I found almost no discussions of this among philosophers, not surprisingly.
Not surprisingly because there are so many thousands of articles and books on free will that it’s hard sort through them, or not surprisingly because you found that philosophers (as you expected) did not discuss the phenomenology of free will in those many thousands of articles and books?
In my experience, it is almost impossible to find any (not obviously false) idea that hasn’t been pretty throughly discussed at some point. One of the greatest things about, say, the idea of FAI is that friendliness as a formal decision procedure is a genuinely new idea. That’s extremely, fantastically hard to do. I expect the problem isn’t going to be finding philosophers who discuss this very question, but sorting through the mountain of such discussion for anything good or interesting.
Philpapers has a pretty okay search engine. I found this article by John Searle searching for ‘free will phenomenology’. I didn’t read it, but the abstract leads me to believe it has some discussion of the phenomenology of free will.
Uh, sorry, I should have phrased it differently. What I meant was not just that this angle is probably not very popular, but also that it is hard to find, given that the specific language philosophers would use would be unfamiliar and non-obvious to someone outside the field. Additionally, it would be a topic more likely to be studied in neuroscience, psychology or even psychiatry than in philosophy of mind. Routine paywalling doesn’t help, either. But yes, I also admit to a certain prejudice against a discipline which has multiple warring schools arguing opposite points with no ability to reconcile them. It’s like if physics was mostly arguing about interpretations of QM.
Anyway, thanks for the links, I’ll see if I can find something relevant. Feel free (as in “free will”) to link if you come across something, as well. I’m looking at the Searle’s article you linked (pdf), and it has one working definition of the feeling of free will:
I did not sense the antecedent causes of my action as setting causally sufficient conditions. I did not sense the reasons for making the decision as causally sufficient to force the decision, and I did not sense the decision itself as causally sufficient to force the action. In typical cases of deliberating and acting, there is, in short, a gap, or a series of gaps between the causes of each stage in the processes of deliberating, deciding and acting, and the subsequent stages. If we probe more deeply we can see that the gap can be divided into different sorts of segments. There is a gap between the reasons for the decision and the making of the decision. There is a
gap between the decision and the onset of the action, and for any extended action, such as when I am trying to learn German or to swim the English Channel, there is a gap between the onset of the action and its continuation to completion. [...] Without the conscious experience of the gap, that is, without the conscious experience of the distinctive features of free, voluntary, rational actions, there would be no problem of free will.
I found no descriptions like “perception of lack of free will may manifest in the following ways...” As a result, the definition above is directly contradicted by some of the no-free-will accounts posted in the comments to the OP. That it takes only one post by an amateur on an online forum to poke holes in a well-cited paper of a renown professional philosopher is not very encouraging.
I donno, that description seems to me to capture in a general way most of what people have pointed to as the experience of (or lack of) free will. Searle might say that the experience of the lack of free will is the experience of there being no such gaps where we generally expect them. That is, the experience of anticedent causes or reasons being causally sufficient for an action in the way perceptions and the causes of perceptual experiences are causally sufficient to make me believe that there’s a tree in front of me.
I mean, in some sense anyone who gives you an answer to the question ‘how does it feel to have/not have free will’, where ‘free will’ is understood as metaphysical free will (the kind that’s at stake in discussions about determinism, say) is confused. Metaphysical free will or lack thereof can’t feel like one thing or another. We can however distinguish between free will (in a non-metaphysical sense) and coercion, or free will in action and the kind of non-free relationship we have with our perceptual beliefs. And the ‘gap’ thing is a fair account of that phenomenological distinction.
TheOtherDave gave one first-hand contradicting account. There the experience of “no free will” came from too large a gap, not from not having a gap. Alternatively, one can think of the feeling of being compelled and unable to resist some perceived external or internal force as “lacking free will”, like an addict in the movie Flight both dialing her dealer and praying he wouldn’t answer. The gap is still present, but what is absent is, in Searle’s words, the stages of deliberating and deciding.
