I sort of think of “agent with free will” as a model for “that complicated thing that actually does determine someone’s actions, which I don’t have the data and/or computational capacity to simulate perfectly.” Predicting human behavior is like predicting weather, turbulent fluid flow, or any other chaotic system: you can sort of do it, but you’ll start running into problems as you aim for higher and higher precision and accuracy.
I don’t think it’s particularly meaningful to use “free will” for that instead of “difficult to predict.” I mean, you don’t say that weather has free will, even though you can’t model it accurately. Applying the label only to humans seems a lot like trying to sneak in a connotation that wasn’t part of the technical definition. I think that your concept captures some of the real-world uses of the term “free will” but that it doesn’t capture enough of the usage to help deal with the confusion around it. In particular, your definition would mean that weather has free will, which is a phrase I wouldn’t be surprised to hear in colloquial English but doesn’t seem to be talking about the same thing that philosophers want to debate.
I sort of think of “agent with free will” as a model for “that complicated thing that actually does determine someone’s actions, which I don’t have the data and/or computational capacity to simulate perfectly.” Predicting human behavior is like predicting weather, turbulent fluid flow, or any other chaotic system: you can sort of do it, but you’ll start running into problems as you aim for higher and higher precision and accuracy.
Does that make any sense? (I’m not sure it does.)
I don’t think it’s particularly meaningful to use “free will” for that instead of “difficult to predict.” I mean, you don’t say that weather has free will, even though you can’t model it accurately. Applying the label only to humans seems a lot like trying to sneak in a connotation that wasn’t part of the technical definition. I think that your concept captures some of the real-world uses of the term “free will” but that it doesn’t capture enough of the usage to help deal with the confusion around it. In particular, your definition would mean that weather has free will, which is a phrase I wouldn’t be surprised to hear in colloquial English but doesn’t seem to be talking about the same thing that philosophers want to debate.
I don’t mean to imply that being difficult to predict is a sufficient condition for having free will… I’m kind of confused about this myself.