Oh no not another free will thread.

[The Grand Nudger]

By that definition, conveyor sorters also have free will.  I'm not saying it's a bad description of what free will is (as opposed to what we thought it was)...only noting it's inclusivity.

Conveyor's don't have a self to express.

You don't think that the selections a conveyor sorter makes are the truest expression of whatever the conveyor sorter is? It;s also a causal chokepoint, and whatever it selects is whatever it always would have - that's it's nature as whatever sort of conveyor sorter it may be. Isn't it as free as you are, if those are the reasons that you are free, and it is also in that same position?

Put another way, some other thing x can satisfy every criteria you employ to proclaim your free will..and even be subject to identical limitations in that employment (even limitations of temporal certainty)...but it's only a free will when your "self" is doing it?

It was beautifully inclusive a moment ago...but now it looks like common case of exclusionary special pleading.

[notimportant1234]

May take on this is that free will is our self-regulating mechanism, The mechanism wich we use to update and correct behavior, kind of like Daniel Dennets free will.
I think that living organisms are the most complex thing that the universe had to offer, to think that natural selection couldn't give us a mechanism that could correct flawed patterns seems short-sighted.

[Angrboda]

I think I get what Lut is saying. The concept that you chose what you wanted to, but it's also what's predicted. The god or whatever may know what you would do, but it didn't make you do anything. But maybe Khem and Hammy are seeing this purely through what the possible outcomes are.

Sort of.  An impediment to free will, the freedom to choose, means that there is no choice whatsoever.  There is always a choice, however, for there is no instance in any moment of our daily lives where we don't have the option to choose what we are going to do or say or act or behave or wear or drink or eat.  A being knowing what we will do in no way cancels out free will.  Rather, it probably reinforces it.

The problem can be expressed as follows. Suppose that a sea-battle will not be fought tomorrow. Then it was also true yesterday (and the week before, and last year) that it will not be fought, since any true statement about what will be the case in the future was also true in the past. But all past truths are now necessary truths; therefore it is now necessarily true in the past, prior and up to the original statement "A sea battle will not be fought tomorrow", that the battle will not be fought, and thus the statement that it will be fought is necessarily false. Therefore, it is not possible that the battle will be fought. In general, if something will not be the case, it is not possible for it to be the case. "For a man may predict an event ten thousand years beforehand, and another may predict the reverse; that which was truly predicted at the moment in the past will of necessity take place in the fullness of time" (De Int. 18b35).

Wikipedia || Problem of future contingents

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Just because the being knows that you will choose the blue shirt over the green shirt does not mean there still wasn't a choice and that you still did not have the free will to choose between the two colored shirts.

You're confusing choice with free will. Choice is simply the ability to finitely deliberate on a matter and arrive at a choice. If decision making is deterministic, then we would still make choices, but there would be no free will involved. This is a common mistake in thinking about free will that choice is necessarily an example of free will. It's not. I can assign the computer the task of designing the optimal wing profile for an airplane. The computer will consider many factors, deliberate upon them, and choose a specific profile out of the range of possibilities. The only sense in which choice might entail free will is if you hold that deliberation itself is a free and not fully determined process. I see nothing about the fact of choice that requires deliberation to be so.

[I_am_not_mafia]

[Angrboda]

I heard an analogy a little while ago, just to add something to think about in the conversation.

A voting machine is rigged, so that no matter who is voted for, the machine will record Trump. A person goes into the booth, and votes for Trump. Now there was no possible way, that they could have voted otherwise (remember the machine is rigged). Did the persons inability to vote otherwise, effect their free will choice to choose Trump?

The solution to the enigma is in your very words. The person did not in fact 'vote' as to vote requires actually registering that vote, unless we are to make the term meaningless. That would be like saying that if a brick wall existed between you and I, and I reached out my hand and struck the wall, that I nonetheless touched you simply because I had the intention of touching you. If the machine did not accurately tally the person's intention, then they did not cast a vote. The machine did.

