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?
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.