What compatibilists standardly mean by a free choice is a choice that is not forced or hindered. Neither of your choices is clearly free in that sense.
Which seems to give me just as much control[4] over the past as I have over the future.
Ok, but that could be zero., in both cases. Controlling the future, in the sense of being able to steer towards different possible futures, is specifically whats missing from compatibilist as opposed to libertarian free will.
I think what most people are trying to point at when they talk about free will is something along the lines of ‘ability to do otherwise’ in the sense that, when looking at a choice in retrospect, we would say a person ‘had the ability to do otherwise’ than they actually did.
Compatibilism is only able to account for CHDO in the weak sense that you weren’t being forced to do one particular thing by another agent. Nonetheless, only one decision was ever possible, given determinism.
What compatibilists standardly mean by a free choice is a choice that is not forced or hindered. Neither of your choices is clearly free in that sense.
To clarify: I meant to refer to a choice that is free from the kinds of hindrance or coercive influence that would render it ‘unfree’ in the compatibilist sense.
Ok, but that could be zero., in both cases. Controlling the future, in the sense of being able to steer towards different possible futures, is specifically whats missing from compatibilist as opposed to libertarian free will.
Are you a compatibilist yourself? Because I expected most compatibilists to hold that we do in some important sense, though of course not the libertarian one, influence the future via our choices. And I was looking to better understand why the sense in which we can influence the future is strong enough to be a good match for the concept ‘free will’, while the sense in which we can influence the past is presumably non-existent or too weak to worry about. (Or, if we can in some important sense influence the past, why that doesn’t bother them.)
Are you a compatibilist yourself? Because I expected most compatibilists to hold that we do in some important sense, though of course not the libertarian one, influence the future via our choices.
I’m not a compatibilist , and I reject compatibilism because it can’t explain that kind of issue.
Theres a standard and often repeated response made by the compatibilists here, that along the lines of “the future depends on your decisions because it won’t happen without you making the decision
”.
Under determinism, events still need to be caused,and your (determined) actions can be part of the cause of a future state that is itself determined, that has probability 1.0. Determinism allows you to cause the future ,but it doesn’t allow you to control the future in any sense other than causing it. It allows, in a purely theoretical sense “if I had made choice b instead of choice a, then future B would have happened instead of future A” … but without the ability to have actually chosen b.
I expected most compatibilists to hold that we do in some important sense, though of course not the libertarian one, influence the future via our choices. And I was looking to better understand why the sense in which we can influence the future is strong enough to be a good match for the concept ‘free will’, while the sense in which we can influence the past is presumably non-existent or too weak to worry about
What is missing here is a definition of ‘people’ to determine how we are effective causes of anything.
When you adopt a compatibilist view, you are already implicitly accepting a deflationary view of free will. There’s no interesting sense in which people cause things to happen ‘fundamentally’ (non-arbitrarily, it’s a matter of setting boundaries), the idea of compatibilism is just to lay down a foundation for moral responsibility. They are talking past each other in a way. It becomes a discussion on semantics.
The different deflationary conceptions of free will are mostly just trying to repurpose the expression ‘free will’ to fit it for the needs of our society and our ‘naive’ understanding of people’s behavior.
Sure, our predispositions bias the distribution of possible actions that we’re gonna take such that, counterfactually, if we had different predispositions, we would have acted differently. That’s all there is to it.
Another different thing is what is a mechanistic explanation of choice-making in our brains, but compatibilism is largely agnostic to that.
What compatibilists standardly mean by a free choice is a choice that is not forced or hindered. Neither of your choices is clearly free in that sense.
Ok, but that could be zero., in both cases. Controlling the future, in the sense of being able to steer towards different possible futures, is specifically whats missing from compatibilist as opposed to libertarian free will.
Compatibilism is only able to account for CHDO in the weak sense that you weren’t being forced to do one particular thing by another agent. Nonetheless, only one decision was ever possible, given determinism.
To clarify: I meant to refer to a choice that is free from the kinds of hindrance or coercive influence that would render it ‘unfree’ in the compatibilist sense.
Are you a compatibilist yourself? Because I expected most compatibilists to hold that we do in some important sense, though of course not the libertarian one, influence the future via our choices. And I was looking to better understand why the sense in which we can influence the future is strong enough to be a good match for the concept ‘free will’, while the sense in which we can influence the past is presumably non-existent or too weak to worry about. (Or, if we can in some important sense influence the past, why that doesn’t bother them.)
I’m not a compatibilist , and I reject compatibilism because it can’t explain that kind of issue.
Theres a standard and often repeated response made by the compatibilists here, that along the lines of “the future depends on your decisions because it won’t happen without you making the decision ”.
Under determinism, events still need to be caused,and your (determined) actions can be part of the cause of a future state that is itself determined, that has probability 1.0. Determinism allows you to cause the future ,but it doesn’t allow you to control the future in any sense other than causing it. It allows, in a purely theoretical sense “if I had made choice b instead of choice a, then future B would have happened instead of future A” … but without the ability to have actually chosen b.
What is missing here is a definition of ‘people’ to determine how we are effective causes of anything.
When you adopt a compatibilist view, you are already implicitly accepting a deflationary view of free will. There’s no interesting sense in which people cause things to happen ‘fundamentally’ (non-arbitrarily, it’s a matter of setting boundaries), the idea of compatibilism is just to lay down a foundation for moral responsibility. They are talking past each other in a way. It becomes a discussion on semantics.
The different deflationary conceptions of free will are mostly just trying to repurpose the expression ‘free will’ to fit it for the needs of our society and our ‘naive’ understanding of people’s behavior.
Sure, our predispositions bias the distribution of possible actions that we’re gonna take such that, counterfactually, if we had different predispositions, we would have acted differently. That’s all there is to it.
Another different thing is what is a mechanistic explanation of choice-making in our brains, but compatibilism is largely agnostic to that.