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> philosophically unrefined No. It's nonsensical to think a person created in the universe is separate from the universe. There are no great philosophers that

• tsimionescu 7y ago
  > It's nonsensical to think a person created in the universe is separate from the universe. There are no great philosophers that believe in free will. And yet compatibilism is a common philosophical belief ever since ancient times, supported throughout history by philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Thomas Aquinas, and Daniel Denett. The essential idea is that what we understand by free will can exist even in a purely deterministic naturalistic universe - mostly, free will should be understood as the ability of any agent to act based on its motivations. So, for example, an artificial neural net is in some important sense free to act as it 'wills' to solve a problem, even though it is following its programming.
  • sysbin 7y ago
    Compatibilism is defining free will differently than how most people think of free will. Free will is an illusion in the traditional sense and thinking of compatibilism changes everything but doesn't give free will in the traditional sense. The agent cannot make decisions free of what the system has influenced. So, it still is nonsensical to think a person has free will in the traditional sense. People are not making their own decisions when they couldn't have been different from the result of the system they reside in. I do consider Schopenhauer a great philosopher but what most people think of free will isn't a possibility. Compatibilism isn't even worthwhile because it doesn't make determinism & free will compatible but instead just redefines free will to delude people into thinking traditional free will is a real thing.
    • tsimionescu 7y ago
      It might not bring back the magical kind of idea where we assert our will over the physical world, true. But if people really believed in that, they would also believe in actual magic, or telekinesis (of course, quite a few do, but there's really no arguing with some people). But the compatibilist free will has most of the characteristics that we associate with any kind of free will. For example, there is still value in arguments, as hearing one agent's argument can well be the cause of the other agent's change in behavior. By the same token, it still makes sense to hold agents responsible for their actions and punish them for their decisions, since the cause of their behavior is very much related to their 'person', the sum total of what they have experienced, learned, and have projected about the future through their own rationality. In fact, it's hard to find anything in the compatibilist free will that contradicts intuitive notions of free will, except for the most religious of intuitions, unless you push it to the brink and try to ask questions where we don't have good intuitions anyway, usually by asking counterfactuals, or moving to the relationship between free will and consciousness. There is also another kind of approach to this question, one I first heard from Noam Chomsky. His point was: if determinism were to contradict our most immediate experience (as discussed before, it may not), the one of deciding how to interact with the world, wouldn't it make more sense to say that we are missing something from our scientific understanding in this area, rather than insisting that the most common empirical observation we have is completely wrong?
      • sysbin 7y ago
        My opinion is compatiblism (like it or not) does delude people into not understanding they have no control over how they came to be as a person, the wealth they accumulate, the relationships, the awful things that happened to them if they do, all these things were by fate, and that people deeply believe the "thought" of realizing free will is an illusion equates to an unpleasant existence or some nonsense of realizing consciousness is really fake (in a sense similar to the colour red changing to orange with yellow added). I'm sure some people read about compatiblism and shortly later go back to believing the traditional free will nonsense. I don't think many people think about not having free will for much time at all. Thinking about determinism for awhile makes it hard to not understand predeterminism. Progresses into making it fairly easy to understand we're just part of a complex system and the system works from a collective mesh of subsystems being "us" to the smallest thing. We're similar to the concept of robots. The universe wrote code for the instructions of us. Similar, we made the robots "code" and people don't consider the robots having free will from our "human code" functioning the operating robots. When people have their thought on robots, they think of determinism subconsciously and think "no.., the actions are really from us, who coded & setup the robots" while the residing of the robots has environment external forces interacting with the robots' outcomes. I personally think the world is good but resembles evil and overtime becomes less resembling evil. I further think the universe repeats more likely than not ever repeat throughout infinity. A good majority of people don't realize they don't have free will; that's keeping evil resembling experiences around longer on earth from what I observe and while people are punished severely. They're never being told they had no free will required to have a better outcome or being given the time observing how their mentality came to be that resulted in the bad outcome. Most people don't even experience what the punishments are from unfavourable: genetics, financial status, health condition, and whatever life variable factoring into conflicting with the system of society; outcomming in not living a mediocre or higher status life but an awful one. So yes, I get freaked out when I even observe all the travesties in society, that likely would have more empathy if people understood "success isn't earned" but given to you at birth and like everything else that follows after birth. Awareness of how the universe at the moment of the creation, resulted in the future (sad or happy) outcomes from the summation of sequential forces upon everything and then thinking of the more privileged vs misfortunate situations in comparison. The forgoing makes me think the system of society would adapt to be more compassionate than the opposite incorrect belief of traditional free will. It's like when people thought it was better to think the world was flat. Delusion isn't better than realism. Eventually, leads me into thinking people can eventually be more likely to agree on universal healthcare and even futuristic things like universal income & homes. So I think free will belief needs to be killed sooner than later. Even though whatever happens is what fate already decided on upon creation. So I'm somewhat hopeful people examine this topic.