We can however distinguish between free will (in a non-metaphysical sense) and coercion, or free will in action and the kind of non-free relationship we have with our perceptual beliefs.
I am not sure what this “non-metaphysical sense” is. Perceptual? Then it seems like a tautology.
And the ‘gap’ thing is a fair account of that phenomenological distinction.
I don’t see how the ‘gap’ disappears in the above examples.
Eh, I wasn’t fair in my other reply. The idea of a gap seems like a neat one, and probably matches some of the free-will experiences, just not all or even a majority of them.
Not surprisingly because there are so many thousands of articles and books on free will that it’s hard sort through them, or not surprisingly because you found that philosophers (as you expected) did not discuss the phenomenology of free will in those many thousands of articles and books?
In my experience, it is almost impossible to find any (not obviously false) idea that hasn’t been pretty throughly discussed at some point. One of the greatest things about, say, the idea of FAI is that friendliness as a formal decision procedure is a genuinely new idea. That’s extremely, fantastically hard to do. I expect the problem isn’t going to be finding philosophers who discuss this very question, but sorting through the mountain of such discussion for anything good or interesting.
Philpapers has a pretty okay search engine. I found this article by John Searle searching for ‘free will phenomenology’. I didn’t read it, but the abstract leads me to believe it has some discussion of the phenomenology of free will.
Uh, sorry, I should have phrased it differently. What I meant was not just that this angle is probably not very popular, but also that it is hard to find, given that the specific language philosophers would use would be unfamiliar and non-obvious to someone outside the field. Additionally, it would be a topic more likely to be studied in neuroscience, psychology or even psychiatry than in philosophy of mind. Routine paywalling doesn’t help, either. But yes, I also admit to a certain prejudice against a discipline which has multiple warring schools arguing opposite points with no ability to reconcile them. It’s like if physics was mostly arguing about interpretations of QM.
Anyway, thanks for the links, I’ll see if I can find something relevant. Feel free (as in “free will”) to link if you come across something, as well. I’m looking at the Searle’s article you linked (pdf), and it has one working definition of the feeling of free will:
There is some more here.
I found no descriptions like “perception of lack of free will may manifest in the following ways...” As a result, the definition above is directly contradicted by some of the no-free-will accounts posted in the comments to the OP. That it takes only one post by an amateur on an online forum to poke holes in a well-cited paper of a renown professional philosopher is not very encouraging.
I donno, that description seems to me to capture in a general way most of what people have pointed to as the experience of (or lack of) free will. Searle might say that the experience of the lack of free will is the experience of there being no such gaps where we generally expect them. That is, the experience of anticedent causes or reasons being causally sufficient for an action in the way perceptions and the causes of perceptual experiences are causally sufficient to make me believe that there’s a tree in front of me.
I mean, in some sense anyone who gives you an answer to the question ‘how does it feel to have/not have free will’, where ‘free will’ is understood as metaphysical free will (the kind that’s at stake in discussions about determinism, say) is confused. Metaphysical free will or lack thereof can’t feel like one thing or another. We can however distinguish between free will (in a non-metaphysical sense) and coercion, or free will in action and the kind of non-free relationship we have with our perceptual beliefs. And the ‘gap’ thing is a fair account of that phenomenological distinction.
TheOtherDave gave one first-hand contradicting account. There the experience of “no free will” came from too large a gap, not from not having a gap. Alternatively, one can think of the feeling of being compelled and unable to resist some perceived external or internal force as “lacking free will”, like an addict in the movie Flight both dialing her dealer and praying he wouldn’t answer. The gap is still present, but what is absent is, in Searle’s words, the stages of deliberating and deciding.
I am not sure what this “non-metaphysical sense” is. Perceptual? Then it seems like a tautology.
I don’t see how the ‘gap’ disappears in the above examples.
Eh, I wasn’t fair in my other reply. The idea of a gap seems like a neat one, and probably matches some of the free-will experiences, just not all or even a majority of them.