On free will: I don’t endorse the claim that “we could have acted differently” as an unqualified statement.
However, I do believe that in order to talk about decisions, we do need to grant validity to a counterfactual view where we could have acted differently as a pragmatically useful fiction.
What’s the difference? Well, you can’t use the second to claim determinism is false.
This lack of contact with naive conception of possibility should be developed further, so that the reasons for temptation to use the word “fiction” dissolve. An object that captures a state of uncertainty doesn’t necessarily come with a set of concrete possibilities that are all “really possible”. The object itself is not “fictional”, and its shadows in the form of sets of possibilities were never claimed to either be “real possibilities” or to sum up the object, so there is no fiction to be found.
A central example of such an object is a program equipped with theorems about its “possible behaviors”. Are these behaviors “really possible”? Some of them might be, but the theorems don’t pin that down. Instead there are spaces on which the remaining possibilities are painted, shadows of behavior of the program as a whole, such as a set of possible tuples for a given pair of variables in the code. A theorem might say that reality lies within the particular part of the shadow pinned down by the theorem. One of those variables might’ve stood for your future decision. What “fiction”? All decision relevant possibility originates like that.
I argue that “I can do X” means “If I want to do X, I will do X”. This can be true (as an unqualified statement) even with determinism. It is different from saying that X is physically possible.
On free will: I don’t endorse the claim that “we could have acted differently” as an unqualified statement.
However, I do believe that in order to talk about decisions, we do need to grant validity to a counterfactual view where we could have acted differently as a pragmatically useful fiction.
What’s the difference? Well, you can’t use the second to claim determinism is false.
This lack of contact with naive conception of possibility should be developed further, so that the reasons for temptation to use the word “fiction” dissolve. An object that captures a state of uncertainty doesn’t necessarily come with a set of concrete possibilities that are all “really possible”. The object itself is not “fictional”, and its shadows in the form of sets of possibilities were never claimed to either be “real possibilities” or to sum up the object, so there is no fiction to be found.
A central example of such an object is a program equipped with theorems about its “possible behaviors”. Are these behaviors “really possible”? Some of them might be, but the theorems don’t pin that down. Instead there are spaces on which the remaining possibilities are painted, shadows of behavior of the program as a whole, such as a set of possible tuples for a given pair of variables in the code. A theorem might say that reality lies within the particular part of the shadow pinned down by the theorem. One of those variables might’ve stood for your future decision. What “fiction”? All decision relevant possibility originates like that.
I argue that “I can do X” means “If I want to do X, I will do X”. This can be true (as an unqualified statement) even with determinism. It is different from saying that X is physically possible.