This is a fascinating topic but I’m going to try to keep this brief and get back to alignment, which is equally fascinating and much more urgent.
My standard statement is that “free will” is just a very bad term. Why would I want my will to be uncaused? I want it my will to pursue the things I want, including letting me change the things I want if I want. And that’s how it works. Tossing “free” in to the term makes it sound bad to not have it, but I think that’s just a confusion.
The term “self-determination” seems to better capture the type of free will worth wanting (Dennett’s work on this is my favorite; self-determination is my proposed term, (I think)).
Then, a nitpick on the thought experiment that may or may not matter for how you feel about it.. You may have a determined future, but you can’t know it in advance.
If you somehow told someone their future, it would change it. Two elements of how our world works prevent this. First, if you somehow had an accurate prophecy, you’d need some strange new laws or properties of the universe to prevent that person from saying “oh I’d rather have a somewhat different life than you describe, I’ll use that information about my default path to steer differently”. The other is the three-body problem, a statement of how interacting elements make accurate predictions from physics exponentially difficult, so that even with just a few interacting pieces, the computational difficulty ramps up very rapidly until a computer the size of the universe can’t predict the state of a brain in a year (that’s a very rough guess but it’s extreme).
I agree that free will probably just isn’t the right term. This whole thing started as a response to Sam Harris, and that’s the term he used. I imagine switching to “self-determination” might resolve half of the dispute, so I like that. I think Gary Watson used that term as well, so you’re in good company.
Yeah, I also agree that telling someone their future would change it. That’s why I had that footnote about blanking their mind after you tell them Men-in-Black style. You tell them their future, tell them you’re going to blank their mind in five minutes, then ask how much free will they feeling. This isn’t the strongest response and I think that’s because this is a real weakness of what I said. Both the thought experiments (telling the boy his future and the woman who kills her children yet somehow has “nothing wrong with her”) are so outlandish that I think it’s fair to just say, “I reject the experiment”. Definitely a weakness for sure. Thanks for reading it and commenting.
This is a fascinating topic but I’m going to try to keep this brief and get back to alignment, which is equally fascinating and much more urgent.
My standard statement is that “free will” is just a very bad term. Why would I want my will to be uncaused? I want it my will to pursue the things I want, including letting me change the things I want if I want. And that’s how it works. Tossing “free” in to the term makes it sound bad to not have it, but I think that’s just a confusion.
The term “self-determination” seems to better capture the type of free will worth wanting (Dennett’s work on this is my favorite; self-determination is my proposed term, (I think)).
Then, a nitpick on the thought experiment that may or may not matter for how you feel about it.. You may have a determined future, but you can’t know it in advance.
If you somehow told someone their future, it would change it. Two elements of how our world works prevent this. First, if you somehow had an accurate prophecy, you’d need some strange new laws or properties of the universe to prevent that person from saying “oh I’d rather have a somewhat different life than you describe, I’ll use that information about my default path to steer differently”. The other is the three-body problem, a statement of how interacting elements make accurate predictions from physics exponentially difficult, so that even with just a few interacting pieces, the computational difficulty ramps up very rapidly until a computer the size of the universe can’t predict the state of a brain in a year (that’s a very rough guess but it’s extreme).
I agree that free will probably just isn’t the right term. This whole thing started as a response to Sam Harris, and that’s the term he used. I imagine switching to “self-determination” might resolve half of the dispute, so I like that. I think Gary Watson used that term as well, so you’re in good company.
Yeah, I also agree that telling someone their future would change it. That’s why I had that footnote about blanking their mind after you tell them Men-in-Black style. You tell them their future, tell them you’re going to blank their mind in five minutes, then ask how much free will they feeling. This isn’t the strongest response and I think that’s because this is a real weakness of what I said. Both the thought experiments (telling the boy his future and the woman who kills her children yet somehow has “nothing wrong with her”) are so outlandish that I think it’s fair to just say, “I reject the experiment”. Definitely a weakness for sure. Thanks for reading it and commenting.