but rather that the issue of the freedom of choice doesn't arise for choices that boil down to mere personal preference. We don't generally inquire whether a dog can freely choose to eat a piece of raw meat over a raw turnip. So, the issue of the compatibility of free will and determinism arises in the context of human choice, but not in the context of (non-rational) animal choice because human actions involve something more than the blind pursuit of "self-interest". (I'll explain elsewhere why I am using scare quotes here).

If the intention is not freely chosen then all of the agent's actions are completely determined by factors that the agent has not freely chosen. This is something that I think libertarians would have a problem with because the idea of libertarian free will seems to require a freedom that can override any determining factors. — litewave

I agree that this a problem that afflicts many traditional libertarian accounts of free will. But I think the main assumption that generates this problem is a mistaken assumption that is generally shared by (most) libertarians and (most) compatibilists. And this is the assumption that the antecedent features of the agent's ability for practical deliberation (including her antecedent beliefs and motivations) -- which she had prior to the time when she deliberated and/or chose what to do -- constitute antecedent constraints on her power of deliberation that she has no power over. Where the traditional libertarians and the traditional compatibilists disagree is whether this lack of present control does constitute a threat on the very idea of freedom of choice.

I am actually agreeing with compatibilists that "present control" on (or ability to override, as it were) the causal efficacy of one's own antecedent beliefs and motivations isn't a requirement for freedom and responsibility. One's own antecedent character indeed isn't something that is external to one's own power of agency. It is rather constitutive of it. I am however disagreeing with compatibilists that the manner in which an agent's antecedent beliefs and desires make intelligible the actions that she chooses to do can be construed in a deterministic fashion.

There are two reasons for that. First, just because one's antecedent beliefs and motivations contribute to explaining what one does doesn't generally absolve one from responsibility. And that's because one's responsibility for those features of one's character often extend to the past. If one acts badly because one has acquired a bad habit, one often is responsible for having acquired the bad habit in the first place.

Secondly, and more importantly, in order to explain what someone does on the basis of the beliefs and motivations that she has, it isn't generally sufficient to merely mention those beliefs and motivations as brute facts about her and her antecedent "dispositions". It is also generally necessary, in order to so much as *make sense* of what it is that she is doing (and hence construe her behavior as genuine intentional actions as opposed to mere conditioned responses to present stimuli, say) to get a handle on the reasons why she takes some of her motivations and some of her beliefs to be relevant to her present decision. One does not always act merely on the strength of one's "strongest" antecedent desire, whatever that might mean. Rather, one acts on desires, values or considerations that one takes to highlight specific features of one's practical situation that are salient on rational and/or moral grounds. And this can't generally be explained in terms of "antecedent" states of mind.

This new topic of yours is excellent, as is your introductory post. I'll post a comment later today when I have more time on my hands since it merits thoughtful consideration. Did you really mean to make it into just one paragraph? Maybe if you could manage merely break it into two or three paragraphs it would make for a less intimidating block of text!

Okay but how can we know for certain that CO2 increase (which is undeniable) will cause warming? We notice a correlation so far between CO2 and temperature, in the long term. How do we know that this correlation indicates causation at the level of the entire earth? — Agustino

We know that because the radiative-convective mechanism underlying this effect is well understood and, indeed, measurable. We can measure the change in the infrared spectra of the radiation emitted to space, and the radiation downwelling back to the surface, and how those spectra have changed over the last few decades. Furthermore, quite independently from our understanding of the mechanism, the warming that has occurred in recent decades in response to the enhanced greenhouse effect hasn't been enough to keep up with this increased forcing. We know that because the oceans still are accumulating heat at a fast rate and this proves that there remains a large positive imbalance between the energy entering the system and the energy leaving it. This is sufficient to show that the cause of the warming can't be some internal circulation cycle since such a cause would lead to an imbalance in the opposite direction and would thus have caused the oceans to lose rather than gain heat.

