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PariahDong t1_j98pjeq wrote

Reply to comment by subito_lucres in Compatibilism is supported by deep intuitions about responsibility and control. It can also feel "obviously" wrong and absurd. Slavoj Žižek's commentary can help us navigate the intuitive standoff. by matthewharlow

The issue is that the sense in which it's "self-evident" falls away very quickly, for many people, with even a little bit of concentrated/guided introspection.

I got a chance during undergrad to spend quite a bit of time on research which surveyed non-philosophy participants on their thoughts/feelings regarding free will/self issues. It's the "illusion of free will is itself an illusion" idea; it's difficult, because the whole topic is so conceptually muddy and there are so many concepts which overlap definitionally with day-to-day use, but, overwhelmingly, when you get people thinking clearly about the idea and sharpen some of the conceptual edges they come away with pretty clear incompatibilist intuitions that they do not actually have free will.

I can dig up some of the research to link if you're interested, but with even just a little bit of conceptual clean-up most non-philosophy people become pretty quickly disillusioned about their free will.

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erkling27 t1_j999xhc wrote

I will say, I feel like just introducing people to determinism and them suddenly feeling a dampened sense of self or free will is kinda like saying kids who can't swim that get thrown into the deep end of a pool stuggle to stay afloat.

But, I will say that it's a solid point that determinism's immediate logical follow up is "free will as I understand it, is sus."

At the end of the day, I think free will is such a loosely defined concept entirely because it kinda takes a whole lot to justify it. Like beyond what is currently or ever may be possible. But that's kinda why it's all very philisophical and not science really.

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subito_lucres t1_j98qneu wrote

First of all, your answer is condescending, and also doesn't really make an argument so much as imply that if I only knew what you know, I'd agree with you.

Second, I already do not believe in free will. I'm merely commenting that, as a scientist, efforts to argue against the possibility of free will based on our current models of physics are not very convincing to me. Because our understanding is incomplete.

Edit: disagree by downvoting all you want, this is a philosophy forum and we should be directly making our arguments here, not describing how our arguments would make someone feel if we made them. It's not politics or debate club, it's philosophy. I don't care how popular the idea is, I care if it's a sound logical argument.

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PariahDong t1_j98ulxs wrote

? You must reading some tone/implication into my comment that was not intended. I'm sorry you felt condescended to, just sharing an interesting personal connection I have to this very specific question and responding to the claim that we might be able to think of free will as self-evident or axiomatic.

Your initial claim was that "perhaps the best argument for free will is the fact that we all seem to experience it," which makes sense. All I was saying is that, for most people, even when they don't spend much time with the topic, it's surprisingly easy for their subjective experience of free will to fall away.

That our "baseline" subjective experience seems to be one of experiencing free will is certainly true, and there are really interesting & open potential cultural/social/evolutionary reasons for that, but generally we wouldn't accept a claim on axiomatic principles if it had the property of seeming to exist or fall away with the relative ease that the experience of free will does.

Again, not making any claims about what you do or don't believe, just responding to the comment that accepting free will as axiomatic or self-evident might make sense with some reasons why it might not make sense.

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warren_stupidity t1_j9a2kj4 wrote

So kind of a ‘free will of the gaps’ argument?

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subito_lucres t1_j9a5zym wrote

It's similar, in that I'm arguing we can't prove it doesn't exist and is perhaps self-evident. Obviously, no one here is going around "believing in things" simply because we can't prove them wrong. So whether or not this is a sound argument hinges on whether or not you think free will is self-evident.

I am not sure of that, myself, and I'm not convinced the answer is known to anyone. I don't think physics really answers that question. Neither does psychology or neuroscience.

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branedead t1_j98uwgm wrote

Incomplete, and something you said earlier that's important, they are MODELS.

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LordMongrove t1_j9fa7t5 wrote

You say you are a scientist, yet your arguments seem to come from a different place. What kind of scientist exactly?

The only way there is a place for free will is if all our fundamental science is wrong. There was no place for free will in classical (Newtonian) mechanics, there is no place for it in quantum mechanics, nor in relativity. There is no place for it in string theory or the standard particle model.

Basically, everything we think we know about the universe would need to be wrong for free will to have a chance. You are grasping at straws.

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subito_lucres t1_j9fgary wrote

I do not believe in free will. However, I do not think our models of the universe are very complete, so I do not think there's a logical basis for dismissing the possibility of free will.

I don't want to make this about my credentials, I was only mentioning my scientific background to help relate my epistemological framework, not to claim any authority. Furthermore, I like to come to r/philosophy to discuss ideas, and it's unfortunate to see that so many debates veer into various logical fallacies, like ad hominem, straw man, argument from authority, etc. So I think it's very important that neither of us do that, which is why I don't want to claim authority, nor assume you are attacking my credentials. But if it helps to understand my state of mind, I will share that I'm an academic biologist, with expertise in molecular biology, biophysics, cell biology, analytical geometry, optics/microscopy, bacterial pathogenesis, evolution, and genetics.

Obviously, it's not the same field as we are discussing (although, really, there is no one field that encompasses all of the science we are discussing, unless we remain so hopelessly broad as to say something like "theoretical physics"), but biology and physics use the same toolset in terms of building and assessing models. Good scientists are skeptics, and it's important to have some sense of what we are reasonably sure is true, what we are reasonably sure is untrue, and everything else. To quote the statistician George Box, "all models are wrong, but some are useful."

To me, as a scientist... I think it's more fair to say that free will is not predicted or explained by any of our models than to say that our models eliminate the possibility of free will. Hopefully, our models are getting better all of the time, and we can approach but never achieve certainty. Most people want certainty, but there is none, only degrees of uncertainty. So, I am arguing from a place of skepticism.

Since it seems to be getting lost somehow, I will repeat for the fourth time that I do not believe in free will. However, all epistemological frameworks that I am aware of require accepting certain axioms. For example, "I think therefore I am," or "A = A," or "existence exists." How do we decide if something is self-evident?

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