If free will was not real

[The Grand Nudger]

"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.

You just linked a popularizing article that uses the term free for the same reasons as anyone else does.  Flourish.  As for (2)...yes, by defining all of the "freedom" out of it.  

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/compatibilism/#TerOneForFreWilPro

Which is a freedom nowhere in evidence.  What is in evidence is a vast mountain of observations to the contrary, cutting even at the heart of what you -want- in the first place.  

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!)

I don't think a nest has a will either (if we're the standard of reference), but I don't think that what we have is too far off from what it has, and I expect to see thermostats with a will before I die.  

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.

That would be a -less damning- comparison, specifically to your position...but better, idk why.  No one doubts the will of those folks, you know.  We just see it to be compromised.  They wanted to do it, that's why they did it. It;s a point you;ll have to take up with the other "compatibilist" in thread, Benny, who has very literally defined free will as the ability to act in accordance with ones nature...etc etc tc.

In any case, you think that some people are about as free as a nest thermo...but that you're different, do you?