171–180 of 265 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Already been done. They do not: https://philpapers.org/rec/ANDWCI-3
Or so says a paper. Assuming no methodological errors and replication, in which Psychology (this being posted in "Philosophical Psychology" is a very bad culprit, and stats/polls even more so).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've written a lot of text, most of which I might agree with, but you haven't demonstrated why any of it precludes the existence of free will. Compatibilism is specifically the position that free will is compatible with deterministic agents. Merely stating you disagree that this qualifies as free will isn't particularly compelling. Compatibilism makes sense of our moral language, we clearly have the free will descr…
>but you haven't demonstrated why any of it precludes the existence of free will. Except I don't need to. Compatibilists haven't proven the existence of free will, so the null hypothesis still holds true, at least for now. Throughout the comments here you seem to continually rely on the fact that professional philosophers strongly agree with the idea of compatabilism, but from my point of view, it doesn't really matt…
And who said the existence of free-will is the null hypothesis?
> Of course, randomness isn’t the only thing necessary for free will Not only that, but randomness and determinism are equally against the (casual) idea of free will. Free will, as commonly understood, means there's an "extra layer of abstraction" between the universe (material objects and their relationships) and me. What people called "soul". It's not just that our decisions (will) are random instead of predetermin…
We're starting from the position that we are not entirely sure how the physical world works. From that starting point, pushing the problem of free will off into some other metaphysical realm which we also don't fully understand solves no problems. Unless we can posit rules or mechanisms that apply to souls but that can't apply physically, and show what those are, they are philosophically indistinguishable.
Personally I'm very much in the compatibilist camp. For a decision to be mine, it must depend on my state. If the decision does not derive directly from my state (memories, personality, emotions, etc) then it is not my decision. So the extent to which a decision comes from some other source, to that extent the decision is not mine. Again punting the problem off to a 'soul' adds no conceptual value. Either the soul is part of me and part of my state, or it isn't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't see any real incompatibilities with moral reasoning between a universe where there is no free will and one where it is compatible with determinism, so saying that compatbilist moral reasoning is predictive of how we generally behave is not an argument for free will. Prove that "a universe without free will but behaviourally indistinguishable from one that features Compatibilism" is actually a coherent defin…
>Prove that "a universe without free will but behaviourally indistinguishable from one that features Compatibilism" is actually a coherent definition/non-empty set. It being at all meaningful for me to do that relies Compatibilism having been proven to be correct. There's no evidence that this is the case. >I honestly don't understand what confusion would lead you to make such a statement. Null hypotheses are simply…
That's not what the null hypothesis is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If the thief stole your car only because someone was holding his wife hostage, now where does the responsibility lie? Still with the thief. He still has all of the other inputs into his system beyond just the fact that someone kidnapped his wife. Believing that causality ultimately determines every decision we make doesn't mean that I believe that it's a simple one to one mapping. He knows he can call the police - t…
> He knows he can call the police - this isn't an action movie, and he's not the characters Jason Statham plays. If he is the characters Jason Statham plays, well, it doesn't really matter because he's not going to be caught anyway, and I'm left railing against the hypothetical thief that more often matches reality than your car getting stolen by the living embodiment of an action movie hero/anti-hero. You're evading…
Someone kidnapped my wife so I stole a car is not a valid legal defense, nor would I argue it is a valid moral defense. As I stated from the get go, I would hold the thief responsible in both situations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>but you haven't demonstrated why any of it precludes the existence of free will. Except I don't need to. Compatibilists haven't proven the existence of free will, so the null hypothesis still holds true, at least for now. Throughout the comments here you seem to continually rely on the fact that professional philosophers strongly agree with the idea of compatabilism, but from my point of view, it doesn't really matt…
> so the null hypothesis still holds true And who said the existence of free-will is the null hypothesis?
How could it not be? You don't assume that literally everything is true without evidence of its existence.
Otherwise there is an infinite amount of an infinite variety of things existing in my room right now that I can't observe.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't see any real incompatibilities with moral reasoning between a universe where there is no free will and one where it is compatible with determinism, so saying that compatbilist moral reasoning is predictive of how we generally behave is not an argument for free will. Prove that "a universe without free will but behaviourally indistinguishable from one that features Compatibilism" is actually a coherent defin…
>Prove that "a universe without free will but behaviourally indistinguishable from one that features Compatibilism" is actually a coherent definition/non-empty set. It being at all meaningful for me to do that relies Compatibilism having been proven to be correct. There's no evidence that this is the case. >I honestly don't understand what confusion would lead you to make such a statement. Null hypotheses are simply…
Take a look at the actual definition of null hypothesis and tell me how it's relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis
You're suggesting there's no relationship between what two phenomena when it comes to free will?
> The scientific null assumption is that something doesn't exist.
No it's not. Science is agnostic on such questions until there's evidence, and that's the proper answer. Making a definitive claim of existence or non-existence both require proof.
> It being at all meaningful for me to do that relies Compatibilism having been proven to be correct.
Lay out what constitutes proof of such a question, because I frankly think you're very confused either about what Compatibilism actually says, or what the whole free will debate is actually about.
> Philosophers do not have profound domain knowledge in determining how the universe actually works.
Fortunately, the philosophical question of free will is not about how the universe works.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He knows he can call the police - this isn't an action movie, and he's not the characters Jason Statham plays. If he is the characters Jason Statham plays, well, it doesn't really matter because he's not going to be caught anyway, and I'm left railing against the hypothetical thief that more often matches reality than your car getting stolen by the living embodiment of an action movie hero/anti-hero. You're evading…
>You're evading the question. The point of moral dilemmas is to highlight the qualities that meaningfully affect the outcome. We have here two scenarios, one in which the thief would be held responsible, and one in which he would not. Free will easily distinguishes these two scenarios, and since you claim we don't need free will to make such judgments, let's hear how you distinguish these. Someone kidnapped my wife s…
That's not the scenario I posed, although perhaps the presentation wasn't clear. So to be perfectly clear so there are no misunderstandings, the thief was told to steal your car or his wife would be executed.
Clearly he's morally culpable for stealing the car in one scenario and not in the other. This distinction can be clearly made using free will. You claim you don't need free will to make this distinction, so I'd like to hear how you do so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's a boring theory that doesn't pass Ockham's razor. For the universe to be superdeterministic you'd have to encode its whole evolution somewhere. That is more complicated that the normal interpretation of QM but doesn't explain more.
> I think it's a boring theory that doesn't pass Ockham's razor. For the universe to be superdeterministic you'd have to encode its whole evolution somewhere The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, by 't Hooft https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's a boring theory that doesn't pass Ockham's razor. For the universe to be superdeterministic you'd have to encode its whole evolution somewhere. That is more complicated that the normal interpretation of QM but doesn't explain more.
Isn't it simpler? There are just a few rules and everything works? For the normal QM you have to get some randomness from somewhere else. edit: I mean I agree it's problematic for experimental science, but I think Occam's razor cuts the other way in this instance. edit2: Isn't the entire history encoded anyway in the current state of the universe in the deterministic case. I don't understand what the problem is there…