Compatibilism is impossible

[Flannel Jesus]

If you'd like to change the focus of the conversation away from what I'm talking about, you'll have to talk to someone else about that. I'm interested in what I've been talking about, and not in sly distractions from that.

[Immanuel Can]

If you'd like to change the focus of the conversation away from what I'm talking about, you'll have to talk to someone else about that. I'm interested in what I've been talking about, and not in sly distractions from that.

I'm not fooled. I'm not the one who's "changing the conversation." That's gaslighting. I'm not buying in, and I recognize the evasion.

I'm also quite entertained that you forgot to hit the "reply" button, so that I'd be automatically notified of your response. It seems this was a hit-and-run attempt, as well.

So I've got a clear picture, now. You WANT Compatiblism to be true. You want Determinism and free will to be so "fully" compatible that there are no possible questions: but you haven't got the foggiest idea, apparently, about how that pig could fly.

That's the real problem. That's why your objections don't hold water. You can't make Compatibilism work by just ignoring the glaring contradiction between Determinism and free will. Maybe you don't recognize the problems, but everybody else does. And that's why the OP is justified: "Compatiblism is, indeed, impossible."

Unless somebody can show how it's not. Apparently, that person isn't going to end up being you.

[Flannel Jesus]

Your problem is still misreading this conversation. I'm not trying to prove compatibilism to you and I haven't since I joined this conversation. You think you've got some gotcha by trying to make me prove it, but that's not now nor has it ever been my concern.

You said compatibilists say a certain thing, determinists say another thing, and you are incorrect on both counts. That's true even if compatibilism is completely wrong.

[Immanuel Can]

Your problem is still misreading this conversation.

You forgot to hit the "reply" button again.

No, I've got it straight. Put away the gaslight. Not gonna play.

Look at the OP.

You think you've got some gotcha by trying to make me prove it,...

Apparently, I do...because you clearly cannot do it. If you could, you'd have done it right away -- ideally, so we could speak on the same terms, but if not for so admirable a purpose, at least to show you knew what would make Compatibilism "not impossible."

That you don't is speaking volumes: it says, "I want Compatibilism to work somehow, but I have no idea how to make it work."

But wishes aren't horses. The problem of the tension between Determinism and free will is real, and needs a solution. Everybody who's really IN the discussion knows that. But maybe you haven't even grasped what the real problems are, and prefer to just say, "Well, I don't know how Compatibilism can work, but I just hope it does."

Okay. That's all that can be said, I guess.

[Flannel Jesus]

You have come up with a very, very clever way to dismiss anything anybody says: demand that they prove something only vaguely tangentially related, and if they can't, then all their other criticisms are completely moot!

You want to tell me that compatibilists don't say free will is an illusion? Well first you have to prove compatibilism to me! If you can't prove it, then compatibilists all say what I tell them they say!

That's... really so far away from anything reasonable lmao. I'm sure any literate person can see that.

[Immanuel Can]

You want to tell me that compatibilists don't say free will is an illusion?

Nothing I've said remotely corresponds to this.

Put away the gaslight. Not buying.

And you forgot to hit "reply" for the third time.

[Flannel Jesus]

You want to tell me that compatibilists don't say free will is an illusion?

Nothing I've said remotely corresponds to this.

Put away the gaslight. Not buying.

And you forgot to hit "reply" for the third time.

Yes, that was me speaking as if I was you, speaking to me.

YOU say that compatibilists say free will is an illusion.

Then I say, they don't say that, then you say

"You want to tell me that compatibilists don't say free will is an illusion? Well first you have to prove compatibilism to me! If you can't prove it, then compatibilists all say what I tell them they say!"

And the gaslighting is very explicitly coming from you.

[Immanuel Can]

"You want to tell me that compatibilists don't say free will is an illusion? Well first you have to prove compatibilism to me! If you can't prove it, then compatibilists all say what I tell them they say!"

No, I said none of this: all I said was that if you say you believe Compatibilism is true, you owe the world to say HOW it can be true; because everybody else who's in the debate, including the three views Stanford cites, thinks it's a problem. And the OP recognizes that it's a problem, too.

So if you don't see there's a problem between Determinism and free will, and that you can't get away with just saying "they're compatible, fully", you're just out of the whole controversy.

That's all that can be said.

