I define free will as this: a person has free will to the extent that he is a cause of which actualities will manifest within the range of potentials of his or her field of influence.
That said, the compatibilist position is incoherent because it rest on three conflicting and/or unsupported premises: 1) physical reality is causally closed, 2) people, things, and ideas can be identified within causal chain & 3) a constant and meaningful harmony holds between someone’s subjective mental states their objective behavior.
Premise 1 is indispensable to the compatibilist position.
But premise 1 conflicts with premise 2. If everything is a continuous chain of material operations then there is no non-question begging way to define the start and end points of deliberations and actions.
Premise 1 also conflicts with premise 3. Physical causal closure either makes subjective experience an inert epiphenomena or physical processes are overdetermined. Thus there is no sufficient reason that can account for the relationship between mental states and behavior.
That said, the compatibilist position is incoherent because it rest on three conflicting and/or unsupported premises: 1) physical reality is causally closed, 2) people, things, and ideas can be identified within causal chain & 3) a constant and meaningful harmony holds between someone’s subjective mental states their objective behavior.
Premise 1 is indispensable to the compatibilist position.
But premise 1 conflicts with premise 2. If everything is a continuous chain of material operations then there is no non-question begging way to define the start and end points of deliberations and actions.
Premise 1 also conflicts with premise 3. Physical causal closure either makes subjective experience an inert epiphenomena or physical processes are overdetermined. Thus there is no sufficient reason that can account for the relationship between mental states and behavior.
