Do you NEED an explanation for "everything"?

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Why did you decide on 01?

The shape seemed easier on the eye.

So it wasn't free will at all! It was based upon an aesthetic judgment that you can't explain the origins of!

[Coito ergo sum]

Shouldn't the free will discussion start with defining what people mean by "free will." These discussions seem quite often to amount to people talking past each other because they start with fundamentally different ideas of what "free will" is.

[ughaibu]

Why did you decide on 01?

The shape seemed easier on the eye.

So it wasn't free will at all! It was based upon an aesthetic judgment that you can't explain the origins of!

How does that conflict with the definition?

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Why did you decide on 01?

The shape seemed easier on the eye.

So it wasn't free will at all! It was based upon an aesthetic judgment that you can't explain the origins of!

How does that conflict with the definition?

Please provide me with your definition of free will.

[ughaibu]

Please provide me with your definition of free will.

I have done so already.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Please provide me with your definition of free will.

I have done so already.

Link please.

[GrahamH]

Please provide me with your definition of free will.

I have done so already.

Do you consider this to be your definition:

Free will is more of a case that they didn't find the bones.

An agent has free will on occasions when that agent makes and enacts a conscious choice from amongst realisable alternatives.
1) I can type 10 and I can type 01, thus I have established a set of realisable alternatives.
2) I am conscious.
3) I have considered the expected result of each selection.
4) I have made a selection.
5) 01.
Thus I have demonstrated the enactment of a conscious choice from amongst realisable alternatives. If you have some reason to doubt this demonstration, what is it?

If it's not the physical world out there independent of our experience that science seeks to uncover, then all bets are off.

Science is the business of constructing models which allow predictions of the probabilities of making certain observations, given certain other observations. The models of science carry no ontological commitments and are thus independent of notions of truth or reality, and science is irreducibly dependent upon human experience, in the form of observation.

It fails hopelessly since you have no way to identify 'realizable alternatives'. How can you know how anticipated alternatives are in fact realizable?

I don;t doubt that we we weigh anticipated outcomes, but the anticipation and selection may not be free will. Why do you think it is? You need to be explicit in what you think this will is free from.

Some count 'free will' as un-caused cause. It could perhaps be some purely random effect (but most would discount that as will). Free from fully identifiable causes is a given. Free from explicit duress is also a given.

What you have is decision for which you can give no full account. 'I don;t know why I typed 01' is not an example of free will, it is an example of lack of knowledge about your actions.

If you now claim that you chose that because it pleased you you should wonder why that pleased you. If some unknown had caused you to prefer 10 would your 'free will' have been subverted? More likely is that your explanation of preference is a post-hoc justification for a choice already made.

[ughaibu]

It fails hopelessly since you have no way to identify 'realizable alternatives'. How can you know how anticipated alternatives are in fact realizable?

1) that isn't a failure of the definition, whether they can be known to be realisable or not is irrelevant, to the definition.
2) my definition is pretty much standard: “Free Will” is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/
3) I demonstrated realisability by enacting each option. If you have some reason to suppose that they somehow became unrealisable subsequently, you'll need to offer that reason, if you want it to be taken into consideration.

[amused]

Somebody said there was no free will because we're just a part of a bigger machine and we always do what the machine wants us to do. So I started doing the opposite of what I'd decided to do. But then they said that I was still just doing what the machine already wanted me to do, even if I changed my mind at the last moment. So I started doing the opposite of the opposite of what I'd decided to do. But then they said....

[GrahamH]

It fails hopelessly since you have no way to identify 'realizable alternatives'. How can you know how anticipated alternatives are in fact realizable?

1) that isn't a failure of the definition, whether they can be known to be realisable or not is irrelevant, to the definition.
2) my definition is pretty much standard: “Free Will” is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/
3) I demonstrated realisability by enacting each option. If you have some reason to suppose that they somehow became unrealisable subsequently, you'll need to offer that reason, if you want it to be taken into consideration.

'It fails hopelessly' as a demonstration of free will. We can demonstrate selection among what we think are alternatives, but we will never know if we could actually have selected a different option at that precise moment in that precise circumstance.

Stanford are more careful and leave out 'realizable', which in unknowable.

You have not demonstrated that you could have chosen differently, you have merely chosen more than once.

The only option we know is realisable is the one option actually enacted in any particular instance.