And if it does how do we know that the earth does not have some mechanisms to counter-act the warming effects? It seems to me that we're being quite arrogant to think we fully understand what the earth is capable to do.

The most plausible such effect would be a negative cloud feedback. But there might equally be a positive cloud feedback. We don't know for sure, and this is precisely why the IPCC estimates that the climate sensitivity to CO2 forcing likely belongs somewhere in the range between 1.5°C and 4.5°C per CO2 doubling. It is, on the contrary, the skeptics who seem quite certain that the high values for climate sensitivity can be discounted. Since they don't offer good arguments for thus narrowing down the IPCC uncertainty range, we are well advised to question their certainties.

You can read for example this counter article from awhile back: — Agustino

This paper from WUWT is fairly bad. It simply ignores two fairly well understood and uncontested principles of climate science.

First, it fails to mention that in the past, before mankind started to release vast amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere, the atmospheric CO2 concentration could act as a positive feedback to global surface warming or cooling. If orbital variations (e.g. Milankovitch cycles) would cause some amount of warming, for instance, then consequent warming of the oceans would trigger the release of even more CO2. But that is not what is mainly causing the CO2 increase now.

Secondly, it asserts that climate sensitivity must be low because the positive feedback due to water vapor is "hypothetical". But this positive feedback is just about the least contested part of climates science and atmospheric physics. Even the very few climate scientists (e.g. Judith Curry, Richard Lindzen or Roy Spencer) who believe that climate sensitivity likely is lower than the central estimate reported by the IPCC believe this because they think the cloud feedback might be negative. Those who question the value of the water vapor feedback don't understand the science at all. They don't even represent the views of the 3% of AGW-skeptical scientists.

The CO2 emission targets recommended by the IPCC, and aimed at by the Paris Agreement, aren't unrealistic. Reasonable policy efforts (aided by technological progress), versus little of no efforts, can mean the difference between a stable 550ppm concentration of CO2 by 2100 or 800ppm and growing. This might translate into either a 2°C global average warming, or 4°C and growing, respectively. This is a huge difference in terms of impacts on human populations and ecosystems. It may also translate into a difference of several meters in sea-level rise. Whatever we do from now on, the Greenland ice-sheet likely is doomed over the long run, but the fate of the much larger Antarctic ice-sheet still depends on us. And there also is the issue of ocean acidification which is a very grave concern.

But all of this can be explained by ordinary temporal causation. Factors like the feeling of hunger, food desires/preferences, belief about what ingredients are available in the kitchen, knowledge of how to make an omelet etc. cause the agent's intention to make an omelet. Then this intention, along with other factors like the knowledge of how to make an omelet, causes the agent to perform actions like heating up the frying pan, breaking eggs, chopping up mushrooms. Logical and physical operations can also be performed by a machine - no libertarian/incompatibilist free will is necessary. — litewave

Let me grant you, for the sake of argument, that libertarian free will isn't required. You are still agreeing with my main point in that case. If the obtaining of all of those causal relations between the agent's prior states of mind (beliefs, desires) and her intentional actions is all that is required for those intentional actions to count as being free, then there is no need for the agent to "control" her intentions for the future and there is no regress looming. This was the main argument that I was making here. The conditions for intentional actions to count as being free don't include a requirement that the intentions themselves be controlled by the agent. It is sufficient that the mental states of the agent that are manifested in the pattern of her intentional actions reflect her sensitivity to whatever features of her practical situation she takes to constitute good reasons for them. So, this is something that I am in broad agreement with many compatibilists about.

But then the act of forming the intention is not freely willed (since it is not controlled by an intention to do the act) and thus the act that is controlled by the formed intention is controlled by something, an intention, that is not freely willed. For a compatibilist it is not a problem, but the fact that the final act is ultimately controlled by something that is not freely willed would clash with the libertarian concept of free will. — litewave

On my view, the action is indeed controlled by the intention of the agent (and therefore, by the agent). What makes it the case that an action is controlled by an agent precisely is the obtaining of the conditions under which the action is intentional. Granted, there arises a problem for some libertarians who believe that acts of the will only are free if the agent could have acted differently in the exact same circumstances, where those circumstances include all of the agent's states of mind and the dispositions of her character. But that's not my account.

