Google defines free will as: the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at...

i dont think free will is a meaningful concept and is mostly subjective. it means different things to different people and even when used legally, it isn't necessarily 100% consistent or unassailable.

free will isnt a meaningful concept. I think you don't even have to appeal to determinism as a metaphysical property of the universe to say that we don't have free will. Just look at how all biological systems are built on hierarchical dependencies and you will see that the notion of free will becomes indefensible.

Okay, free will doesn't exist.
Which, if any, of your behaviors will now change as a result of this information?
Oh wait the answer is none, because you can't decide to change your behaviors according to your own assertion.

>free will isnt a meaningful concept.

Of course it is, we experience the sensation of having it whether it actually exists or not.

i mean objective sorry. it means things to different people like i said and is not always consistently defined. People who say that we have free will often have a different definition to people that say we don't and who define it more in terms of freedom from other causal factors in determining choices. I'd guess by your post that your definition is not that and what you'd describe as free will, i would describe as something different.

I've never found it a particularly important or even relevant question. The concept is coherent enough, but it doesn't actually matter at all either way. I guess it matters if you belong to a religion that has a hell, because otherwise how can you justify god burning people in fire forever, but I've never been religious so idk for sure.

OP where you compelled by necessity or fate to make this post? In which case, keep up the good work because my free will is allowing me to thoroughly enjoy this thread.

You're totally right. But philosophers aren't going to waste time saying that "sure everything we've ever experienced has a cause an effect but we don't *really* know if causality is universal"

They kinda just roll with it and move on to uncover implications.

And don't go all QM on me because that's still not well understood + most likely doesn't apply on a large scale. Even if it did, the randomness would stem from particles not being deterministic and not humans overcoming determinism.

Read

I'd say the circumstances led me to make this thread.
Also I was drinking coffee and caffeine makes me think hard about random shit.
Today's topic is free will.

read what i said here
.also in my post that you target, i do say there are different definitions of free will and this is exactly the point of the post you linked to me. Some definitions are more around compatibilism like this guy and some are not (e.g. hard determinists) but these definitions of free will are not the same. Also when free will or similar concepts are used in court they are not philosophically consistent necessarily.

Oh and i just reminded myself that when i said free will isnt a meaningful concept, that the version of free will that hard determinists argue against definitely isnt meaningful or consistent as opposed to how compatibilists might view it.

I was showing you the two definitions philosophers tend to play with. Any other definition of freewill you have will most likely either be incapsulated by the other two or isn't a particularly useful definition to have for the sake of advancing a discussion.

Hopefully that made things clearer.

Why not use the just one and simple definition of the dictionary?
I thought philosophy was logical.

>Why not use the definition in the dictionary
Because the dictionary definition gives us what people often use the word as, not what the object they try and refer to. Also, dictionary definitions aren't always the most useful. For example, the definition of "racism" in the dictionary is usually something like "prejudice against a certain group." That's fine and all, but if we want a *useful* definition of racism sociologist come up with a different definition (an exertion of power by a privileged class against a disinfranchized class with the aim of maintaining control) because the new definition is more useful for the purposes of advancing discussion to the point of finding out new ways of understanding phenomena.

>Why not use one definition
Because words can have multiple. This shouldn't be news to anyone. More importantly, we draw the distinction between these two definitions (metaphysics and moral) because a lot of philosophical debate often only exists because the philosophers are using different terms. But when you clearly establish definitions it helps clear things up.

So to be specific, before the distinction was made you would often see arguments for why free will doesn't exist because of determinism. But then you would also see arguments that free will exists because we still act on our desires. Both seem right, but how can that be? It's because they are using two different definitions of free will here (metaphysical vs moral). So explicitly defining these two terms helps to resolve the disagreement, allows us to be more precise, and lets us progress the conversation to util conclusions. This effect is what I mean when I say "useful" definitions.

oh okay woops.

that definition seems recursive, how would you define the word "fate" you use in your definition without saying "lack of free will"?

To be honest I think the idea of free will and/or the lack thereof is a meme. It's very easy to say "but P v ~P is a tautology, so you either have it or you don't" but in saying that you're assuming P actually describes something. In the case of will, it seems indefinite. Imagine if someone came up to you and said "do you have gobbelygok?". You're probably going to say no, because you haven on idea what they mean by that, but then they could turn around and say "so you lack gobbelygok?" to which you are also uncertain of. In the end there's no answer to give because you don't know what gobbelygok is, but it isn't really that you just "don't know," but rather that "there is no such idea"; there is only the idea of the idea of gobbelygok, it doesn't actually completely describe anything in and of itself.

what do you think of the people here that use the compatibilist verysion though.

Free will can definitely be defined to mean something.

Read:

You would need to be secluded from everything else with no way of interaction, inside a place where only you are there alone and you have to "rebirth" all your matter into its own big bang and hope it reforms what you were before in order to truly have free will, but, even then, the laws of the place you do this at wouldn't be enough to truly give yourself free will, as they would be dictated by something outside.

any temporal continuity in those events you describe entails determinism.

Alaska.

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