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For purposes of structuring a revision of this article, an outline could be based upon Phorrest's flowchart, presented with minor modifications below:

------------------

Are some events fated to happen, no matter what else happens?

Yes → Fatalism

No → In principle, if all events are necessitated by prior events, is free will possible?

No → Incompatibilism

→ In fact, are all events necessitated by prior events?

Yes → Hard determinism

No → Libertarianism

Yes → Compatibilism

→ In principle, if all our actions are determined by nature/nurture etc., is free will possible?

Yes → Classical compatibilism

→ In fact, if others coerce our actions, is free will possible?

No → For example, see Rousseau

→ In fact, if others physically force or restrain our actions, is free will possible?

No → For example, see Hobbes

No → Modern compatibilism

→ In fact, are our actions determined by nature/nurture etc.?

Yes → Psychological determinism; Nurture → Cultural determinism; Nature → Biological determinism

No → For example, see Harry Frankfurt

------------------

Can a revision, at least in part, be based upon this outline? What adjustments are necessary? Can neuroscience and mind-body problem be explicitly incorporated? Can the case be fit in explicitly that only some events, not all of them, are predetermined? Brews ohare (talk) 15:03, 2 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, I'm pleasantly surprised at the positive reaction to my little chart.

As to your first question there (actually, all of them except the last, which I don't quite understand), this is exactly what I was proposing earlier. We divide the article up into sections on the different senses of free will, and then put all material, be it scientific, philosophical, or whatever, that talks about free will in that sense, in that section.

Off the top of my head, we would have sections with contents like this (not particularly well-organized here, I'm in a rush):

• Incompatibilism (free will as lack of nomological determination)
  • Distinguishing determinism from fatalism
  • Philosophical arguments for why this is the correct sense of free will, including descriptions of the positions:
    • Metaphysical libertarianism
    • Hard determinism
    • Hard incompatibilism (may deserve its own section or at least subsection as it adds another criterion to the sense of free will)
  • Physical findings on whether or not nomological determinism in fact is the case
  • Theological discussions about reconciling God's omniscience with free will
• Compatibilist senses of free will still concerned with something like nomological determinism (unpredictability, two-stage models, etc; may be better split into several sections)
  • Philosophical arguments for why this or that is the correct sense of free will
  • Mathematical limits of prediction, etc
• Classical compatibilism of the Hobbesian variety
  • Overview of Hobbes' view
  • Criticism and distinction between freedom of will and freedom of action
• Classical compatibilism in the Rousseau sense (or not, as we seem to be missing whatever we used to have on this sense)
• Modern compatibilism of the Frankfurtian variety
  • Philosophical arguments for why this is the correct sense of free will
    • Biological arguments about whether biology permits us to have free will in this sense
    • Sociological arguments about whether culture permits us to have free will in this sense
    • Psychological and neurological arguments about whether our minds and brains are set up in a way to permit us this sense of free will
• Other discussions of free will (as useful, as an illusion, etc -- maybe multiple sections, maybe integrated into other sections)

That's the general idea, but it needs a lot of refinement. --Pfhorrest (talk) 11:34, 3 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for creating this list. My only recommendations are as follows:

I think it would be important to maintain a chosen order, as some forms are more restrictive than others. I would recommend roughly the same order I identified in talk section 'Free will Concepts Based On Determinism Views' [i.e that used in your flowchart response [1], and replicated by Brews above].

1. free will with respect to higher order/logical/theological determinism. Split up into sub sections. I would recommend including the following in discussion;

a) fatalism "there's nothing you can do about it" is not necessarily implied by any form determinism. [A combination of both belief in destiny and lack of belief in free will (incompatibilist or compatibilist) leads to fatalism - references required], and;

b) [Destiny as implied for example by] omniscience places a restriction on the influence of free will if existent to lower order creation - eg physical reality [i.e. definition of "free will" is restricted to the ability of a higher level component to influence a lower level component in the overall determined system - references required].

2. free will with respect to nomological determinism ("Incompatibilism" above). Discuss the limitations of alternate possibility without origination. Split up into sub sections (NB I definitely recommend separating out hard incompatibilism into its own sub section as you have done).