But what does "being sensitive" mean? It seems we can again explain it causally - being sensitive to something means being able to be influenced by something, for example by the agent's needs, habits, desires, beliefs, knowledge, intentions... These factors influence the agent's actions. — litewave

Sure, but the relevant factor that I am identifying as the ground of the agent's intentional actions are the features of her practical situation that she can adduce as the reasons why she is doing what she is doing.

If you ask me why I am doing something, you can then challenge my reasons, or try to convince me that I am not acting in a way that furthers my own self-interest, or that my choice has been made on the ground of some false beliefs, etc. But if you tell me that I am not free since my action is being "influenced" by my awareness of the reason that I just gave you, then I can shrug this off. Who would want to be acting "freely" on no rational ground whatsoever?

If, on the other hand, you are arguing that my action isn't free since my being aware of the particular reason why I act depends on my having the beliefs and motivations that I in fact had immediately prior to making my choice, then it seems that I can also shrug this off. This is only relevant if you can show me that some of those beliefs and motivations are states of mind that are interfering with my awareness of better reasons that I might have for acting differently right now. But then, what you really should be offering me are those better reasons. My having prior beliefs only constitutes a limitation (of sorts) on my freedom if the beliefs are false and therefore interfere with my ability to achieve my goals. And likewise regarding misguided motivations or bad character traits that may cloud my judgement regarding what it is that I should set as my goals.

Of course in real life the process of "critically assessing" our beliefs and their sources may be complicated, but in principle these seem to be logical operations that also a machine could perform, reducible to causal processes. — litewave

To the extent that a robot would perform those rational tasks just as well as a mature human being, then it would also be free. But the mere fact that the computer controlling the robot might run a deterministic algorithm would be irrelevant, on my view. If the robot's emergent behavior is such that it manifests sensitivity to good reasons for acting, and the robot is able to revise its beliefs, and steer and adjust its own motivational states accordingly, then its emergent behavior will not be deterministic even though the mechanism that produces its bodily movements might be. Some emergent properties of complex systems can be indeterministic even if the laws that govern the evolution of its constituent parts aren't. The behaviors of animals or robots characterized in high level intentional terms are such emergent features that are distinctive from the 'raw' bodily motions and the antecedent neural/computational states that generate them.

Indeed. Not only is it very likely that human activity has been responsible for more than 50% of the warming that occurred since 1950, the central estimate for the human contribution is actually around 110% percent of the observed warming. That figure is higher than 100% because the net effect from the natural contributions to global warming over that period likely has been a cooling effect. So, were it not for the natural contributors to climate change, the warming that we have experienced up until now would be even larger. Here is a good post by Gavin Schmidt over at RealClimate that explains how we know that.

How would one define directional coordinates in such a universe? — Arkady

Mirrors reverse chirality. Here is Groucho Marx negotiating a common understanding of chirality with his own mirror image. (They're starting to reach an agreement at the 1:55 time mark.)

This experiment has been done before. You could try using a rubber band and a hat.

"Phenomenon" - simply an occurrence, something that obtains. "Phenomena" is the plural. — Terrapin Station

So, in summary, you account of free will is that it's real freedom accompanied with things that obtain. Have you thought about submitting it to a philosophical journal?

But if my intention does not influence the action then my being engaged in the action is not controlling the action. I wouldn't even say that the action is intended (intentional). — litewave

When we characterize an intentional action we often use a verb phrase that doesn't merely describe the bodily motions of the person who is acting but also the ends that she is pursuing. For instance, we might say that she is (intentionally) making an omelet. And this explains why she is heating the frying pan, breaking eggs, chopping up mushrooms, etc. All that purposeful activity is geared towards realizing the end characterized as "having made an omelet". As long as the person is performing this overarching action intentionally, all the component actions that are means towards that end are being performed by her thanks to her understanding them to be such necessary means. So, I am suggesting that what makes the action intentional under such a description (i.e. "making an omelet") is the fact that the agent is pursuing that goal while being able to deliberate practically towards realizing that goal; that is, judging what the necessary means are and executing them for that reason.