[Flannel Jesus]

"You want to tell me that compatibilists don't say free will is an illusion? Well first you have to prove compatibilism to me! If you can't prove it, then compatibilists all say what I tell them they say!"

No, I said none of this: all I said was that if you say you believe Compatibilism is true, you owe the world to say HOW it can be true;

But I've never even said anything like this in this conversation with you. This conversation has literally 0 to do with my personal beliefs.

Whether I like the compatibilist take is not relevant. Whether the compatibilist take is good is not relevant. Whether the compatibilist take is complete nonsense is not relevant.

You said compatibilists think free will is an illusion, or not genuine. I'm saying they don't say that. I can make that case even if I'm not a compatibilist - my position on compatibilism is completely not relevant to the question, "Do compatibilists say the things I says they say?" It's not relevant.

They don't say the things you say they say. I can say that without proving compatibilism to be true. I can say that even if I explicitly believe compatibilism is not true.

[bahman]

@ FJ and IC. I think you need a proper definition for free will as well.

[Flannel Jesus]

I'll say again: Compatibilism makes Determinism the non-negotiable, baseline reality, and freedom a thing that gets explained-away -- usually with reference to seemings or "epiphenomena" in the human experience.

They're saying we're believing in a thing that isn't real. That's an illusion, of course, by definition.

Compatibilists don't say it isn't real, or is not an illusion. I can point this out to you even if I can't prove compatibilism, even if I'm not a compatibilist at all.

Determinists think there's no actual such thing as a "decision."

No they don't. I can say they don't think that, at least not in general, occasional exceptions notwithstanding, regardless of what else I think about determinism.

[Immanuel Can]

"You want to tell me that compatibilists don't say free will is an illusion? Well first you have to prove compatibilism to me! If you can't prove it, then compatibilists all say what I tell them they say!"

No, I said none of this: all I said was that if you say you believe Compatibilism is true, you owe the world to say HOW it can be true;

But I've never even said anything like this in this conversation with you. This conversation has literally 0 to do with my personal beliefs.

I've asked you for your definition of Compatiblism. I had to, because you were taking issue with all other definitions. So it was the only fair thing to do: to ask you what you mean when you say "Compatibilism."

My intention was to understand your position, and see if we could agree. But when your definition came back, it just said that Compatiblism means that Determinism and free will are "fully compatible." That's a circular definition, and it doesn't answer the question of HOW they can be compatible, which is what this entire thread is about.

And you stil haven't said. I can only conclude that you don't know. And our chances of agreeing, therefore are zero...not because I'm unwilling to find common ground, but because you don't actually offer an explanation of "Compatibilism" that explains how it is supposed to work.

But I can see I'm overexplaining this. I'm certain you get it. It's not a hard concept: if you say they're compatible, you've got to say how they can be.

[Trajk Logik]

What do you mean by "lead into" in describing how physical states "lead into" mental states?

I said one mental state leads to another mental state following the laws of nature.

But which laws of nature show this to be the case? Do you have any evidence for this claim?

No, under determinism there is only one chain of causality which starts from the Big Bang and never finishes.

Right, and all of your decisions occur within that range of causal events. As I said, you don't make decisions in a vacuum. You and your decisions and actions are part of this causal chain of events.

That is the problem: How can you decide to do otherwise if there is only one chain of causality?

If you could have chosen otherwise, then why didn't you? You had to have a reason why you made one choice rather than another. If you didn't then it was an unconscious, or sub-conscious decision rather than a conscious one. If you did not make a conscious decision then it might be possible that you didn't make a decision at all and it wouldn't make any sense to say that you had any freedom in the first place.

Sure, the Big Bang was necessary for you to be here making your decisions, but so what your birth and every other event that led up to the very moment of your decision to start this thread, and then continues on with the consequences of your decision such as the responses to your thread. Your decision is a necessary cause for the subsequent consequence, so I don't know what you mean initiating or terminating a chain of causality. You'd need to provide an example. Where was your decision to start this thread terminated?

The point is whether I could do otherwise, don't start this thread. This means that we are dealing with options when a decision is needed. This means that a chain of causality forks at the point when a decision is needed. The system cannot evolve deterministically in such a situation given the definition of determinism. Therefore, an agent with the capacity to decide is needed.

It sounds to me that you are speaking in deterministic terms in describing what is "needed" for something else to happen.

