I suppose if I had the feeling that I could predict my own actions with certainty—as though I were able to compute my own input-output table—that would be like feeling like I didn’t have free will.
Yet people ordinarily predict their own actions all the time, quite reliably. For example, I predict that in a few minutes I will turn off the computer and go home, buying groceries at the supermarket on the way, and I already have a rough idea of what I will be doing this evening and tomorrow morning. There are factors that could interfere with this, but they rarely do, and the unpredictability comes from external sources (e.g. the supermarket is unexpectedly closed), not from me.
It is also interesting that people facing up to some hard moral choice will often, afterwards, talk in such terms as “I could not have done other than I did” (here is a random example of what I mean), or “Here I stand, I can do no other.” (The attribution of the last to Luther is disputed, but whoever wrote it, it was undoubtedly written.)
I can also predict that unless your mind has gone awry by contemplating the conundrum of free will, you are not going to deliberately step in front of a bus. Are you “free” to do so when you have (I hope) compelling reasons not to?
For example, I predict that in a few minutes I will turn off the computer and go home, buying groceries at the supermarket on the way
And that is exactly what I did. And for my next trick, I ate because I was hungry, and tonight I will sleep when I am tired.
The sensation of free will is the experience that our acts seem to us to come out of nowhere. But they do come out of somewhere; a part of us that is inaccessible to experience. The sensation is real, but to interpret it at face value is like imagining that your head has no back because you cannot see it.
David Velleman’s concept of epistemic freedom provides a way to agree with both CronoDAS and Richard here. We can “predict” our acts in the broad sense of forming correct expectations. But we also know that we could form the opposite expectation in many cases and be correct in that case too. Last time I bought ice cream, I expected to say “chocolate” to the person behind the counter, and I did. But I could have expected to say “raspberry” instead, and if I had, that’s what I’d have said.
Some prophecies are self-fulfilling. When I said “I’ll have chocolate”, that not only correctly predicted the outcome, but caused it as well. Self-fulfilling prophecies often allow multiple alternative prophecies, any of which will be fulfilled if made. Velleman says that intentions for immediate actions are typically self-fulfilling prophecies. There may be more to intention than that, but there is at least this much: that intentions do involve expectation, and the intention itself (and/or closely associated psychological processes) tends to bring it about.
Yet people ordinarily predict their own actions all the time, quite reliably. For example, I predict that in a few minutes I will turn off the computer and go home, buying groceries at the supermarket on the way, and I already have a rough idea of what I will be doing this evening and tomorrow morning. There are factors that could interfere with this, but they rarely do, and the unpredictability comes from external sources (e.g. the supermarket is unexpectedly closed), not from me.
It is also interesting that people facing up to some hard moral choice will often, afterwards, talk in such terms as “I could not have done other than I did” (here is a random example of what I mean), or “Here I stand, I can do no other.” (The attribution of the last to Luther is disputed, but whoever wrote it, it was undoubtedly written.)
I can also predict that unless your mind has gone awry by contemplating the conundrum of free will, you are not going to deliberately step in front of a bus. Are you “free” to do so when you have (I hope) compelling reasons not to?
And that is exactly what I did. And for my next trick, I ate because I was hungry, and tonight I will sleep when I am tired.
The sensation of free will is the experience that our acts seem to us to come out of nowhere. But they do come out of somewhere; a part of us that is inaccessible to experience. The sensation is real, but to interpret it at face value is like imagining that your head has no back because you cannot see it.
David Velleman’s concept of epistemic freedom provides a way to agree with both CronoDAS and Richard here. We can “predict” our acts in the broad sense of forming correct expectations. But we also know that we could form the opposite expectation in many cases and be correct in that case too. Last time I bought ice cream, I expected to say “chocolate” to the person behind the counter, and I did. But I could have expected to say “raspberry” instead, and if I had, that’s what I’d have said.
Some prophecies are self-fulfilling. When I said “I’ll have chocolate”, that not only correctly predicted the outcome, but caused it as well. Self-fulfilling prophecies often allow multiple alternative prophecies, any of which will be fulfilled if made. Velleman says that intentions for immediate actions are typically self-fulfilling prophecies. There may be more to intention than that, but there is at least this much: that intentions do involve expectation, and the intention itself (and/or closely associated psychological processes) tends to bring it about.