I think what you may be seeing on LW is a reluctance to use the term “free will”. I hope it is, since I think it’s a terribly confusing term. I don’t think “free will” is a coherent concept in an intuitive definition of the phrase. What would such a thing mean, and would you want what you’ve defined?
I think what people are usually thinking of as “free will” is better called self-determination; the ability to determine one’s own future according to one’s preferences. (This might include changing one’s preferences, if one prefers to do that when finding certain types of new evidence.) This is the only type of “free will” I’ve ever thought or heard of that’s worth wanting (see Dennett’s book of the same name).
If we assume that I know about HA or HB, my choice of FA or FB is self-determination. If HA and HB is the person I’m dealing with having stolen money in the past, and FA and FB are me choosing to do business with them or not, I want my beliefs about how to treat people to be the determining cause of my actions.
I’d say that I do have control of the future, because my brain, and specifically the parts that implement my beliefs about ethics and game theory, is what links the past HA to the future FA, just as I prefer to see such states linked.
I wouldn’t say this is necessarily a compatibilist position; it’s more of a position of “Are you sure you know what you mean by free will? You say it like it’s something worth wanting, but I can’t see how it would be if it’s not compatible with determinism”.
LIke most philosophical questions, it boils down to defining the question. If you say exactly what you mean by free will, you’ll have your answer.
Or at least an approximate answer, with details to be filled in by empirical observations. I actually disagree with Dennett that we have “all of the free will worth wanting”. I think our cognitive biases prevent us from acting based on our beliefs an awful lot of the time. I’d say we have something like 50% of the self-determination worth wanting.
I think what you may be seeing on LW is a reluctance to use the term “free will”. I hope it is, since I think it’s a terribly confusing term. I don’t think “free will” is a coherent concept in an intuitive definition of the phrase. What would such a thing mean, and would you want what you’ve defined?
I think what people are usually thinking of as “free will” is better called self-determination; the ability to determine one’s own future according to one’s preferences. (This might include changing one’s preferences, if one prefers to do that when finding certain types of new evidence.) This is the only type of “free will” I’ve ever thought or heard of that’s worth wanting (see Dennett’s book of the same name).
If we assume that I know about HA or HB, my choice of FA or FB is self-determination. If HA and HB is the person I’m dealing with having stolen money in the past, and FA and FB are me choosing to do business with them or not, I want my beliefs about how to treat people to be the determining cause of my actions.
I’d say that I do have control of the future, because my brain, and specifically the parts that implement my beliefs about ethics and game theory, is what links the past HA to the future FA, just as I prefer to see such states linked.
I wouldn’t say this is necessarily a compatibilist position; it’s more of a position of “Are you sure you know what you mean by free will? You say it like it’s something worth wanting, but I can’t see how it would be if it’s not compatible with determinism”.
LIke most philosophical questions, it boils down to defining the question. If you say exactly what you mean by free will, you’ll have your answer.
Or at least an approximate answer, with details to be filled in by empirical observations. I actually disagree with Dennett that we have “all of the free will worth wanting”. I think our cognitive biases prevent us from acting based on our beliefs an awful lot of the time. I’d say we have something like 50% of the self-determination worth wanting.