I don’t think it’s always useful to think of free will as a “capacity to make choices in which the outcome has not been determined by past events” (wikipedia). I’m not even sure that definition makes any sense, actually. To me, at least, it doesn’t feel like I make decisions without referring to my memories, which were laid into my mind by my past experiences. It certainly feels like different memories could easily result in my making different decisions in the same situation. And the fact that we can get more skilled at handling certain situations as we get older and experience those situations more times supports that notion.
Rather, I think it’s (at least sometimes) more useful to reframe free will as how it feels to be inside a system that operates at least partially by constructing counterfactual futures and conditioning its outputs on how it provisionally responds to those simulated futures. Start such a system in a specific state, give it a particular input set, and you can expect a specific output; but from within the system it feels like freely making a choice. We can see exactly this happen in patients experiencing Transient Global Amnesia, and with other conditions that prevent the encoding of new memories (though those with permanent conditions do still show some neuroplasticity, and this leads to some changes in the long term).
But I also don’t think I would say that “physics excludes… freewill”. Rather, I would call trying to reconcile free will with cause and effect a category error. Free will is a way to model how a mind can feel like it works from the inside, while causality is a way to model how information propagates through the universe. They’re just not really related, is all.
I don’t think it’s always useful to think of free will as a “capacity to make choices in which the outcome has not been determined by past events” (wikipedia).
That’s not the only definition. That’s the definition of libertatian free will.
I’m not even sure that definition makes any sense, actually. To me, at least, it doesn’t feel like I make decisions without referring to my memories, which were laid into my mind by my past experiences.
You are reading ”...has not been determined by past events” as though it means “entirely unconnected to previous events”. It doesn’t mean that.
Rather, I think it’s (at least sometimes) more useful to reframe free will as how it feels to be inside a system that …
Free will is a way to model how a mind can feel like it works from the inside
You start off by saying that this approach is “sometimes” “useful” and then switch to treating it as stone cold fact.
Taking a step back ,
1 we are basically always at map level, because ,even in physics, we have to use simplifications. We can’t model things at the quark level.
2 we can’t regard map level features as false just because they are map level features. So claims like “free will is a map level feature” don’t disprove free will.
3 defining free will as an illusory feeling doesn’t prove or disprove it either, since other people use other definitions.
I don’t think it’s always useful to think of free will as a “capacity to make choices in which the outcome has not been determined by past events” (wikipedia). I’m not even sure that definition makes any sense, actually. To me, at least, it doesn’t feel like I make decisions without referring to my memories, which were laid into my mind by my past experiences. It certainly feels like different memories could easily result in my making different decisions in the same situation. And the fact that we can get more skilled at handling certain situations as we get older and experience those situations more times supports that notion.
Rather, I think it’s (at least sometimes) more useful to reframe free will as how it feels to be inside a system that operates at least partially by constructing counterfactual futures and conditioning its outputs on how it provisionally responds to those simulated futures. Start such a system in a specific state, give it a particular input set, and you can expect a specific output; but from within the system it feels like freely making a choice. We can see exactly this happen in patients experiencing Transient Global Amnesia, and with other conditions that prevent the encoding of new memories (though those with permanent conditions do still show some neuroplasticity, and this leads to some changes in the long term).
But I also don’t think I would say that “physics excludes… freewill”. Rather, I would call trying to reconcile free will with cause and effect a category error. Free will is a way to model how a mind can feel like it works from the inside, while causality is a way to model how information propagates through the universe. They’re just not really related, is all.
That’s not the only definition. That’s the definition of libertatian free will.
You are reading ”...has not been determined by past events” as though it means “entirely unconnected to previous events”. It doesn’t mean that.
You start off by saying that this approach is “sometimes” “useful” and then switch to treating it as stone cold fact.
Taking a step back ,
1 we are basically always at map level, because ,even in physics, we have to use simplifications. We can’t model things at the quark level.
2 we can’t regard map level features as false just because they are map level features. So claims like “free will is a map level feature” don’t disprove free will.
3 defining free will as an illusory feeling doesn’t prove or disprove it either, since other people use other definitions.