So, yes, you may say that the intention influences the action, but that is merely to say that the agent's self-determination of her own goals and her ability to reason instrumentally towards achieving them, explains how her basic actions are being structured by her while her overarching action progresses.

I would say that my intention to express something verbally causes the related words to come to my tongue. For example if I intend to communicate to someone that I have the feeling of hunger, this intention draws the word "hunger" from my lexical memory and pushes it to the speech center in my brain which activates my tongue, lips, breathing and so on in such a way that the sound of the word "hunger" is produced. I guess this is roughly the causal neurological process.

It seems doubtful to me that there is a wordless thought process that operates upstream from any of our exercises of abilities to use words when we are reasoning or forming intentions. And, in fact, I think there might be evidence to the contrary from cognitive neuroscience. but if you don't accept this then my Rylean example will not be helpful.

I may not absolutely need, however, to appeal to this Rylean model in order to argue that freely chosen courses of action need not be controlled by prior intentions that themselves are chosen intentionally, as you suggested in your original post (as an alleged requirement of libertarian free will). Even if we construe the forming of an intention as a purely mental act, that occurs prior to acting, and that controls our actions, there still need not be a separate act of choosing to intend in this way in order that the intention be free and that we be responsible for it.

As Fafner suggested, for an intentional action to be free in the relevant sense that secures the agent's responsibility, the source of the intention must be the agent herself rather than antecedent causes that lay beyond the scopes of her control and agency. But if, as I suggested, what the formation of an intention essentially reflects is the agent's sensitivity to the practical considerations that, by her own lights, make it reasonable and intelligible that she would pursue this intended course of action, then she is a free as anyone may wish to be when she so intends.

As I also suggested, such an explanation of action looks very much like a compatibilist account. But it is crucially distinguished from standard compatibilist accounts in an important respect. If what grounds the agent's decision is her being sensitive to the features of her practical situation that make it reasonable, by her own lights, that she ought to so act, then her actions aren't determined by prior causes that have receded in the historical past and that therefore lay beyond her control.

It seems that the part "is manifested in" can be easily substituted with "causes".

It can't be so substituted since what is being manifested in intentional action is the agent's sensitivity to the reasons why she acts and the rational outcome of this sensitivity isn't caused by past events. Such a capacity is only, at most, being enabled by the past history of the agent. We are not free the become rational agents because we are relying on our having suitable biological and social endowments. But when those necessary causal requirements are met, then we acquire the sort of rational and moral autonomy that make us free and responsible.

Why? To believe that pi is irrational means to believe that its decimal expansion is infinite and is not periodic. So that which caused me to have this belief also causes (indirectly, through the belief) my answer when I am asked what I believe about pi

That would be correct if we were always being passively caused to acquire our beliefs through the impact of brute external events. But this would be to deny that we have rational abilities to critically assess our beliefs and their sources in such a manner as to secure genuine knowledge. This is why my example was focused on knowledge rather than belief, since our rational ability to know is analogous to our ability to reasons practically and determine our ends.

When we have a rational ability to know, then the reasons why we come to endorse specific beliefs and repudiate others can liberate us from the past vagaries that caused us to acquire them in the first place. We can then submit them the rational criticism (which may be a quite trivial business, such as checking for commons sources of illusion, or ceasing to trust habitual liars, etc.) and what thereby comes to be the cause of our states of genuine knowledge becomes our own self-determined power to asses the justifications of our beliefs.

What about computers and neutron stars?

