It does not bother me at all, since it doesn’t actually address any of the factors that are relevant to my compatibilist position on free will.
The first part to understand is that 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. Many of these shades of meaning are related to each other. Most of them are compatible with determinism, which is why I would describe my position as mostly compatibilist.
The description given in this post doesn’t appear to be related to any of these, but with mere physical correlation in a toy universe simplified beyond the point of recognizability or relevance. Further questions would need to be answered in order to even begin to consider whether the agent in this post’s question has “free will” in any of the relevant senses. For example:
To what extent does the agent know the relation between the H’s, C’s and F’s?
Would the deciding agent perceive HA and HB as being identical up the the point of decision?
Is it the same agent making the decision in universes HA and HB?
What basis for judgement is used for the preceding answer?
In a fairly “central” example, my expectation would be:
The agent does not know these relations;
That the agent does perceive HA and HB as being identical;
That in most important respects the agents are considered to be “the same”, by some sort of criterion such as:
They themselves would recognize each other’s memories, personalities, and past decisions as being essentially “their own”. (They may diverge in future)
In this case I would say that this agent (singular, due to the third answer) has free will in most important respects (mostly due to answer 2 but also somewhat due to 1), can be said to choose CA or CB, influences FA or FB butdoes not choose them, and likewise does not choose HA or HB.
If you have different answers to those questions, my answers and the reasons behind them may change.
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.
It does not bother me at all, since it doesn’t actually address any of the factors that are relevant to my compatibilist position on free will.
The first part to understand is that 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. Many of these shades of meaning are related to each other. Most of them are compatible with determinism, which is why I would describe my position as mostly compatibilist.
The description given in this post doesn’t appear to be related to any of these, but with mere physical correlation in a toy universe simplified beyond the point of recognizability or relevance. Further questions would need to be answered in order to even begin to consider whether the agent in this post’s question has “free will” in any of the relevant senses. For example:
To what extent does the agent know the relation between the H’s, C’s and F’s?
Would the deciding agent perceive HA and HB as being identical up the the point of decision?
Is it the same agent making the decision in universes HA and HB?
What basis for judgement is used for the preceding answer?
In a fairly “central” example, my expectation would be:
The agent does not know these relations;
That the agent does perceive HA and HB as being identical;
That in most important respects the agents are considered to be “the same”, by some sort of criterion such as:
They themselves would recognize each other’s memories, personalities, and past decisions as being essentially “their own”. (They may diverge in future)
In this case I would say that this agent (singular, due to the third answer) has free will in most important respects (mostly due to answer 2 but also somewhat due to 1), 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.
If you have different answers to those questions, my answers and the reasons behind them may change.
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.
In what sense do they influence the inevitable future (FA or FB)?