Soft Determinism, Hard Determinism, Necessitarianism, Fatalism...Huh?

[bennyboy]

I'm sorry, but even the idea of free will being that one's will is free doesn't make sense, as the will is clearly not free. [. . .]It shows that the usual idea of free will is at best incomplete.

Okay, so you are of the position that the idea of free will is malformed. You may be right about that.

To spend chapters redefining free will in neurological terms, and then say it is compatible with determinism, is really just to say that neurology is deterministic. The whole process of equivocating on free will to arrive at that obvious conclusion is a bit derp.

The same misformed criticism could be labelled towards ANY idea of free will. After all, libertarians will try to "describe free will in incompatibilistic terms is really just to say that free will is indeterministic to arrive at that obvious conclusion is a bit derp."

The concept of free will is rooted in a series of world views extending at least a couple thousand years. To make any conversation ABOUT free will have any meaningful context, we have to accept that the words already meant something before we decided to move them into the lab. Otherwise, we aren't refining or improving on an understanding rooted in our cultural history-- we are discarding that traditional vehicle completely and insisting on a new start, viewed from a new model.

I'd argue that if that's the case, it's simpler just to use a new vocabulary, since those old words carry so much philosophical baggage.