3. free will with respect to predictability/deterministic selection from pseudo random possibilities ("Compatibilist senses of free will still concerned with something like nomological determinism" above). Split up into sub sections.

4. free will with respect to cultural/biological/psychological determinism ("Modern compatibilism of the Frankfurtian variety" above). Split up into sub sections.

5. free will with respect to action/coercion ("Classical compatibilism" above - including both freedom of action and freedom from coercion eg Hobbes and Rousseu). Split up into sub sections.

6. other

Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 23:30, 22 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

For reference, I have regenerated the outline with respect to my recommendations;

• 1. Free will with respect to higher order/logical/theological determinism (including "Theological discussions about reconciling God's omniscience with free will" above)
  • Determinism (various kinds)
  • Destiny (including omniscience)
  • Fate (fatalism/predeterminism)
• 2. Free will with respect to nomological determinism ("Incompatibilism" above).
  • positions:
    • Metaphysical libertarianism
    • Hard determinism
    • Hard incompatibilism
  • Issues:
    • Physical determinism
    • Alternate possibility without origination (eg two stage models)
• 3. Free will with respect to predictability/deterministic selection from pseudo random possibilities ("Compatibilist senses of free will still concerned with something like nomological determinism" above).
  • Positions:
    • Predictability
    • Deterministic selection from pseudo random possibilities (non-incompatibilist two stage models)
  • Issues:
    • Mathematical limits of precision
    • Prevented at the last moment by neuroscientific demons from "doing otherwise" (eg two stage models)
• 4. Free will with respect to cultural/biological/psychological determinism ("Modern compatibilism of the Frankfurtian variety" above).
  • Positions:
    • Biological arguments about whether biology permits us to have free will in this sense
    • Sociological arguments about whether culture permits us to have free will in this sense
    • Psychological and neurological arguments about whether our minds and brains are set up in a way to permit us this sense of free will
• 5. Free will with respect to action/coercion ("Classical compatibilism" above - including both freedom of action and freedom from coercion eg Hobbes and Rousseu).
  • Positions:
    • Classical compatibilism of the Hobbesian variety
    • Classical compatibilism in the Rousseau sense
  • Issues:
    • Criticism and distinction between freedom of will and freedom of action
• 6. Other ("Other discussions of free will" above)

[including bracketed edits in previous post above] Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 07:14, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Below I have annotated the new outline provided by Pfhorrest. Of course, it is easier to pick at an outline than to construct one, and I hope my annotations are viewed as a step in the evolution of the outline, and not viewed as some form of refutation of this evolutionary process.

I hope my comments will be addressed to help me come closer to what Pfhorrest has in mind.

• Incompatibilism (free will as lack of nomological determination)
  • Distinguishing determinism from fatalism
  • Philosophical arguments for why this is the correct sense of free will, including descriptions of the positions:
    • Metaphysical libertarianism
    • Hard determinism
    • Hard incompatibilism (may deserve its own section or at least subsection as it adds another criterion to the sense of free will)

→ Here the use of "the correct sense of free will" is a contentious phrasing. Definitions are not "correct" or "incorrect". One can classify the logical relationship drawn between definitions as "logically correct" or "logically incorrect"

→ It is contentious to suppose that these "all or nothing" definitions exhaust the repertoire of possible definitions for free will.

• • Physical findings on whether or not nomological determinism in fact is the case

→ I doubt that there are any such physical findings. The physical findings like studies of the addicted brain, or studies of behavioral modification using "brainwashing" or "advertising" or psychological counseling show only that in some prescribed circumstances a modicum of determinism is introduced into decisions and behavior.

• • Theological discussions about reconciling God's omniscience with free will

→ One can introduce theology into the matter, and historically that has been very significant. However, I suspect that theology is not logically separate from secular views of the matter.

• Compatibilist senses of free will still concerned with something like nomological determinism (unpredictability, two-stage models, etc; may be better split into several sections)

→ Compatibilism, in a broad sense, is not concerned particularly with "nomological determinism" if that means the view that everything is determined. Rather, it is concerned with what aspects of mental life are determined and to what degree.

