Compatibilism is impossible

[Flannel Jesus]

No, no...no dodging out now.

You made a very specific claim, one intended to be insulting and denigrating, obviously. And you claimed there was a "long string" of evidence.

You need to substantiate your claim. Let's see the evidence.

Quote me. Prove it.

I'll do it when...

No, I know you won't. It was bunk from the start.

Children's tactics with me, children's tactics with iwanna. Grow up.

[Flannel Jesus]

Assuming things about what FJ was doing....

No. Proof. Quote me. Show me doing it. Vague, unfounded slanders not allowed.

You seem to have conveniently missed the main point of the post. You could both be wrong, for example. Whether or not FJ can demonstrate compatibilism to be the case has nothing to with whether your interpretation of compatiblism or the article in the SEP were correct. You jumped from the latter to the former instead as if they were hinged.

YOu have a habit of assuming that others bear the onus and shifting the discussion to give them the onus, instead of continuing to support your assertions.

It's what children do.

I'm really actually quite disappointed in IC. I mean, I'm not even saying anything controversial. "Compatibilists don't think free will is an illusion". That's not controversial. That's not a defense of compatibilism. That's not defending compatibilism any more than saying "Christians don't think Jesus was a Satan worshipper" is a defense of Christianity.

Both of those statements are just entirely uncontroversial facts about people with those beliefs, and yet stating it to IC drives him up a wall.

[attofishpi]

Yep, the guy has me on ignore for no reason other than pointing out where and when he is being irrational, and since he declines to respond it can only mean he sees the error(s) of his ways.

[Flannel Jesus]

Yep, the guy has me on ignore for no reason other than pointing out where and when he is being irrational, and since he declines to respond it can only mean he sees the error(s) of his ways.

Yes, by his logic it certainly does mean that.

[attofishpi]

[Age]

Compatibilism basically says that there are no uncaused events.

Therefore, free-will is only ever free from external constrain or coercion.

That's compatibilist free-will.

What I am arguing is that free will is impossible in a deterministic world.

But there is NO need for 'you' to so-call 'argue' 'this'. AS NO one would DISAGREE WITH 'you' here.

[Age]

I think we can agree on the fact that the brain is a set of neurons that interact with each other. Any mental state, the physical state of the brain, leads into another mental state by following the laws of physics. This is a deterministic chain of causality. Free will on another hand is the ability to initiate or terminate a chain of causality.

BUT 'this' IS NOT what 'free will' in relation to the definition of 'free will', which ACTUALLY FITS IN and WORKS PERFECTLY WITH OTHER WORDS and their DEFINITIONS.

This is true since we are dealing with two options in an undecided situation which requires an agent to choose one of the options and initiate a chain of causality. This, initiating or terminating a causal chain, is impossible in a physical/deterministic world. Therefore compatibilism is impossible.

WHY?

'you' are, OBVIOUSLY, ONLY speaking OF some PRECONCEIVED and/or BELIEVED 'physical/deterministic world' ONLY.

Which, OBVIOUSLY, does NOT EXIST.

[Iwannaplato]

I'm really actually quite disappointed in IC. I mean, I'm not even saying anything controversial. "Compatibilists don't think free will is an illusion". That's not controversial. That's not a defense of compatibilism. That's not defending compatibilism any more than saying "Christians don't think Jesus was a Satan worshipper" is a defense of Christianity.

Both of those statements are just entirely uncontroversial facts about people with those beliefs, and yet stating it to IC drives him up a wall.

And to be pedagogical, and not for you, here's more of the parallel pattern, using your example.

FJ: Jesus was a Satan worshipper.
IC: he was not. Demonstrate that is true.
FJ: prove Jesus was the son or God (or Holy, or God or a spirtual being, etc.)
IC: wait, no. Demonstrate that Jesus was a Satan worshipper.
FJ: You're dodging the issue, so clearly you can't demonstrate Jesus is.....(whatever)

It's actually rather hilarious since it seem so wrong to attribute such a pattern to you and it is so clearly IC's habit.
How charitable of you to be disappointed.

[bahman]

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?

To the best of our knowledge, there is only one sort of laws of nature.

Do you have any evidence for this claim?

Physics.

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?

Because I didn't freely decide otherwise.

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.

I am talking about conscious decisions.

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.

Could we agree that options are real in the sense that I can choose any of them?

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.

No, free will is something more than options. Free will is about you being able to choose any option.

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.

I didn't say that you cannot decide if you cannot foresee the market. In fact, the free decision comes into play when you cannot forecast the market.

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.

The bold part is not the definition of free will. We have control over our decisions all the time.

[bahman]

Compatibilism basically says that there are no uncaused events.

Therefore, free-will is only ever free from external constrain or coercion.

That's compatibilist free-will.

What I am arguing is that free will is impossible in a deterministic world.

Maybe it isn't completely deterministic. Anyway, there is too much that we don't know to be able to say if, and to what extent, free will is possible.

Free will isn't deterministic. Free will is necessary. There are situations when only a free decision can resolve the conflict of interest in options.

[bahman]

What I am arguing is that free will is impossible in a deterministic world.

Libertarian free will (as described by Chisholm) surely is.

"[E]ach of us, when we act, is a prime mover unmoved. In doing what we do, we cause certain events to happen, and nothing—or no one—causes us to cause those events to happen."

(Chisholm, Roderick M. On Metaphysics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. p. 12)

What is the other sort of free will?

[bahman]

Compatibilism basically says that there are no uncaused events.

Therefore, free-will is only ever free from external constrain or coercion.

That's compatibilist free-will.

What I am arguing is that free will is impossible in a deterministic world.

But there is NO need for 'you' to so-call 'argue' 'this'. AS NO one would DISAGREE WITH 'you' here.

So you agree?

[Flannel Jesus]

But there is NO need for 'you' to so-call 'argue' 'this'. AS NO one would DISAGREE WITH 'you' here.

So you agree?

It probably goes without saying but age has no idea what he's talking about. He's actually disagreeing with you - you think compatibilists exist, he's saying they don't.

[bahman]

But there is NO need for 'you' to so-call 'argue' 'this'. AS NO one would DISAGREE WITH 'you' here.

So you agree?

It probably goes without saying but age has no idea what he's talking about. He's actually disagreeing with you - you think compatibilists exist, he's saying they don't.

Oh, thanks for the clarification.

[Age]

What I am arguing is that free will is impossible in a deterministic world.

But there is NO need for 'you' to so-call 'argue' 'this'. AS NO one would DISAGREE WITH 'you' here.

So you agree?

If 'you' are SAYING that 'free will' is impossible in a deterministic only world, then yes.