[possibletarian]

I think someone knowing the future argument does not relate either way to free will, for or against.

The two should be separated.

[Mystic]

[The Grand Nudger]

I think someone knowing the future argument does not relate either way to free will, for or against.

The two should be separated.

Why?

It certainly relates to the reality of their "choice" between a and b.  Obviously, it wouldn't make you feel like you had less of a choice or no choice..but that's an artifact of personal ignorance of the future and the process by which we do and will choose a.  From a privileged temporal position of observation, it could be seen that you are not free in that situation.

Any notion of free will has to address both whether and how free will is or can be exerted in the case of a certain inevitability. It would be easy, I suppose...to say that those certain inevitabilities aren't where free will can be exerted, regardless of how...but when the certain inevitability is the outcome of a choice.........?

[Edwardo Piet]

Classic.

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I heard an analogy a little while ago, just to add something to think about in the conversation.

A voting machine is rigged, so that no matter who is voted for, the machine will record Trump. A person goes into the booth, and votes for Trump. Now there was no possible way, that they could have voted otherwise (remember the machine is rigged). Did the persons inability to vote otherwise, effect their free will choice to choose Trump?

The solution to the enigma is in your very words.  The person did not in fact 'vote' as to vote requires actually registering that vote, unless we are to make the term meaningless.  That would be like saying that if a brick wall existed between you and I, and I reached out my hand and struck the wall, that I nonetheless touched you simply because I had the intention of touching you.  If the machine did not accurately tally the person's intention, then they did not cast a vote.  The machine did.

And in any case, I can't see any of that escaping Strawson's succinct argument. The idea that "could have done otherwise" not requiring ultimate responsibility is just plain silly. Maybe it will hold for compatabilist accounts of non-ultimate responsiblity, but only a true fatalist would deny those accounts anyway. It's just misleading at best to call that "free will" when most people believe free will is a lot more than that.

I'm partly by the key being in RR's words when RR said "A person goes into the booth and votes for Trump". Surely that would mean they did register? Maybe I'm not 'picturing' it right. I take it the idea is that they vote for Trump but they would have been forced to vote for Trump regardless, they couldn't have done otherwise, but still, they happen to have wanted to anyway so it doesn't matter, they don't need to do otherwise.

My response to that is simply that that only gives us compatabilist free will, which I don't deny anyway. I just think it's silly to call that "free will". I think it's like calling the universe "God". Compatabilism is like pantheism to me. And when Dennett says "You're a compatabilist in all but name!" to an incompatabilist that's as silly as a naturalistic pantheist exclaiming to an atheist "You're a pantheist in all but name!". Well yeah, but then that means your label is vacuous. That's your fault there. ("You" meaning Dennett/the compatabilist/the pantheist in this analogy).

[Angrboda]

That may be true, but you can't deny the conclusion to prove the argument false, you have to deal with the argument. Also, I believe God innovates in real time,  future doesn't exist, he is not bound by time, but neither is time something that exists from beginning to end with him, the present exists, the past once existed, and the future is going to come about and is not determined.

I see it as God being able to see past present and future simultaneously and all at once, because He is outside of time. While we can only see the present because we are bound by time. Think of it as God having the ability to see a cube at an angle, seeing 3 faces of it at a glance (3 squares, if you will.) Let's say we are on one of those squares. All we can see is the square we are currently on. The "present" square.

If the past, present, and future can be seen simultaneously by God, then the past, present, and future simultaneously exist, by necessity. Presentism is the idea that only the present moment exists. If presentism is true, then God cannot see the past nor the future as neither of those exists. You can't see something which doesn't exist. You can predict the future, but that's not knowledge. What you are implicitly describing is the B theory of time in which the future in some sense necessarily already exists. Under the B theory of time, free will becomes incoherent as the choices have already essentially been made already at the inception of existence.