• • Philosophical arguments for why this or that is the correct sense of free will

→ Again, there is no "correct sense" of free will to be found by analyzing hypothetical formulations. The correctness of any definition is an empirical matter, to be established by how well that definition squares with observations, however one classifies observations. It is (I'd hazard) extremely unlikely that any definition can be shown to be completely correspondent with observations, and so no definition will be correct in every situation.

• • Mathematical limits of prediction, etc

→ Mathematics has no power of prediction. When a theory is introduced that incorporate relations between a mathematical formalism and observations, that theory may have limited value for prediction. But, for example, geometries (of various kinds: Euclidean, spherical, Riemannian) are autonomous creations, and have application to such things as surveying, navigation, and so on only for certain domains of experience. It is the application of geometry that is correct or not; it is not the geometry itself.

• Classical compatibilism of the Hobbesian variety
  • Overview of Hobbes' view
  • Criticism and distinction between freedom of will and freedom of action

→ This distinction is, I believe, extremely crucial and should be raised in importance in the article. Per Timothy O'Connor (Oct 29, 2010). Edward N. Zalta, ed (ed.). "Free Will". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition). The Metaphysics Research Lab Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. {{cite web}}: |editor= has generic name (help) - "Philosophers who distinguish freedom of action and freedom of will..."

• Classical compatibilism in the Rousseau sense (or not, as we seem to be missing whatever we used to have on this sense)
• Modern compatibilism of the Frankfurtian variety
  • Philosophical arguments for why this is the correct sense of free will

→ Again, the use of "correct" is inadvisable, confusing logical constructions with the applicability of theoretical constructions to observations of the world.

• • • Biological arguments about whether biology permits us to have free will in this sense

→ Again, biology does not "permit" a "sense" of free will, but offers evidence as to whether a particular sense of free will has any utility in the real world. The type of observation accepted in biology is subject to evolution - for instance, brain scans were not available in early times. Also, there is reason to doubt that biological observations are applicable to some of the issues involved here, as noted by Georg Northoff (2004). Philosophy of the Brain: The Brain Problem (Volume 52 of Advances in Consciousness Research ed.). John Benjamins Publishing. ISBN 1588114171., and differently, by Bohr, also discussed here.

• • • Sociological arguments about whether culture permits us to have free will in this sense

→ Again, sociology so far as this is a science doesn't "permit" a "sense" of free will, but offers evidence as to its utility in a particular (possibly severely proscribed) arena.

• • • Psychological and neurological arguments about whether our minds and brains are set up in a way to permit us this sense of free will

→ Just which "sense" is being compared with just what observations of mind and brain? Many senses of "mind" have yet to be placed in correspondence with the kind of observations accepted in biology, and some would argue that such a correspondence between the subjective and objective is impossible in principle. Some would argue that such correspondence awaits the development of a more general theory of complex non-linear feedback systems which will introduce new concepts more readily associated with the subjective experiences of mental life. (As an aside, it might be noted that not all concepts of a theory have to be observable (the stance of the verificationist school): only that the theory has to predict observable consequences.)

• Other discussions of free will (as useful, as an illusion, etc -- maybe multiple sections, maybe integrated into other sections)

→ The discussion of free will as a "useful" concept should be, in my view, a major aspect of this article that can be ranked right up there with the historical background and the various definitions. The various definitions must be related to usefulness in order that their discussion be more than an amusement. Brews ohare (talk) 16:01, 5 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ In this connection, it might be noted that a lot of discussion of free will is related to its practical implications for law, medicine and education. In particular, a belief in "free will" underlies the apportionment of legal punishment on the basis of whether one was "in control" of one's actions, or a victim of ungovernable emotion. The law's application of punishment or treatment for addiction depends upon one's views about an individual's ability to "will" going cold turkey. And so forth. These are not academic issues only. Brews ohare (talk) 16:21, 5 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It should be noted that this new outline has abandoned to a degree one aspect of the previous flowchart, namely the attempt to inter-relate the various approaches as branches of a tree of various logical alternatives. Maybe the tree structure has some merits? Brews ohare (talk) 13:09, 4 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ Here the use of "the correct sense of free will" is a contentious phrasing. Definitions are not "correct" or "incorrect". One can classify the logical relationship drawn between definitions as "logically correct" or "logically incorrect"

→ Again, there is no "correct sense" of free will to be found by analyzing hypothetical formulations. The correctness of any definition is an empirical matter, to be established by how well that definition squares with observations, however one classifies observations. It is (I'd hazard) extremely unlikely that any definition can be shown to be completely correspondent with observations, and so no definition will be correct in every situation.