Just because you are aware of options does not mean that you could have chosen otherwise. It just means that you are aware of them. You didn't go with those other options for a reason.

Decision-making is a process. It takes time. You have an idea of what you want to accomplish and then you think of options to accomplish it. You filter out the options in favor of the one that you believe would be the best. As such it is a causal process like any other.

Yes, I am assuming that options are real. This means that there are two states of affairs available to choose from. This is not allowed in a deterministic world since given a state of affairs there is only one state of affairs available to choose from.

Just because you have multiple states of affairs to choose from doesn't mean that you could have chosen other than what you did. It's no different than IF-THEN statements. Decision-making has to take into account the current situation (IF) and your available choices (which is not all possible choices because you have a limited memory and limited time to make the choice), (THEN).

While making a decision, you may have several (nested) IF-THEN statements but you disqualify the THEN options when they do not fit the IF conditions. In other words, you could never have chosen those options even though they exist in your programming because the conditions for which they would have been chosen were not true.

So you are not free.

What does it mean to be "free"?

I equate freedom with options. The more options you have, the more freedom. Why would a determinist, like myself, fight for freedom (options)? Because more options allows me to deterministically make better choices. More options gives me more information to make the best decisions. Hiding options from me would be limiting my freedom and preventing me from making better decisions. As I have already said, we can only make decisions based on current information and the current situation. So by adding information gives me more options that can affect the deterministic process of my decision-making, which typically leads to better decisions being made.

That is not always the case. Think of a situation in which you cannot forecast the market. Reasoning has no place in such a situation. Can you invest in the market? Of course, you can although you cannot forecast the market.

We make decisions based on some information that we have in the moment. I'm willing to bet that there was some reason you invested in some stock rather than another. They may not be valid reasons, but they are still reasons all the same. We are not omniscient which is what contributes to the illusory ideas of randomness, probabilities and possibilities.

Well, there cannot be any reason if you cannot forecast the market. You might lose or gain money which is not clear at the point of decision.

Just because you cannot predict the future does not mean you can't make decisions using the information you have now. You can't predict the future for anything yet we still have reasons for our decisions. You use the best information you have at the moment, which may be the advice of someone else or the track record of a particular stock, or the current state of the company and it's profits. There are many reasons to point to in making a decision like this or we wouldn't have people making millions of dollars doing it and making a living off giving advice for others to do it.

What?

Sure, some versions of free-will are incompatible with determinism. It comes down to how one defines free-will.

Well, people define free-will differently, some of them mix free will with will.

Will is defined as a desire or wish. Freedom is defined as the ability to act without control. So free will would be the ability to act without control to realize some desire or dream. But the fact is that we are always limited by time and information. Our choices are limited by the amount of information you have and the amount of time you have before the decision becomes irrelevant. You may have other peoples welfare to think of. There will be options that will not be valid, which is why you didn't choose them and chose another that did. So, defining free-will in this way is incompatible with determinism and free will in this instance would still exist, but as an illusion. Illusions exist, even in a deterministic world. They happen for deterministic reasons, like in how light behaves and how a mind interprets it's behavior.

In defining freedom as having access to more information that would then determine better choices, then free will of this kind would be compatible with determinism.

[Immanuel Can]

@ FJ and IC. I think you need a proper definition for free will as well.

Darn right. Thanks.

But let's at least see if we can get the first word of the OP defined. That seems pretty important.

[Flannel Jesus]

No, I said none of this: all I said was that if you say you believe Compatibilism is true, you owe the world to say HOW it can be true;

But I've never even said anything like this in this conversation with you. This conversation has literally 0 to do with my personal beliefs.

I've asked you for your definition of Compatiblism. I had to, because you were taking issue with all other definitions. So it was the only fair thing to do: to ask you what you mean when you say "Compatibilism."

My intention was to understand your position, and see if we could agree. But when your definition came back, it just said that Compatiblism means that Determinism and free will are "fully compatible." That's a circular definition, and it doesn't answer the question of HOW they can be compatible, which is what this entire thread is about.

And you stil haven't said. I can only conclude that you don't know. And our chances of agreeing, therefore are zero...not because I'm unwilling to find common ground, but because you don't actually offer an explanation of "Compatibilism" that explains how it is supposed to work.

A definition of most things doesn't explain how those things are supposed to work. That's not... how definitions work. Can you define the word "clock" without understanding how clocks work?