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. — litewave

You don't need to control the intentional action since your being engaged in an intentional action already is your controlling what happens with your own body and surroundings. It's not as if you were a puppet and what you need in order to control your action is to be able to pull your own strings. On my view -- which I also take to be broadly consistent with the view of several contemporary philosophers of action -- our intentions aren't epiphenomena that accompany our bodily movements. Rather, they are being manifested in the rational structure of those voluntary movements. (Compare how the canvas of a tissue accounts for its tensile strength, but doesn't cause it in the manner of an antecedent condition.)

It might be useful to compare this with Gilbert Ryle's polemic against the "dogma of the Ghost in the Machine". On Ryle's view, when you are talking intelligently you may on occasion, but usually don't, think how you are going to string your words together in order to convey an intelligent thought. Rather, in the usual case, your ability to intelligently come up with the correct words, on the fly, as it were, is partly constitutive of your ability to think out loud. Likewise, in the case of intentional action, your ability to intelligently manipulate the material world around you reveals your activity as intentional and responsive to instrumental reasons (among other sorts of reasons that you are freely endorsing at the time when you are acting).

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

I would rather say that your prior intention to go to Cuba, as well as your ability to reason instrumentally, is manifested in your now booking the plane tickets (and many other things that you do, or refrain from doing when that would interfere with your plans). This is a manifestation of your practical knowledge (i.e. your knowledge of what it is that you are doing and why you are doing it) being retained over long stretches of time: until such a time, usually, when your intention has been realized.

Compare this with the case of theoretical knowledge. If you acquire on Monday the knowledge that pi is an irrational number and are being asked on Wednesday whether the decimal expansion of pi is periodic, you will say that it isn't. This is a manifestation of you persistent knowledge that pi is irrational (and your ability to rationally infer things from what you know). It would be strange to say that your answer that pi isn't periodic has been caused by whatever caused you, in the past, to believe that pi is irrational. (Though that could be a sensible contrastive explanation to offer to someone who knew that you used to be ignorant of the fact that pi is irrational). Your answer to the question rather is, in the usual case, best explained as the continued manifestation of a piece theoretical knowledge that you once acquired and now retain together with your ability to make inferences on its basis.

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. — litewave

Yes, indeed, which is why I am agreeing with you that intending to do something (or forming such an intention) does not require a prior act of intending to form that intention. Also, an intentional action, on the account I have been recommending, isn't a further act causally downstream from the act of intending. Rather, to say that an action is intentional just is a way to characterize the actions of rational animals as the sorts of rationally structured behaviors that they are.

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.

Yes and no. Intentions are internally structured by means-ends relationships. They are teleologically organized, we may say. That's because the parts of our action (their "proper temporal stages", we may call them, although this way of characterizing the "parts" of our action is slightly misleading) are actions done by us as means to realizing what our overarching action is done for the sake of. They are means to our ends.

So, to refer back to my earlier trip-to-Cuba example, if I intend to go to Cuba next month, then this already existing intention can be the cause, in a sense, of my forming today a new intention to book 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 at 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.

Now, this sort of causal explanation of intentional action could be thought to lead to troublesome regresses in two different ways. The first worry is that when the time comes to act on an intention for the future, one must then intend to act on one's prior intention when the time comes. (This is what John Searle views as the "gap" problem.) The second worry is that, if a prior intention to do A explains why one intends to do B, when A is a means to do B, then there ought to be another action C that one intends to do in order to explain why one intends to do B, and so on ad infinitum.

In order to block the first regress, my suggestion (similar to Fafner's) is that intending to do A and doing A intentionally just are two ways to characterize the very same thing. Intentions aren't purely mental acts that stand behind people's intentional actions. They rather are the manner in which such actions are rationally structured. (Compare Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind on "mental processes" and "intelligent acts").

