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The Problem of Imperfect Revelation: Your Thoughts?
RE: The Problem of Imperfect Revelation: Your Thoughts?
(September 28, 2013 at 12:14 am)MindForgedManacle Wrote:
(September 27, 2013 at 10:57 pm)Vincenzo "Vinny" G. Wrote: More than the argument now I'm interested in why you think a libertarian account of free will is incoherent Smile Could you explain why?

Dan Dennett's "Elbow Room" is a good place to look if you want to see an actual, good philosopher of mind take a whack at free will.

But as for your question, I'm about to go to bed so this'll be a bit cut and dry. I guess the short of it would be that for the usual libertarian view of free will (i.e the ability to have done otherwise than you did), you have to avoid determinism. But, you cannot be satisfied with indeterminism either, because then it's essentially random; it would then more appropriately be called 'random will'. So, how can you have the mechanism(s) by which we have [libertarian] free will and thus not be deterministic, while simultaneously also not being indeterministic?

And what's this mechanism supposed to be? Substance dualism is even more fundamentally flawed (always the interaction problem), so it's pretty much a no-go, and doesn't solve that problem either.

Even philosophers like Robert Kanes who are considered to have given rather clever attempts at shoring up libertarian free will's many flaws (I just gave one that I vaguely recall), his arguments received thorough critique from the likes of Dennett. It's libertarianisms many flaws that have driven it down in popularity in the philosophical community (it's around 14% of adherents among philosophers, last I checked, in comparison to compatibilism's ~59%).

That's what comes to mind anyway. The user Genkaus has shown me errors in my thoughts on free will in regards to God before, so he might be a better person to ask on such philosophical issues.

I imagine Dennett is a reductive materialist, right?
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RE: The Problem of Imperfect Revelation: Your Thoughts? - by Vincenzo Vinny G. - September 28, 2013 at 9:18 pm

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