Thanks. One clarifying question: When you say that the agent “can be said to choose CA or CB, influences FA or FB butdoes not choose them, and likewise does not choose HA or HB”, do you mean that they influence but do not choose HA or HB, or that they neither influence nor choose HA or HB? (My guess is the latter, because you would restrict ‘influence’ to forward-in-time causation, but I want to make sure I’m not misunderstanding.)
I think the reason my little scenario seems irrelevant to you is related to disagreement over this:
I see the term “free will” as having a whole range of different shades of meaning. Most of these involve questions of corrigibility, adaptability, predictability, moral responsibility, and so on.
I think the pre-theoretic concept of free will has implications for those sorts of questions, but I don’t think most of them they are part of what it means. 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. So to me your version seems like a redefinition of the original concept, rather than a meaning-preserving addition of rigor.
I would say that they neither choose nor influence HA and HB, assuming that the universe in question follows some sort of temporal-causal model. Non-causal universes or those in which causality does not follow a temporal ordering are much more annoying to deal with and most people don’t have them in mind when talking about free will, so I wouldn’t include them in exploration of a more ‘central’ meaning. However, there is some literature in which the concept of free will in universes with other types of determinism is discussed.
I distinguish between “influence” and “choice” since answer 1 posited that the relationship between the various parts of the universe wasn’t known to the agent. The agent does not know that future Fx follows choice Cx nor that Cx follows from past Hx, and by answer 2 does not even know the difference between HA and HB. If FA includes some particular outcome OA that causally follows from CA but isn’t in FB, and the agent choosing CA does not know that, then I would not say that the agent chose OA. They chose CA, which influenced OA.
There are lots of different ways to address different forms of “ability to do otherwise”, each of which is useful and relevant to different questions about free will, and so they all lead to different shades of meaning for “free will” even including nothing more than what you’ve just said. However, different people communicate different explicit and implicit assumptions about what “free will” means in their communication, and so necessarily mean somewhat different things by the term. Each of the aspects I mentioned in my post come from multiple respected writers on the subject of free will.
So no, it’s not a redefinition. It’s a recognition that the meaning of the term in practice varies with person and context, and that it doesn’t so much have a single meaning as a collection of related meanings. From long experience, proposing a much more specific definition is one of the surest ways to end up squabbling pointlessly over semantics. This is one of the major failure modes of discussions of free will, and where possible I prefer to start from a point of recognizing that it is a broad term, not a narrow one.
Thanks. One clarifying question: When you say that the agent “can be said to choose CA or CB, influences FA or FB but does not choose them, and likewise does not choose HA or HB”, do you mean that they influence but do not choose HA or HB, or that they neither influence nor choose HA or HB? (My guess is the latter, because you would restrict ‘influence’ to forward-in-time causation, but I want to make sure I’m not misunderstanding.)
I think the reason my little scenario seems irrelevant to you is related to disagreement over this:
I think the pre-theoretic concept of free will has implications for those sorts of questions, but I don’t think most of them they are part of what it means. 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. So to me your version seems like a redefinition of the original concept, rather than a meaning-preserving addition of rigor.
I would say that they neither choose nor influence HA and HB, assuming that the universe in question follows some sort of temporal-causal model. Non-causal universes or those in which causality does not follow a temporal ordering are much more annoying to deal with and most people don’t have them in mind when talking about free will, so I wouldn’t include them in exploration of a more ‘central’ meaning. However, there is some literature in which the concept of free will in universes with other types of determinism is discussed.
I distinguish between “influence” and “choice” since answer 1 posited that the relationship between the various parts of the universe wasn’t known to the agent. The agent does not know that future Fx follows choice Cx nor that Cx follows from past Hx, and by answer 2 does not even know the difference between HA and HB. If FA includes some particular outcome OA that causally follows from CA but isn’t in FB, and the agent choosing CA does not know that, then I would not say that the agent chose OA. They chose CA, which influenced OA.
There are lots of different ways to address different forms of “ability to do otherwise”, each of which is useful and relevant to different questions about free will, and so they all lead to different shades of meaning for “free will” even including nothing more than what you’ve just said. However, different people communicate different explicit and implicit assumptions about what “free will” means in their communication, and so necessarily mean somewhat different things by the term. Each of the aspects I mentioned in my post come from multiple respected writers on the subject of free will.
So no, it’s not a redefinition. It’s a recognition that the meaning of the term in practice varies with person and context, and that it doesn’t so much have a single meaning as a collection of related meanings. From long experience, proposing a much more specific definition is one of the surest ways to end up squabbling pointlessly over semantics. This is one of the major failure modes of discussions of free will, and where possible I prefer to start from a point of recognizing that it is a broad term, not a narrow one.