[apophenia]

I want to return briefly to ughaibo's original point, as I feel it was well met, and deserves expanding upon. It is true that we tend to partition the world into that which is real, that which isn't, and that which is unknown, all based on whether the idea or hypothesis is consistent with the beliefs of our pre-existing world view; this is the property of coherence -- something coheres with our current assumptions or it does not. This is where free will seems intent on forcing its way into our world, something that is so unlike everything else as to be incoherent, yet so real as to be undeniable. If free will exists, it is the epistemological ninja who sneaks in and steals the family jewels without even disturbing the cat (substitute matzah balls if that is your idiom). As an example of this is Bart Ehrman's contention that historians don't attribute historical accounts of miracles to bonafide miracles, not because they are ruled out a priori as being unnatural, but rather because they are extremely unlikely. He seems to base this notion on the idea that miracles are rare. To me, this is wrong headed; we do not know the frequency of miracles -- indeed some say that reality is one long persistent miracle -- to assess unknowable probabilities and base an assessment of likelihood on those grounds is insupportable. Again, truth is judged based on coherence with our prior beliefs. It is said that it is not so much that coherence is truth, as that it indicates where truth is. There is a famous objection by Bertrand Russell to coherentism that it is possible a proposition and its negation could cohere equally well with a given set of beliefs, and thus you could have two sets of equally coherent sets of beliefs, differing only in their position on that one proposition. Perhaps, but I see a different problem. If we don't judge potential truths on the basis of coherence, how do we filter those ideas worth pursuing from those not worth investigating?

An agent has free will on occasions when that agent makes and enacts a conscious choice from amongst realisable alternatives.
1) I can type 10 and I can type 01, thus I have established a set of realisable alternatives.
2) I am conscious.
3) I have considered the expected result of each selection.
4) I have made a selection.
5) 01.
Thus I have demonstrated the enactment of a conscious choice from amongst realisable alternatives. If you have some reason to doubt this demonstration, what is it?

Of the three components of free will identified previously by the blog poster [1]: (i)alternavism -- the capacity to (meaningfully) choose between different possible futures (ii) intelligibility -- the capacity to act from intelligible reasons, and (iii) origination -- the capacity to be the originator of actions; the crux of debate here seems to be focusing on (i), alternavism. I think for many here, it is not clear how you have demonstrated that both alternatives were in fact reachable -- that if your brain were reset to the exact same state, it wouldn't make the same choice every time, that the alternative could not in fact be reached in practice; this hinges critically on your use of the word "can" in step 1. I'd like to draw your attention rather to the fact that you seem to be engaged in a bizarre form of kettle logic. If indeed free will is inexplicable, and its activity cannot be described by deterministic or stochastic processes, then its activity -- its ability to realise potential alternatives -- will forever be hidden from view. In other words, your proof seems to depend on demonstrating something which, if your initial view of free will is correct, can never be demonstrated; that a wild will can realise alternatives is the mystery which cannot be shown or demonstrated. In short, I don't see what you hope to gain with this demonstration, as it seems to erode your position, rather than support it. At a minimum, it simply displays the same devil in a different form.

[1] "I like to appeal to a model of free will that I first came across in Henrik Walter’s book The Neurophilosophy of Free Will (he took it from somewhere else)."

[ughaibu]

we tend to partition the world into that which is real, that which isn't, and that which is unknown, all based on whether the idea or hypothesis is consistent with the beliefs of our pre-existing world view; this is the property of coherence -- something coheres with our current assumptions or it does not. This is where free will seems intent on forcing its way into our world, something that is so unlike everything else as to be incoherent, yet so real as to be undeniable. If free will exists, it is the epistemological ninja who sneaks in and steals the family jewels without even disturbing the cat

This is an interesting possibility, that those atheists who insist that only the explicable can exist hold to a coherence theory of truth, perhaps a poll is called for. However, one is left wondering why they dont claim that single events of radioactive decay are non-existent.

I think for many here, it is not clear how you have demonstrated that both alternatives were in fact reachable -- that if your brain were reset to the exact same state, it wouldn't make the same choice every time, that the alternative could not in fact be reached in practice; this hinges critically on your use of the word "can" in step 1.