→ Again, the use of "correct" is inadvisable, confusing logical constructions with the applicability of theoretical constructions to observations of the world.

I don't mean to have the article state in its own voice which sense of free will is the correct one. And I have some sympathy for your apparent position that what matters is we just be clear about what sense we mean. Nevertheless philosophers do notably argue that one particular formulation of the concept of "free will" better matches our common (informal) use and intuition of the concept, and we need a space to include that content.

For a prominent contemporary example, incompatibilists like to appeal to the principle of alternative possibilities as a necessary condition of any formulation of the concept of free will (and then show that determinism would run counter to that principle and so is incompatible with free will), but Frankfurt counterexamples intend to show that there are conditions where, determinism or not, the principle of alternate possibilities clear does not hold true, but we nevertheless intuitively want to say someone still acted of their own free will.

And I'm not sure what you're on about regarding empirical verification of definitions. That makes no sense. A definition is not in itself a position on whether or not free will actually exists; it's just a claim of what exactly this free will thing we're talking about would be if it existed. Definitional issues are about clarifying the question, not about coming up with their answers; that comes afterward.

For an example you're likely to agree with: Hobbes said that by "free will" all we can really sensibly mean is unimpeded action, the freedom to do what we want, unbound by chains and the like. You and I will both agree, I think that that is a bad definition of free will; that is the definition of freedom of action, and freedom of will is something else entirely. The argument between compatibilists and incompatibilists is like that: they're not arguing about facts of the world, they're arguing about what facts are relevant in the question "do we have free will?". They're arguing about what we really mean when we ask that question. And we need a place to include their arguments that "This is what we mean when we ask whether we have free will, and here's why we have to mean this...".

→ It is contentious to suppose that these "all or nothing" definitions exhaust the repertoire of possible definitions for free will.

I think you misunderstood my use of the definite article. I did not mean that to be an exhaustive list of all positions on free will -- not "THE positions on free will". I meant it to be a list of some positions on free will, specifically those three (incompatibilist ones); like if I said "bring me the ex-presidents Bush and Clinton", I would not mean that those are all of the ex-presidents, but that I want some ex-presidents and the ones I want are those two.

Within an incompatibilist sense of free will though, those positions are exhaustive. Incompatibilists all agree free that "free will" means something which requires indeterminism. So within that framework, either determinism is true and therefore there is no free will (D .: ~F, hard determinism), determinism is false and we do have free will (metaphysical libertarianism), or determinism is false but for other reasons we still don't have free will (hard incompatibilism). Incompatibilism states, in short, "~(D & F)", which leaves open the possibilities "D & ~F" (hard determinism), "~D & F" (metaphysical libertarianism), and "~D & ~F (hard incompatibilism).

Of course compatibilists go on to dispute that "~(D & F)", and argue that free will is something unrelated to the relationship between D and F. So there are more positions besides those three, but within incompatibilism those three are logically exhaustive.

→ I doubt that there are any such physical findings. The physical findings like studies of the addicted brain, or studies of behavioral modification using "brainwashing" or "advertising" or psychological counseling show only that in some prescribed circumstances a modicum of determinism is introduced into decisions and behavior.

I was thinking of findings in physics there, when I said "physical findings". You know, things like all this indeterminism stuff physicists have been going on about since Heisenberg, Schrodinger, et al. As far as contemporary physics is concerned, nomological determinism is false; the universe is indeterministic and we have very strong empirical evidence to support that assertion. This is very relevant to incompatibilism, as unless refuted it narrows the possibilities down to metaphysical libertarianism or hard incompatibilism, and the close examination of indeterminism and its relationship to randomness starts to give strong credence to hard incompatibilism between the two, or else more compatibilist views (e.g. we don't want to say that an electron has free will, but its behavior is indeterministic, so by an incompatibilist sense of free will why shouldn't we? is there something more that's required for free will besides indeterminism? is there such a thing as too much indeterminism? Then we get into two-stage models and the like...)

