Do you believe in free will?

[genkaus]

Yours is the misconception. The concept of free will has contained that as a part of itself for most of its history, usually with reference to duallistic notions, but not always; see below.

For Aristotle, a break in the causal chain allowed us to feel our actions "depend on us" (ἐφ' ἡμῖν). He knew that many of our decisions are quite predictable based on habit and character, but they are no less free nor we less responsible if our character itself and predictable habits were developed freely in the past and are changeable in the future.

This is the view of some Eastern philosophies and religions. Our Karma has been determined by our past actions (even from past lives), and strongly influences our current actions, but we are free to improve our Karma by good actions.

One generation after Aristotle, Epicurus argued that as atoms moved through the void, there were occasions when they would "swerve" from their otherwise determined paths, thus initiating new causal chains. Epicurus argued that these swerves would allow us to be more responsible for our actions, something impossible if every action was deterministically caused. For Epicurus, the occasional interventions of arbitrary gods would be preferable to strict determinism.

Epicurus did not say the swerve was directly involved in decisions. His critics, ancient and modern, have claimed mistakenly that Epicurus did assume "one swerve - one decision." Following Aristotle, Epicurus thought human agents have the ability to transcend necessity and chance.

" ...some things happen of necessity, others by chance, others through our own agency. ...necessity destroys responsibility and chance is inconstant; whereas our own actions are autonomous, and it is to them that praise and blame naturally attach."

—

As I've maintained, and explained previously, the basic question of free will has remained the same : Are our actions up to us?

Any philosopher or philosophy which sees a dichotomy between free-will and determinism, does so due to its seeing the agent as something apart from the causal chain. And the history you provided supports that. You're really not saying anything new here.

You're not "correcting" anything, you're taking a concept we know to be flawed and replacing it with a new concept, presumably in the hopes that the new concept will furnish all the things the old concept did, only without all its problems.

No, the basic concept remains the same: "An agent's control over his actions". The flaw or the error in the prior understanding came from the misconception of what an agent is. By correcting that flaw, it is expected that the ensuing understanding would be corrected as well.

What about free will is worth preserving, and is that or those things actually preserved by your new concept. If moral culpability is the only thing you're trying to save, you haven't saved it.

How so? If according to the corrected free-will, an agent is in control of his actions, then he is morally responsible for them. Though that was not the goal of correcting the error.

If the feeling of freedom is what you're trying to save, I suggest we don't need that "feeling" for anything useful. If your fear is that without the belief that we have free will people will stop caring and stop living (like those people on the planet in the movie Serenity), I think a) you need to demonstrate this would actually happen, b) that this would be a bad thing even if true. I forget who said it, maybe William James, but it has been said that the truth is never a mistake; and I haven't seen anything to contradict that. If there is some other something that you think is "rescued" by your redefinition then name it. I personally don't think you can, which makes redefining free will along compatibilist lines a lot of work for absolutely no result.

All such reasons are irrelevant. If any of these were the reason for my conclusion, then I'd be arguing from consequences. As I explained in my earlier post, I considered that question of "is free will possible?", figured out what free will could realistically mean and went from there.

I just want to note for your benefit that I am intentionally skipping this point. Partly because I'm not up to it at the moment, and partly because the question of what an emergent property is, what their ontological status is and whether there can be anything attributed to them independent of non-emergent properties is such a large topic that I'm not sure it isn't simply a distraction.

A quick example. Let's suppose we simulate a hurricane on a computer by programming in all the relevant conditions, humidity, pressure, temperature and gravity, and all the relevant rules of physics. Suppose it's six days before landfall of Katrina, and we want to try to predict what areas are going to be hardest hit. We run our simulation and six days later, Katrina comes ashore exactly where our model predicted. Now, the course of the hurricane in our simulation is an emergent property: we did not program in which direction Katrina was going to go, that emerged as a result of the totality of all lower level properties. However, calling the hurricane's course emergent doesn't in and of itself get you anything, as emergent properties are every bit as deterministically caused as lower level causes, they are just a higher level characterization of the same phenomenon.

Emergent entities and their properties, by their very nature cannot be independent of their constituent entities. But their consideration is not a distraction, since in doing so we can regard it as an entity in its own right.