Thanks, that is very illuminating. I think with this in mind I can refine what I’m trying to talk about a bit more. So lets similarly distinguish between freedom and free will.
By ‘freedom’ lets stipulate that we mean something like political freedom. So one has political freedom if one is not prohibited by law from doing things one ought to be able to do, like speaking one’s mind. Likewise, freedom in general means not being constrained by thugs, or one’s spouse, or whatever.
Let’s take up Aaronson’s understanding of ‘free will’: first, your actions are determined by you as opposed to arbitrarily pursued (they are willed), and second, your actions are determined by you alone (they are freely willed).
I don’t think Aaronson’s point about skepticism is a good one. I don’t think the skeptic could always deny that the decision was really yours, so long as we agreed on what ‘yours’ means. They could deny that an action was yours on the basis of, say, it’s appearance to a third party, but we shouldn’t worry about that. I also don’t think past confusion or disagreement about free will is a good reason to get discouraged and abandon the idea.
So maybe this will be helpful: in order for an action to be freely willed in the primary case, it must follow from reasons. Reasons are beliefs held true by the agent and related to one another by inferences. To give a simple example, one freely wills to eat a cookie when something like the following obtains:
1) I like cookies, and I eat them whenever I can.
2) Here is a cookie!
3) [eating it]
It follows from (1) and (2) that I should eat a cookie, and (3) is the eating of a cookie, so (3) follows from (1) and (2). Anything capable of acting such that their action has this kind of rational background (i.e. (1) and (2) and the inference connecting them) has free will. One acts freely, or exercises free will, when one acts on the basis of such a rational background. If we cannot correctly impute to the agent such a rational background for a given action, the action is not freely willed. I’m taking pains to describe free will both as precisely as I can, and in such a way that I say nothing radical or idiosyncratic, but I may be failing.
I grant, of course, that freedom is consistent with determination by natural law. The question is, is free will similarly consistent. I myself am a compatibilist, and I think free will as I’ve described it is consistent with a purely naturalistic understanding of the world. But I don’t see how EY is arguing for compatibilism.
Thanks, that is very illuminating. I think with this in mind I can refine what I’m trying to talk about a bit more. So lets similarly distinguish between freedom and free will.
By ‘freedom’ lets stipulate that we mean something like political freedom. So one has political freedom if one is not prohibited by law from doing things one ought to be able to do, like speaking one’s mind. Likewise, freedom in general means not being constrained by thugs, or one’s spouse, or whatever.
Let’s take up Aaronson’s understanding of ‘free will’: first, your actions are determined by you as opposed to arbitrarily pursued (they are willed), and second, your actions are determined by you alone (they are freely willed).
I don’t think Aaronson’s point about skepticism is a good one. I don’t think the skeptic could always deny that the decision was really yours, so long as we agreed on what ‘yours’ means. They could deny that an action was yours on the basis of, say, it’s appearance to a third party, but we shouldn’t worry about that. I also don’t think past confusion or disagreement about free will is a good reason to get discouraged and abandon the idea.
So maybe this will be helpful: in order for an action to be freely willed in the primary case, it must follow from reasons. Reasons are beliefs held true by the agent and related to one another by inferences. To give a simple example, one freely wills to eat a cookie when something like the following obtains:
1) I like cookies, and I eat them whenever I can. 2) Here is a cookie! 3) [eating it]
It follows from (1) and (2) that I should eat a cookie, and (3) is the eating of a cookie, so (3) follows from (1) and (2). Anything capable of acting such that their action has this kind of rational background (i.e. (1) and (2) and the inference connecting them) has free will. One acts freely, or exercises free will, when one acts on the basis of such a rational background. If we cannot correctly impute to the agent such a rational background for a given action, the action is not freely willed. I’m taking pains to describe free will both as precisely as I can, and in such a way that I say nothing radical or idiosyncratic, but I may be failing.
I grant, of course, that freedom is consistent with determination by natural law. The question is, is free will similarly consistent. I myself am a compatibilist, and I think free will as I’ve described it is consistent with a purely naturalistic understanding of the world. But I don’t see how EY is arguing for compatibilism.