I demonstrated that each action was possible and all healthy human beings unavoidably operate on the assumption that they have such available possibilities, so the question is why should I doubt the reality of these possibilities?, and so far I have been given no sensible reason.
Consider the case in which I'm kept in a room with exactly repeating stimuli and once an hour I'm asked to select numbers. At the same time, in the same room, an experimenter rolls a ball down an inclined plane. The behaviour of the ball is consistent because conditions are repeated, yet it's claimed that my ability to vary the numbers chosen is due to the conditions not being repeated.
Due to this problem the matter is often stated in terms of winding back time so that the world has the global conditions of an earlier time, and then the question about doing the same or doing otherwise is run. But in fact this is begging the question, because it relies on the assumption that an action performed at time one is a fact at time zero, if time is rewound from one to zero. In short, there is a hidden assumption that at time zero there is a fact about how the agent acts at time one, which is an assumption of determinism, and as my definition of free will is incompatibilist, I reject assumptions of determinism as question-begging.

If indeed free will is inexplicable, and its activity cannot be described by deterministic or stochastic processes, then its activity -- its ability to realise potential alternatives -- will forever be hidden from view.

I dont think this is true, certainly I dont see how it would be logically entailed.
If there is something which locally causes my choice of two numbers, then that choice has a fifty percent probability of agreeing with some causally isolated two state event. So, we can easily design an experiment in which it's announced that the number chosen will agree with the result of an astronomical observation, or of radioactive decay. As (I hope) nobody serious disputes that an agent can choose to match their choice to the specified event for an arbitrarily long consecutive sequence, the probability of the choice having been locally caused or globally determined becomes vanishingly small.

I don't see what you hope to gain with this demonstration, as it seems to erode your position, rather than support it.

Assume that my demonstration is the demonstration of a conscious choice from amongst realisable alternatives, you then have free will as the fact to be explained.

you still have yet to introduce free will as a fact to be explained.

[GrahamH]

As an example of this is Bart Ehrman's contention that historians don't attribute historical accounts of miracles to bonafide miracles, not because they are ruled out a priori as being unnatural, but rather because they are extremely unlikely. He seems to base this notion on the idea that miracles are rare. To me, this is wrong headed; we do not know the frequency of miracles -- indeed some say that reality is one long persistent miracle -- to assess unknowable probabilities and base an assessment of likelihood on those grounds is insupportable. Again, truth is judged based on coherence with our prior beliefs.

I agree that the frequency of genuine miracles is unknown. There may be none at all. No claimed examples are beyond reasonable doubt. What we can make some estimate of is the frequency with which people assume miraculous events due to ignorance of the details of an event. People are remarkably likely to assume agency in events unless they detailed knowledge of the nature of the event.

I think we can safely say that it is much more likely that a miracle claim is mistaken than that it is correct.

[GrahamH]

I think for many here, it is not clear how you have demonstrated that both alternatives were in fact reachable -- that if your brain were reset to the exact same state, it wouldn't make the same choice every time, that the alternative could not in fact be reached in practice; this hinges critically on your use of the word "can" in step 1.

I demonstrated that each action was possible

No, you did not, and there seems to be no possibility of demonstrating such possibility. All you showed was that different choices can be made at different times and in different circumstances. You are unable to show that at a particular time and in those particular and exact cicumstances some other outcome was realizable, and that is the crux of the issue.

Consider the case in which I'm kept in a room with exactly repeating stimuli and once an hour I'm asked to select numbers. At the same time, in the same room, an experimenter rolls a ball down an inclined plane. The behaviour of the ball is consistent because conditions are repeated, yet it's claimed that my ability to vary the numbers chosen is due to the conditions not being repeated.

Replace the ball,consisting of a vast number of particles locked in a rather static structure, with a drop of liquid, a single molecule of soot flopating in air, or a single electron.

Replace you individual choice with the mean choice of ten million people.

Perhaps there is an issue of sensitivity of a system to small variations. Variation in one neuron extends to tens of thousands of other neurons. Average the responses and reduce the sensitivty of the system and you probably find that people are as predictable as rolling balls in carefully controlled conditions.

Due to this problem the matter is often stated in terms of winding back time so that the world has the global conditions of an earlier time, and then the question about doing the same or doing otherwise is run. But in fact this is begging the question, because it relies on the assumption that an action performed at time one is a fact at time zero, if time is rewound from one to zero. In short, there is a hidden assumption that at time zero there is a fact about how the agent acts at time one, which is an assumption of determinism, and as my definition of free will is incompatibilist, I reject assumptions of determinism as question-begging.

Rerunning decisions is, of course, impossible. Even if time travel were possible the very fact of revisiting an instant in time might alter the conditions of that moment. There is no way to tell if any outcome other than that observed was actually realizable.

[Santa_Claus]

A simple yes or no would have worked for me.

Just sayin'..............