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I mean, its oppositional, but I don't think it's unfair. When you follow determinism to it's logical conclusion you come to realize that everything that an animal or human does is a product of their brain structure, their surroundings, their sensory inputs, etc. Essentially, the human brain is a computer, and like all computers (all physical things, really.) it is deterministic. So, you declare "there is no free will! everything is predetermined, even my very thoughts!" And you are correct.
But then, along comes a soft determinist to say "Aha! but if we redefine free will in such a way that it instead represents the preferences of one of these deterministic machines and it's ability to have agency in this universe then free will does exist!" Well okay, yeah, I suppose, but all this really is is sleight of hand. You've twisted the concept of 'free will' until it no longer represents what it did before you learned of determinism. I accept the logic, I don't accept that you've demonstrated anything profound. Under this paradigm, a computer that wants to contact a server, and succeeds, has free will. But we don't think of smartphones as having free will, for obvious reasons.
Is it, in fact, a redefinition at all? It seems to me that ‘free will’ is really about the output space for whatever computation our minds do, whether that happens on a material or spiritual level. Anti-soft-materialism arguments struggle to explain what ‘classical’ free will that excludes it is supposed to be.
Meanwhile, it is possible to suggest at the (largely semantic, of course) difference between ‘hard determinism’ and the ‘soft materialist’ positions. Consider a criminal enterprise. Someone gets arrested, volunteers everything to the cops, gets released on bail, his co-conspirators say “what the fuck man, you have free will bro, why did you tell them that?”. The point being made isn’t a complex analysis of the internal process in the mind that occurs during reasoning, it’s a straightforward exhortation that this agent was not being externally forced to do something that it did anyway. It’s clear that it refers to a way of discussing the bounds of our behavior in a material reality, not an immaterial spiritual concept, which is why we don’t talk about having “free will” to regrow a leg or jump to the moon.
Defining free will as something that happens at the intersection of deterministic machines with good but imperfect predictive ability, material reality, and the forward passage of time fits with the way the term is generally used.
I think it is a redefinition. What you are describing is something most people would call 'freedom of action', or possibly just 'freedom' - the ability of an agent to do what it wants to without external interference. But under this definition, we could say that a Roomba has free will - because it can do what it wants (clean floors), but a prisoner does not, because he is unable to do what he wants (leave prison). This is very much at odds with how most people would use the term.
I agree that agents can make decisions to perform actions to alter the world. What I don't agree is that an agent - any agent - had the capability to make a decision other than the one that it ended up making. This is what most people would mean when they talk about free will - it's the idea that your snitch could have decided not to tattle, which is something that determinism rejects. the choice to snitch appeared unforced, but it was in fact as deterministic as was my Roomba's 'choice' to hoover my floors every day at ten o'clock.
I think i know what you're getting at here, but for the avoidance of doubt, determinism denies the possibility of spiritual decision making. The deterministic argument is:
In such a universe, “free will” more properly means the ability to consider multiple courses of action, and to reject any given potential choice based on conscious reasons, such as moral principles. In practice, our human wills are constrained by unconscious (“subconscious”) reasons, and not perfectly free.
FYI, I’ve had great success consciously removing unwanted reasons from my unconscious using Fourth Step tools from the Twelve-Step recovery method. I feel more free now than ever before.
But you're always going to reject the same ones and chose the one you were always going to, based on everything that has come before that decision point. You will always make the same choice given the same set of conditions. There is no such thing as "free will".
You seem to be constraining the definition of free will to something tautological, while trying to prove some meaningful point.
There are different categories/qualities of free will, specific to any given entity and context. Free will of material+spirit sapients in a material+spirit world looks freer to the philosopher than the free will of material sapients in either a purely material or a material+spirit world, since spirit is (presumably) acausal relative to the material. However, a theologian who presumes original sin is a spiritual condition which constrains the will to the selfish choice will think a purely material AGI a freer will than an unrepentant sinner.
Assuming a purely material world, an agent’s ability to carry out a given choice or to even think of that choice as a choice is naturally constrained in many ways, by fatigue and hunger, by senses and by neurology, by lack of abilities or skills, yet that agent is still functionally free to will whatever he can imagine.
I advise you to consider the concept of Turing completeness before calling my paradox more absurd than your tautology.
I'm aware of the concept. I just don't see how it does anything except back me up. If you can simulate everything a given person is going to do their whole life because you have all available information and enough compute, then how can you claim they have free will?
There is no such thing as free will because their can't be. Either things are causal and you were always going to chose left based on past states, or there are random fluctuations in the aether that somehow fired enough neurons at the same time for you to tip the balance into turning left instead of right. Either way you didn't have any more to do with the outcome than a ball rolling down a hill does.
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