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Originally Posted by Chula Vista
Free Will. The power and ability to act out without being held back, or caring about the consequences.
We all have it. We've all used it.
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Robots have the same. But, you're working with another definition of free will than I am. Yours is merely the lack of a metaphorical gun to my head, preventing me from doing what I want to do. Mine is the actual mental capacity to be able to make decisions free from ANY constraints, but they physical, mental, or metaphysical.
According to your definition, the lack of a gun to your head constitutes having free will, but in mine, the gun is unnecessary, because I am no more capable of making unconstrained decisions with or without the gun due to absolute mathematical predictability.
I don't know how aware you are of it, but there's a whole philosophical thing about "compatibilism"---which you seem to subscribe to---and "incompatibilism"---which I would agree with, and both of their definitions of free will are dependent on "determinism". Here's some Wikipedia help, that's at least vaguely helpful...
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Determinism is the philosophical position that for every event, including human action, there exist conditions that could cause no other event.
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Determinism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A nebulous definition, but it basically means what I was talking about where mathematics determines everything that happens in the universe: from how a pool ball will rebound of the side of the table, to how a person will respond to coming home to find his wife in bed with the neighbor, to how a nation will respond in a crisis such as a natural disaster or war, to how the culture of an entire race will evolve over millions or billions of years, right down to the length of every step each individual member of that race will make for all of eternity.
Incompatibilists believe that the concept of free will and determinism are... well, incompatible.
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Incompatibilism is the position that free will and determinism are logically incompatible, and that the major question regarding whether or not people have free will is thus whether or not their actions are determined. "Hard determinists", such as d'Holbach, are those incompatibilists who accept determinism and reject free will.
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Free will: Incompatibilism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Incompatibilism is the view that a deterministic universe is completely at odds with the notion that people have a free will; that there is a dichotomy between determinism and free will where philosophers must choose one or the other. This view is pursued in at least three ways: libertarians deny that the universe is deterministic, the hard determinists deny that any free will exists, and pessimistic incompatibilists (hard indeterminists) deny both that the universe is determined and that free will exists. Some of these incompatibilistic views have more trouble than the others in dealing with the standard argument against free will.
Incompatiblism is contrasted with compatibilism, which rejects the determinism/free will dichotomy. Compatibilists maintain free will by defining it as more of a 'freedom to act' — a move that has been met with some criticism.
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Incompatibilism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Compatibilism is the philosophy that determinism and free will are... ya know, compatible. But they define free will differently than incompatibilists. There's generally a metaphysical (magical) component to free will for "us", as I've already explained with all my talk of mathematical calculations and randomness being necessary for the existence of free will. Compatibilists basically describe free will as you do, in that it's basically just being able to act without that gun to your head. The legal definition of free will basically, and probably what most people see as free will, even if they're not aware of the philosophical debate. (One of my fav debates as well, mostly because it's actually a rather simple concept which I'm comfortable in my position toward.)
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Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are compatible ideas, and that it is possible to believe both without being logically inconsistent.[1] Compatibilists believe freedom can be present or absent in situations for reasons that have nothing to do with metaphysics.
For instance, courts of law make judgments about whether individuals are acting under their own free will under certain circumstances without bringing in metaphysics. Similarly, political liberty is a non-metaphysical concept.[2] Likewise, compatibilists define free will as freedom to act according to one's determined motives without arbitrary hindrance from other individuals or institutions.
In contrast, the incompatibilist positions are concerned with a sort of "metaphysically free will", which compatibilists claim has never been coherently defined.[
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Compatibilism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Free will: Compatibilism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Basically, both sides are correct. It's just seems that they don't accept each other's definitions of free will. Without some kind of magic to give people "true" free will, the incompatibilist sees the concept as useless, whereas compatibilists see the incompatibilist definition to be impossible to define and therefore also useless.
I define myself as an incompatibilist simply because society at large seems to accept compatibilism in ignorance while still subscribing to the metaphysical definition of free will in a way that would make no sense if they really thought about the subject from a secular point of view. And since this popular definition of free will (the incompatibilist definition) is the one that is accepted by the majority of at least the Western world, I will accept that definition and base my arguments around it.
There's other stuff tied into both philosophies, but I'm not
all that up on the details, and this post is probably already kind of TL;DR. I tried to make it as coherent as possible, but I'm long-winded and prone to being disorganized. Hopefully I wasn't too confusing. If so, someone smarter than me please explain what I just said in a more clear manner.