→ One can introduce theology into the matter, and historically that has been very significant. However, I suspect that theology is not logically separate from secular views of the matter.

Agreed that the conclusions are going to be the same either way, but there are whole bodies of literature which deal with the problem of determinism as caused by God having perfect knowledge and control of every event that will ever happen, rather than the problem of determinism as caused by there being rigorous impersonal laws of nature which permit no randomness into the inevitable progression of one moment to the next. There is a lot of general material that applies to both, but then there's a lot of material talking specifically about physical, causal determination (like the section above) and a lot of other material talking specifically about divine foreknowledge, so I think they could each deserve their own subsections if we have material on them both.

→ Compatibilism, in a broad sense, is not concerned particularly with "nomological determinism" if that means the view that everything is determined. Rather, it is concerned with what aspects of mental life are determined and to what degree.

True on the first sentence, but the second only describes some varieties of compatibilism. Compatibilism is not a monolithic thing like incompatibilism where everyone agrees on the definition of free will; it's only united by disagreeing with the incompatibilist definition.

What I meant here was that there are other compatibilists which, being compatibilist, say that free will can coexist with nomological determinism, but still say that the important factor in free will is something very much like nomological determinism. Specifically, I'm thinking of two-stage models which say that some indeterminism is necessary but also that some determinism is necessary, which are almost a direct outgrowth of the concerns that would otherwise lead people to hard incompatibilism ("too much" of either would undermine free will); and of Dennett's sense of free will as unpredictability, which says that even if the past and the laws of nature do strictly necessitate specific future actions and people can't do otherwise, we have no way even in principle of predicting what those actions will be before they occur (for a variety of reasons), so for all intents and purposes the universe might as well be indeterministic, even if it's really not.

These views are strictly speaking compatibilist, but they are very close to incompatibilism in their definition of what "free will" is. Instead of saying free will requires indeterminism, they say it requires some but not too much indeterminism, or that it requires unpredictability. In contrast, other compatibilist senses of "free will" work fine even if there is complete nomological determinism and complete predictability; they say it's not a matter of "how much" something is determined (there doesn't need to be any random input to the system at all), or whether we can determine (i.e. predict) the outcome, but about what specifically determines what, about how outcomes (people's actions) are determined, by what process.

→ Mathematics has no power of prediction. When a theory is introduced that incorporate relations between a mathematical formalism and observations, that theory may have limited value for prediction. But, for example, geometries (of various kinds: Euclidean, spherical, Riemannian) are autonomous creations, and have application to such things as surveying, navigation, and so on only for certain domains of experience. It is the application of geometry that is correct or not; it is not the geometry itself.

I was speaking not of the ability of mathematics to make predictions, but on limits imposed by mathematics on our ability to generate predictions from mathematical models. This is related to Dennett's sense of free will as unpredictability. Issues with computational complexity and chaos impose not just practical but even theoretical limits on our ability to compute sufficiently detailed simulations of the world faster than the events we're simulating occur. So even if there is some distinct fact about what a particular person will do at a particular time, given the past and the laws of nature, and even if we somehow knew the past and the laws of nature perfectly, it may (and probably is) the case that we simply cannot, even on a perfect ideal optimal computer, do the computations necessary to predict that that person will do, before they do it. We could cut corners and get a less accurate prediction faster, but then that inaccuracy lets unpredictability slip in again.

I meant for this subsection to be an area to discuss computational complexity and chaos theory, within the section on this sense of free will as unpredictability. Just like we'd have a subsection on quantum indeterminism within the section on incompatibilism. They're scientific or mathematical issues relevant to that sense of free will and so deserve a summary at least in the relevant section.

→ This distinction is, I believe, extremely crucial and should be raised in importance in the article. Per Timothy O'Connor (Oct 29, 2010). Edward N. Zalta, ed (ed.). "Free Will". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition). The Metaphysics Research Lab Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. {{cite web}}: |editor= has generic name (help) - "Philosophers who distinguish freedom of action and freedom of will..."