I've also sketched a way to block the second regress through appealing to the considerations in the light of which an agent acts. When a chain of 'why?' questions terminates with the mention of the broadest intentional action (e.g. "Why are you breaking eggs?", ... , "Why are you making an omelet?", ... , "Why are you having guests for dinner?") then the final answer need not refer to an intention to form the intention of having guests for dinner. Rather, it terminates with the mention that one enjoys the company of those particular guests or whatever. (There'd be more to say about the way reasons can rationalize and, at the same time, explain, other actions in a way that is very similar to the way overarching actions rationalize their component actions.)

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. — litewave

It does indeed negate the first point, but not because there is no time for a prior intention to influence the action. It is rather because, on my view (which appears to be similar to Fafner's), prior "intentions to act" -- or intentions for the future, we may call them -- stand to intentional actions in the same sort of causal relation that intentions in action stand to with respect to the 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.

So, on the alternative view, acts of the will aren't mental acts that occur prior to intentional actions (or instantaneously at the same time when the action begins). 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. For instance, the fact that you are making an omelet (which is a manifestation of the orientation of your will at that time) can explain why you are breaking eggs. What is it, then, that explains the fact that you are intentionally making an omelet? The explanation for this can not be: because you formed the intention to do so. That would be a dummy explanation. ("Why are you making an omelet?" -- "I was caused to do so by my prior intention to make an omelet.")

Rather, when asked why you are doing something, the chain of explanation terminates with your mention of the considerations that, by your own lights, makes it reasonable for you to do it. The mention of those reasons make it intelligible why you are doing it in a manner that is quite different from mentioning prior causes of an event.

That is not to say that mention of prior causes can't be explanatory as well. In order to act for some reason, it must be the case that you were suitably inclined to be moved by some rational considerations, or that you were suitably informed of the relevant features of your practical situation. But such contrastive explanations lay out some of the necessary or enabling conditions for your having exercised your ability to rationally decide what to do. They don't necessarily constitute restrictions on your freedom. This is a point compatibilists usually get right. Where compatibilists often go wrong may be in thinking that such prior conditions necessitate the actual action.

When we turn from the search for necessary conditions for human actions to sufficient conditions for them, then we must inquire into the reasons why the agent is doing what she is doing and such an inquiry into the intelligibility of her behavior is entirely different from the first inquiry. It isn't looking for antecedent "causes" in the past.

I'm wondering now if every theory can be forced into an ad hoc refinement — Srap Tasmaner

Are you thinking of substance-sortals, event-types or concepts of natural kinds as reflecting theories? Or are you thinking about something else? Surely, all scientific theories reflect some specific focus of our interests since when some empirical domain is being investigated, some features of its objects are being considered while others are abstracted away or ignored as irrelevant. As our focus changes, sometimes in response to unforeseen discoveries, then this may yield progressive refinements of our concepts. However, such refinements need not be ad hoc except in the sense that our new focus is always responsive to our present theoretical or practical interests.

Can you explain the "just not right now" part? — Fafner

Yes. The idea is that the formation of an intention amounts to the (practical) rational determination of an orientation of the will. It is akin to the endorsement of a plan that structures behavior, and behavioral dispositions, from then on (and until such a time when what one intended to do has been done, or one has changed one's mind about doing it). On Anscombe's account, acting and reasoning practically aren't separate activities since actions are internally structured by means-end relations. So, as you are acting intentionally, you are determining what you are doing (the component parts of your action), in accordance with the overarching intention, as means to realizing it or of progressing towards the achievement if its goal.

In view of this, an action can be viewed as furnishing the reasons why an agent is performing the component parts of her action. Hence, if I intend to go to Cuba for my next vacations, the fact that I intend to go to Cuba may motivate me to shop for plane tickets, or to decline an invitation elsewhere. When asked why I am shopping for plane tickets, or declining the invitation, I may reply that's because I am going to Cuba next month. I need not say that it's because I will be going to Cuba next month. Effectively, the fact that I'm going to Cuba next month already is structuring my action right now through means-end relationships. So, it's similar to saying that I'm breaking eggs because I'm making an omelet. However, when I'm breaking eggs, I've thereby already started making the omelet. But when I'm buying tickets because I'm going to Cuba next month, I'm not going there right now. I'm intending to go next month. But since I'm right now structuring my behavior in view of that end, there also is a clear sense in which my action (i.e. going to Cuba) is present. And this is what motivates the use of the present tense when one is invoking intentions for the future in justifying what one is doing right now.

