Interesting how you introduce a sort of ‘let’s not just be about semantics’ while in the end, the disagreement boils down to essentially exactly that.
I think you’re completely right with what you point out, but I think this is not about having to convince SH about the ‘existence of free will’, rather about what terminology to best use in which discussion with whom.
I remain highly sympathetic to SH’s framing, as
0. SH is simply always right on everything. Ok, small joke to start (though—gosh—isn’t he kind of so so amazingly right in most things? My personal opinion; still always surprising me, though I appreciate quite some smart people seem to not like him).
Retributive justice—as in really within jurisprudence or so—questions are essentialy when we discuss free will, and here’s where most people are stupidly confused while SH’s exposition and interpretation is spot on about it—as I have the impression you mostly agree
In our daily usual interactions the same applies even much more broadly. I instinctively hate you if you do something bad and I think you’re somehow evil in a way that’s beyond ’that unfortunate creature is just suffering the tumor—or, as you put it, it’s tumor all the way down to even that more usual seeming creature still! - and this is absolutely impossible to see and rmbr for 95% of people or so → It’s exactly SH’s framing that’s an ideal summary as to why we’re wholly wrong in our instincts.
With point 2. said, I do agree that emphasizing the nuances you point out—and which whom I’m convinced SH rather fully agrees—might, for quite some people, make the whole free-will-not-in-the-way-you-instinctively-mean less of a non-starter, and thus be a fruitful addition to the discourse. What I dislike though is some of the nuances in your framing/wording, that makes it initially sound as if you’d try to rebut more than you actually, substantively do.
I guess I was thinking it included semantics, but I was thinking (hoping?) that these were more conceptual than purely semantic. (I admit there’s very little empirical difference here.) I tried to call them out in the cruxes section, where I have things like whether consciousness is causally efficacious or merely a witness and whether deliberated actions and reflexes differ in kind or only in degree.
I think the question of does something (consciousness) do causal work is an empirical claim. We could (in theory) find a bunch of p-zombies and test it.
I was trying to show that some definitions really do lead to more natural distinctions that intuitively feel like different things, like the difference between being convinced by an argument and falling off a cliff.
Do even these ultimately collapse into semantics? (Is this ultimate about what we define as “you”?) Of course we could define free will any which way, so it’s always partially semantic. I was thinking they didn’t, but could be wrong.
Re: the framing, I understand the sympathies towards his framing. If your goal is “help people stop hating criminals as self-created monsters,” then “you have no free will” is a much better reply than “read my long essay please”.
Sometimes I was wondering how much I was rebutting and how much we were agreeing. I think it ended up being less rebutting almost because Sam ends up in essentially compatibilist positions. For example, I would regard someone who believes they’re just watching their body move without their control (i.e. alien hand syndrome) as a pathology. My guess is Sam would call that a pathology as well, although I don’t know how that conclusion would follow from his framework. But doesn’t this implicitly concede that consciousness normally does something functional?
Interesting how you introduce a sort of ‘let’s not just be about semantics’ while in the end, the disagreement boils down to essentially exactly that.
I think you’re completely right with what you point out, but I think this is not about having to convince SH about the ‘existence of free will’, rather about what terminology to best use in which discussion with whom.
I remain highly sympathetic to SH’s framing, as
0. SH is simply always right on everything. Ok, small joke to start (though—gosh—isn’t he kind of so so amazingly right in most things? My personal opinion; still always surprising me, though I appreciate quite some smart people seem to not like him).
Retributive justice—as in really within jurisprudence or so—questions are essentialy when we discuss free will, and here’s where most people are stupidly confused while SH’s exposition and interpretation is spot on about it—as I have the impression you mostly agree
In our daily usual interactions the same applies even much more broadly. I instinctively hate you if you do something bad and I think you’re somehow evil in a way that’s beyond ’that unfortunate creature is just suffering the tumor—or, as you put it, it’s tumor all the way down to even that more usual seeming creature still! - and this is absolutely impossible to see and rmbr for 95% of people or so → It’s exactly SH’s framing that’s an ideal summary as to why we’re wholly wrong in our instincts.
With point 2. said, I do agree that emphasizing the nuances you point out—and which whom I’m convinced SH rather fully agrees—might, for quite some people, make the whole free-will-not-in-the-way-you-instinctively-mean less of a non-starter, and thus be a fruitful addition to the discourse. What I dislike though is some of the nuances in your framing/wording, that makes it initially sound as if you’d try to rebut more than you actually, substantively do.
I guess I was thinking it included semantics, but I was thinking (hoping?) that these were more conceptual than purely semantic. (I admit there’s very little empirical difference here.) I tried to call them out in the cruxes section, where I have things like whether consciousness is causally efficacious or merely a witness and whether deliberated actions and reflexes differ in kind or only in degree.
I think the question of does something (consciousness) do causal work is an empirical claim. We could (in theory) find a bunch of p-zombies and test it.
I was trying to show that some definitions really do lead to more natural distinctions that intuitively feel like different things, like the difference between being convinced by an argument and falling off a cliff.
Do even these ultimately collapse into semantics? (Is this ultimate about what we define as “you”?) Of course we could define free will any which way, so it’s always partially semantic. I was thinking they didn’t, but could be wrong.
Re: the framing, I understand the sympathies towards his framing. If your goal is “help people stop hating criminals as self-created monsters,” then “you have no free will” is a much better reply than “read my long essay please”.
Sometimes I was wondering how much I was rebutting and how much we were agreeing. I think it ended up being less rebutting almost because Sam ends up in essentially compatibilist positions. For example, I would regard someone who believes they’re just watching their body move without their control (i.e. alien hand syndrome) as a pathology. My guess is Sam would call that a pathology as well, although I don’t know how that conclusion would follow from his framework. But doesn’t this implicitly concede that consciousness normally does something functional?
Thanks for reading it and commenting.