I personally agree that it's an important distinction, but it's not one that everyone makes, and there are other important distinctions that not everyone makes too. I think it's an issue of "what exactly do or do not we mean by 'free will'" exactly like the definitional issues surrounding compatibilism vs incompatibilism, and so belongs in this section among discussion of the validity of this sense of free will. Just like compatibilists tell incompatibilists "free will is something different from just indeterminism; indeterminism is not the same thing as, and is not enough for, free will" -- likewise you and I and most modern compatibilist say "free will is something different from just freedom of action; freedom of action is not the same thing as, and is not enough for, free will".

Your second sentence there seems a little strange, I'm not sure exactly what you were trying to say.

→ Again, biology does not "permit" a "sense" of free will, but offers evidence as to whether a particular sense of free will has any utility in the real world.

→ Again, sociology so far as this is a science doesn't "permit" a "sense" of free will, but offers evidence as to its utility in a particular (possibly severely proscribed) arena.

Note that I said "society", not "sociology"; the object of study, not the field which studies it. Likewise, I meant "biology" in the sense of the stuff biologists study (organisms, genes, etc), not in the sense of the activity that biologists do (which is to study that stuff).

That is to say, by "whether biology permits" and "whether society permits", I mean that in these sections we discuss issues of biological and cultural determinism, and look at the scientific evidence for whether our behavior is completely fixed by our genetics/upbringing/etc, or if there are feedback mechanisms which meet the definition of free will in this sense (being able to want what you want to want, and to change which of your desires are effective on your behavior, rather than just wanting what you've been programmed to want and inevitably acting on whichever of those desires is strongest).

→ Just which "sense" is being compared with just what observations of mind and brain? Many senses of "mind" have yet to be placed in correspondence with the kind of observations accepted in biology, and some would argue that such a correspondence between the subjective and objective is impossible in principle. Some would argue that such correspondence awaits the development of a more general theory of complex non-linear feedback systems which will introduce new concepts more readily associated with the subjective experiences of mental life. (As an aside, it might be noted that not all concepts of a theory have to be observable (the stance of the verificationist school): only that the theory has to predict observable consequences.)

I'm not entirely sure what your objection here is. All I meant was "in this section we will discuss psychological determinism".

It should be noted that this new outline has abandoned to a degree one aspect of the previous flowchart, namely the attempt to inter-relate the various approaches as branches of a tree of various logical alternatives. Maybe the tree structure has some merits?

I meant for this to read like a narrative version of the tree structure. Let me maybe outline it again with more verbiage to make that clear:

• (Incompatibilism) Some people say that free will is incompatibile with nomological determinism.
  • They argue that it must be so because [principle of alternate possibilities, etc].
  • But they disagree about whether determinism is true:
    • (Hard determinism) Some say it is
    • (Metphysical libertarianism) Some say it's not
  • Theologians have argued about whether God's omniscience entails determinism and what that means for free will...
  • Physicists used to think determinism was true because [...], but modern physicists now think determinism is false because [quantum physics], however [doubts about quantum indeterminism], etc...
  • (Hard incompatibilism) Some of these people say that free will is also incompatibile with indeterminism, so any way you slice it, we don't have it.

But other people say that determinism is not incompatible with free will...

• (Two-stage models) Some people say that free will requires some determinism, but not too much...
  • They argue that it must be so because [...].
• (Unpredictability) Other people say it doesn't matter whether or not or how much you're determined, but whether or not you're predictable.
  • They argue that it must be so because [...].
  • Mathematical results tell us that even theoretically deterministic systems can be unpredictable even in principle because [chaos, computational complexity, etc]

Others say that it doesn't matter whether or not or how much you're determined or predictable, but about what specific limits there are on your abilities.

