RE: If free will was not real
August 21, 2016 at 5:08 pm
(This post was last modified: August 21, 2016 at 5:10 pm by Gemini.)
(August 21, 2016 at 9:11 am)Rhythm Wrote: No, it's not -why- we can prosecute people..and we're flirting with an appeal to consequence if you think that we couldn't, if we didn't have free will, or didn't accept the folklore surrounding free will...which is something we've discussed more than once in this thread. Your frontal lobes -may- grant you the property of a human will (even this is a stretch), but we're looking for a -free- will, which we've also discussed.
"Researchers get a glimpse of what free will looks like in the brain"--It's not a stretch. And I never said we couldn't prosecute people if we didn't have free will (as defined by compatibilists). I get the impression that you're assuming compatibilists are trying to reconcile the incompatibilist, libertarian kind of free will with hard determinism.
That's not what we're doing. We're just (1) being careful to avoid describing determinism in terms that make it seem like fatalism and (2) redefining what "free will" means.
Quote:It;s just not an argument -for free will-. Nor is the lack of duress or coercion generic compatibilism..because we plainly understand..even if you won;t accept..that there is no time in which our will is free of either of those things. That no sensible and evidenced description of will can divorce itself -from- them. Compatibilism is the notion that a "free will": is somehow -compatible- with all the forms of duress, coercion, and compulsion we accept to be present and, perhaps, part of the fundamental state of affairs in the universe, such as hard determinism.That in some sense, even with all of that, we have such a will...not that those factors are not present or relevant or applicable. This has always been the criticism of a compatibilist free will, that it;s a way of -saying- that you freely chose the output of your deterministic will, a non-cognitive sentence if one has even a rudimentary grasp of either the concept of freedom, or determinism. This criticism isn't even lost on prominent compatibilists, they understand the problems of proposing such a thing, the difficulties in establishing it, and the contradictions in terms pursuant to any description of it. "Free" enough, for them...whatever that means anyway, but in no way qualitatively free.
From section 3.1, "3.1 Freedom According to Classical Compatibilism"
"...freedom of the sort pertinent to moral evaluation is nothing more than an agent's ability to do what she wishes in the absence of impediments that would otherwise stand in her way." http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compat...rFreWilPro
Quote:Firstly, your criteria have been troubled* for a variety of reasons we've discussed at length...
As for the reasons we discussed at length, I'm happy to concede that your nest thermometer has freedom in the compatibilist sense, but not will.
(And sometimes I stomp on it
. Cause fuck nest thermometers!)Quote: As you've pointed out..if we think a person has a will about as free as a thermostat, we consider them unfit for trial - not sufficiently accountable for their actions. We're obviously referring to some other quality "x"....even if it doesn't exist.
A better comparison would be our consideraton of a mentally compromised person as unfit for trial due to the fact that his intellectual faculties were so diminished that he didn't know what effects his actions would have. Nothing impeded his freedom to act, he just didn't have a "will" that could be impeded by anything. Like a nest thermometer.
A Gemma is forever.
