Devinology t1_j8qxvo6 wrote on February 16, 2023 at 8:52 AM

Reply to comment by ReaperX24 in “The principle of protecting our own thinking from eavesdroppers is fundamental to autonomy.” – Daniel Dennett debates the sort of free will it’s worth wanting with neuroscientists Patrick Haggard and philosopher Helen Steward by IAI_Admin

I'm defending a compatibilism closest to Harry Frankfurt's conception of free will.

Under this view, you can very much do things you didn't want to do, because you have different levels of preferences/desires. The laws of realty dictate what you do, and whether your will is free or not is more about how you perceive what happens. If what happens is what you'd want to happen if you were able to control it, then your will is free. If the opposite, then it's not. This is super simplified of course. The idea is that we don't really choose what we do, but we have some higher order preferences, and we feel free if they are fulfilled over lower order ones.

So if you have a drug addiction, we can say that you both want and also don't want the drug. Your higher order reasoning and desire is that you don't keep using the drug, assuming you'd genuinely prefer a life without it. This doesn't always win though, you often succumb to the drug, to lower order desires. If you ultimately desire not to use the drug and succeed in this, you will perceive your will as free, which is all free will really is. If you don't succeed, you'll perceive your will as not free. Meanwhile, all of what actually happens is determined, there are no classically conceived "decisions" happening here. You experience the agency, you don't enact it.

ReaperX24 t1_j8r23ou wrote on February 16, 2023 at 9:52 AM

I see where you are coming from and find your premise to be mostly agreeable. I just don't see how calling it free will is helpful, when there is nothing free about it.

To follow up on your example, if I'm truly convinced that the decision to use the drug was the less desirable option, and I still used it anyway, that would imply that I felt forced by an outside source. I would not even view that as a choice that I made. What is more likely, though, is that using the drug was always my real desire, regardless of the stories that I tell myself to feel better about my own depravity. In this latter case, it's just a slightly trickier version of the free will illusion. This storyline, more often than not, comes off as textbook self-deception.

But let's say it's not self-deception, instead sticking with your original proposition. From my viewpoint - as the drug abuser - the illusion of free will was never present to begin with. I never felt like I had a choice to make, I just acted on pure impulse as a result of my addiction. I may still experience regret and feel responsibile for my inability to resist the urges, but it's not unheard of for people to take responsibility of an act that they never had any agency over to begin with. One morbid example of this is how rape victims often blame themselves for not acting otherwise, even though they fully know that their agency was severely diminished by uncontrollable circumstances.

In either case, there is no genuine free will to experience, but the latter case features the illusion of it, when as with the former, one just immediately admits that it was never there to begin with. So, why call it free will at all? If we must make a distinction between the two scenarios, we could use words like "will" or "desire" without pretending that freedom plays any part in it. My main problem with compatibilism has always been its potentiality to reinforce the layman concept of free will. I think it's more conducive to abolish the term entirely, and instead use new terminology when nuance is required. "Free will" carries far too much baggage.

Edit: I said I wouldn't get into this rabbit hole in the other comment chain, and yet here I am irresistibly at it again. That's fairly amusing, considering the subject at hand haha. Certainly hope my comment makes at least a bit of sense to you, after all that.

Devinology t1_j8t5x07 wrote on February 16, 2023 at 7:47 PM

We can have competing desires, but only one side can "win" in any given situation. In fact, we rarely wholeheartedly do anything. This doesn't mean that we didn't genuinely want to do multiple conflicting things. You're right, if you didn't want to do the drug but did it anyway, you didn't have free will, you felt forced. That's exactly what I'm saying. If you did the thing your higher order desires want, then you feel free, like you really wanted that. That's the experience of free will. You can also say that when you do what you wholeheartedly wanted to, that's free will.

The reason it makes sense to call this free will and not an illusion is because that's what freedom is to a will. Why refer to something that's impossible (going against the laws of reality) as freedom? That seems silly, that's not something we can do and doesn't represent anything in our experience. The way I'm using it is a useful distinction, between when we feel free and when we don't. That's all freedom to a person's will is. Using terms like 'desire' or 'will' aren't helpful here. It's your will and your desires in every case. But only in some cases is your will free.