If free will was not real

[Gemini]

It certainly could mean that... that's the sense Dan Dennett uses...

Oh, I'm a total Dan Dennnett fangirl. Except for the appeal to consequences in his arguments for compatibilism.

And brights. Not really on board with calling myself a "bright."

Yummy. That works. It was sexy. It reminds me of me but I think you're more intelligent than I. Which again, feels good in my balls.

That's why I love arguing about free will with you, Hammy. It's so...stimulating

Rawr! You said monads! Gottfried would be proud.

You called him Gottfried... I am hungry for your mind.

This is the most interesting thing you've said to me because this not only further confirms to me that our disagreement is indeed nothing but semantics and a different approach... but we both feel the same way about the damage that the incorrect belief of free will that most people believe in does.

Our approach is different, you take the Dennett approach: "Free will is real but it just isn't what you think it is." Since I take the approach "Free will isn't real but you don''t need free will and you don't have to lapse into fatalism. There is no reason to do that. You have free agency. You are a free agent with normal human willpower and although you are not philosophically responsible for your actions you ought to hold yourself to be a responsible human adult and discarding free will will give you a greater understanding of yourself (and your self) and paradoxically give you more freedom therefore."

The risk for me is that I find even after I have defined compatabilist free will to someone they still very easily start thinking that although they have free will in a deterministic world because compatabilist free will is completely different -- they very easily also start thinking and behaving as if this freedom extends to the illogical contra-causal sense of 'could have done otherwise' provided their will is not under coeertion. People conflate definitions all the time and this is a problem I think. Rather than separate out different definitions and analyse them people are generally more intuitive than myself but less analytical (generally) so in my experience most people are master equivocators. Rather than analysing different senses of a concept they synthesise them. They have strong common sense but they lapse into equivocation.

You know...I'm considering changing my mind about compatibilism in light of your post. Ours really is a semantic difference, and my primary concern has been that people tend to conflate determinism with fatalism. And that's a problem, but is it worse than believing in contra-causal free will? If compatibilism denies both, then it's strictly better than determinism, but as you point out, people are going to conflate compatibilism with libertarianism. I've got to think about this...