I hope this isn't too confusing. The main lesson is that although I am not going to Cuba right now (I think McDowell's phrase was "I am doing it... only not yet", this action has as its constitutive parts present component actions and/or present dispositions that already are structured by it.

On edit: I just found the following quote: "Intention for the here and now is, if you like, a kind of thought. But it is practical in the sense that assenting to such a thought just is beginning to act in a certain way, for instance starting to cross a street; and continuing to assent – not revoking one’s assent – is continuing to act, for instance continuing to cross the street. An intention for the future is, by all means, a thought of the same kind, apart from the time difference. But the way to accommodate that is not to distance intention for the here and now from acting, on the ground that intending purely for the future is not acting, but to conceive an intention for the future as a potential action biding its time." -- John McDowell, Some Remarks on Intention in Action (my emphasis)

That's a nice way to put it! An intention for the future is a potential action that is biding its time.

Right, I think that I picked this idea from McDowell, and it is interesting to know that it goes way back. — Fafner

Has a philosopher ever had a good idea such that Aristotle hadn't already beaten them to the punch ;-) Maybe some Pre-Socratic...

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

This is my view also. Following Elizabeth Anscombe, it has become much more common to view intentions that occur prior to the initiation of actions on the same model as intentional actions (or intentions in actions as John Searle calls them). This is consistent with Aristotle's claim that actions are the conclusions of acts of practical deliberation. Or, as John McDowell puts it, when one intends to do something, one is thereby doing it, just not right now.

This view of intentions being constitutive parts of the actions that they govern indeed avoids some of the regress problems that afflict voluntarist conceptions of action that picture acts of the will as mental events separate from the actions that they allegedly cause.

If you're convinced of this why waste your time convincing others it is not real?
What use would it bring? — JupiterJess

Because it's a fair topic for philosophical discussion? Also, the goal might not be convincing others but rather to test out some ideas in view of reaching a better understanding.

But my suspicion is that this is just not true, that it's always the amount of flour we're interested in and the bag is just the obvious way of referring to how much. If bags of flour did not have weights printed on them, a grocer who emptied some of the flour from each bag would still be a cheat. "It's still a bag of flour" wouldn't be much of a defense. — Srap Tasmaner

Likewise if you would buy a statue of Hermes and it's damaged during transport. And then the seller tells you: "But it's still a statue! Now it has become a statue of Donald J. Trump." But what you bought was a statue of Hermes and that statue doesn't exist anymore.

So, statue is a sortal concept that may be modified by the qualifier of Hermes in order to further specify its conditions of persistence and identity. If it is damaged to the point that it doesn't recognizably depict Hermes anymore, then it may still be a statue, but it is a (numerically) different statue.

And likewise with a 10kg bag of flour. If one kilogram is taken out, then it's still a bag of flour. But it's no longer a 10kg bag of flour for purpose of sale. However, I must concede that it's still the same bag of flour, for purpose of consumption (as it's being progressively used up in your own home, say). So, you most definitely have a point.

Actually I'm not quite sure what is supposed to be the actual paradox in the ship of Theseus story. — Fafner

The usual way it's told in a paradoxical manner is when the old damaged planks that are being replaced over time are being collected somewhere and eventually reassembled in the same form as the old ship. But there are now two ships in existence. One of them is continuous with the original and the other one matches the original both in form and material constitution (though it's not historically continuous, unless you view it as having remained in existence in disassembled form). But if both ships have a title to be deemed numerically identical with the original, that violates Leibniz's law of indiscernibility of identicals.

My favorite resolution of this paradox is of course Simons's.