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.

[Mudhammam]

So what's the difference between determinism and necessitarianism? It seems like the latter is a logical reduction of the former. No?

[Cato]

OK, I usually follow along and don't have much to say in the free will/determinism conversations. This has mostly been due to me trying to sort it out for myself and attain a certain level of understanding before chiming in. I may need some help continuing this process at this point. This may get lengthy.

I think I now have a decent understanding of the basics and if forced to choose (there's a free will joke in there somewhere) would consider myself an uncomfortable compatibalist. What I don't know is if I conclude this for rational reasons or I am still clutching onto the idea of being in control as part of some type of wish fulfillment.

Recently I dropped any reservation and accepted the fact that my conscious me is far less in control of my choices than what I previously and intuitively thought. I was reluctant at first because I didn't immediately equate my subconscious as also being me. Now this seems a little childish, but when first confronted with the concept it appeared for a bit as if someone else was in here with me and I had no insight as to what the fuck he was doing, or more importantly what he could or would be willing to do.

Jonathan Haidt has a great analogy of an elephant and its rider applied to emotional/rational components of thought and decision making. I like to apply the same to subconscious/conscious decision making keeping in mind that I am both the elephant and the rider.

As a materialist I am sympathtic to the idea of determinism and is something that I can't outright dismiss, but cannot yet accept the idea that I am not really choosing among availabe actions as in the Garden of Forking Paths model (or am I, remembering that my subconscious is still me). Dennett's attempt to remove inevitability from determinsim feels right, but I can't say that I agree with the argument and this is where I'm stuck right now. I know I would like determinism not to equal inevitable, only because it's counterintuitive and immediately uncomfortable and not because all of a sudden I would hitch a ride on the good ship Narcissist (I'll come back to this later or in another post). Perhaps I just don't understand enough to flush out and articulate what I feel is wrong. I'm fine with more work; I just hate being stuck.

I would like to say I'm a determinist, but can't yet fully escape what my everyday experience suggests. Dennett may be closer to the truth, but all I see ahead of me is a paradox; a deterministic universe that resulted in our evolving into a being that experiences the events of the universe through a series of perceived choices.

[Angrboda]

I think what hangs most people up about hard determinism is not that we aren't ultimately free, anybody who is not a child already acknowledges this. I think most people get stuck on swallowing hard determinism because of what they see as the consequences of the position, the loss of existential meaning, the abandonment of traditional concepts of justice and morality, the loss of the notion of moral dessert, losing a sense of ownership of one's actions. It's like nihilism to most people, they don't see anyway to avoid the conclusion, but they find the emotional and philosophical consequences of embracing the viewpoint to be daunting. (I don't agree with nihilism, but it's a very well accepted position by many.) Hard determinism is similar in that people don't mind embracing the limitations on their freedom so much as the consequences that seem to flow from embracing that position. I say "seem to flow" because I think many of the fears are bogeyman created by letting go of free will with one hand, but not letting go of traditional frameworks with the other hand.

Off the top of my head, I think compatibilism could be refashioned into a defensible position, but its advocates want too much from it. They want to do the one-hand hang, giving up some of the traditional metaphysics and concepts, but remodeling only certain parts so that it looks like nothing has been changed. I think, at minimum, this is too ambitious a goal. You're going to have to redraw much of the rest of the map to bring determinism into the heart of being, you can't just change the central linchpin into something resembling the old concept, and still hold everything else in place. So you end up with philosophers like Dennett trying to bridge the gap with hand-waving, and it just doesn't work. The illusion may charm for a while, but eventually the mirror breaks from the strain. If compatibilists would accept a more radical redrawing of concepts and consequences, perhaps compatibilism could be made consistent. With what compatibilists want to do though, I don't think it will ever work. And those things eventually come out in the wash in philosophy, so today's compatibilism may very well just be "a phase" on the way to something else.

[Mudhammam]

I agree with you rasetsu but even if the "self" is "nothing" more than determined physical processes (i.e. brain states), it doesn't compute to me that I've surrendered meaning to nihilism. As I tried to make the point in my little "rant" at you from another thread dealing with determinism/free will (and I apologize if I came across as lashing out), does the fact that we're composed of atoms that literally make up everything in the universe make me feel synonymous with rocks? Of course not. As long as we can "feel" that we're able to do otherwise and possess a sense that we "should," moral responsibility seems unscathed. Brain states are complex so who's to say what my next move will be? "Me."