Curiously, people are willing to impute thought, choice, decision-making, understanding, purpose, action to achieve purposes, and so on, to machines like the GPT family, yet are often diffident or hostile to attributing these things to people. I find this very strange.
I left “free will” out of that list, because it is not clear to me what people are asserting, when they say they have “free will”, or what they are denying, when they say they do not.
We can all agree that there is no such thing as a unicorn. We can do that because we all know what the word means: a supposed horse-like creature with a single horn in its forehead, and having magical attributes variously told of. Because we know what we mean, we would recognise one if we found one. But we know it is only a legend. Explorers have never found any such creature, not even something close enough to have inspired the legend. There is no such thing as a unicorn.
But when speaking of free will, whether to assert it or deny it, people describe it only in phrases that seem to point at the same thing in different words, whatever that thing is. “Choice”, “the possibility of having done differently”, and so on. Contrast “unicorn”, which is described in terms that make no reference to unicorns.
Thus “free will” is the name given to a certain subjective experience that people are unable to articulate any further, the experience of acting in the world. When they try to articulate it they confabulate non-answers, answers that no more answer the question “what is free will?” than “gravity” answers “why do things fall?”, or “energy” answers “how does a clockwork toy work?”, or “fluency” answers “how do you speak a foreign language well?”[1] These non-answers are easily shown to be empty or absurd, but this does not negate the existence of the phenomena that they fail to elucidate. Things fall, clockwork toys move, and mastery of a foreign language is possible.
People clearly do think, choose, make decisions, understand things, have purposes, act to achieve them, and so on. Given that, what is left to talk about on the subject of “free will”? Free will is the quale of doing such things, and can be no more articulated than the sensation of hearing a trumpet.
Curiously, people are willing to impute thought, choice, decision-making, understanding, purpose, action to achieve purposes, and so on, to machines like the GPT family, yet are often diffident or hostile to attributing these things to people. I find this very strange.
I left “free will” out of that list, because it is not clear to me what people are asserting, when they say they have “free will”, or what they are denying, when they say they do not.
We can all agree that there is no such thing as a unicorn. We can do that because we all know what the word means: a supposed horse-like creature with a single horn in its forehead, and having magical attributes variously told of. Because we know what we mean, we would recognise one if we found one. But we know it is only a legend. Explorers have never found any such creature, not even something close enough to have inspired the legend. There is no such thing as a unicorn.
But when speaking of free will, whether to assert it or deny it, people describe it only in phrases that seem to point at the same thing in different words, whatever that thing is. “Choice”, “the possibility of having done differently”, and so on. Contrast “unicorn”, which is described in terms that make no reference to unicorns.
Thus “free will” is the name given to a certain subjective experience that people are unable to articulate any further, the experience of acting in the world. When they try to articulate it they confabulate non-answers, answers that no more answer the question “what is free will?” than “gravity” answers “why do things fall?”, or “energy” answers “how does a clockwork toy work?”, or “fluency” answers “how do you speak a foreign language well?”[1] These non-answers are easily shown to be empty or absurd, but this does not negate the existence of the phenomena that they fail to elucidate. Things fall, clockwork toys move, and mastery of a foreign language is possible.
People clearly do think, choose, make decisions, understand things, have purposes, act to achieve them, and so on. Given that, what is left to talk about on the subject of “free will”? Free will is the quale of doing such things, and can be no more articulated than the sensation of hearing a trumpet.
The first two examples are from Feynman, and the last from my late mother, who often “explained” things in that manner.