• Some say that your will is free so long as you are not imprisoned or in chains.
  • They say that it must be so because [...] But others say that free will has nothing to do with that, that's just freedom of action.
• Other say that your will is free so long as nobody's pointing a gun at your head.
  • They say that it must be so because [...] But other say that free will has nothing to do with that, that's just political liberty.
• Still others say that your will is free so long as you have a psychological feedback mechanism which allows your wanting to want something different to cause you to want something different, etc.
  • They say that it must be so because [Frankfurt counterexamples, etc].
  • Various influences on our behavior jeopardize the possibility of such feedback mechnisms:
    • (Biological determinism) Genetics
    • (Cultural determinism) Upbringing and conditioning
    • (Psychological determinism) Other psychological issues

Etc. Is the tree structure more evident there? I don't think we want to nest section within section within section or else most of this article is going to be 4 or 5 sections deep and all buried within a 2nd-level section on compatibilism.

I'm very tempted to split it into four major sections:

• Incompatibilism
• Incompatibilist-like compatibilism (two-stage and unpredictability models)
• Classical compatibilism (freedom of action and political liberty)
• Modern compatibilism

But I fear that might be original research.

--Pfhorrest (talk) 06:54, 6 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Pfhorrest: There is a lot to think about in your reply, and I'll take some moments to think it over. The OR concern is a bugaboo of WP that I've encountered mostly as flack from contributors who don't want to hear about something like A→B + B→C means A→C. I suspect that the organization of a WP article is necessarily OR as it doesn't exist anywhere else, cannot be cited, and if it could, would be challenged as violating NPOV because lots of other organizations of material could be envisioned that stress some aspects differently. One has to hope (perhaps vainly) that common sense has some role on WP. Live in optimism! Brews ohare (talk) 14:45, 6 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Phorrest: Below I will annotate the beginning of your new proposal to continue our discussion.

• (Incompatibilism) Some people say that free will is incompatibile with nomological determinism.

→ It is helpful here to be clear whether this incompatibility is a matter of logic or one of fact.

• • They argue that it must be so because [principle of alternate possibilities, etc].

→ The article Alternative possibilities suggests this principle is about moral responsibility, which introduces a bevy of other complications not about the definition of free will. Perhaps you intend to replace:

""a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise."

with:

"a person has free will to do something only if he could have done otherwise."

To me, this last is a clear attempt at a logical definition of free will; the first is not. One can now delve into a logical parsing of "could have done otherwise".

One also can go into a factual (empirical) examination of "could have done otherwise", for example, at what point in in an addict's descent into addiction has their brain's dopamine production been so compromised that they cannot exercise the will to desist? Can psychotherapy create alternative mechanisms in the brain to compensate for the damage to the brain? To exercise this program, one will have to develop criteria to evaluate the presence of will: is a patient's say-so sufficient indicator? Is there some correlate of willing to desist that can be observed without relying upon the patient's subjective observations of themselves?. The proper posing of these issues is a moving target, and while these issues can be raised here, that is all.

What I need from you here is some elaboration of your meaning. Brews ohare (talk) 15:59, 6 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• • But they disagree about whether determinism is true:
    • (Hard determinism) Some say it is
    • (Metphysical libertarianism) Some say it's not

→ Perhaps these are statements about theories in physics à la Laplace. Then they are questions about the logical implications of these theories, which can be readily assessed and shown to be misinterpretations without practical consequence. See this. Otherwise they are intended as more general factual assertions about what is "out there". A dichotomy is proposed that either everything is determined or it is not. Obvious alternatives are ignored entirely: that maybe some things are determined and others are not, or that it is presumptuous to suppose this is a provable proposition because one can never (even in principle) establish where identical circumstances appear. That is true for the weather and even for celestial dynamics.

→ In my opinion, hard determinism is a purely logical position which is empirically unprovable in principle, and so has no standing as a statement of fact about the real world. I believe plenty of literature establishing this point is out there, and so this position really deserves very little attention aside from its historical interest and a certain awe that so much blather has been written about it.

This is a good place to continue. The rest of the outline also deserves attention, but one has to start somewhere, eh? Brews ohare (talk) 15:59, 6 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

There may be subtlety involved here: the distinction between ontology and epistemology, the difference between what a thing is and how we know it. Perhaps this difference has to be introduced? Brews ohare (talk) 16:55, 7 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

As a point of clarification, I'm a subscriber to Model-dependent realism which has a Popper's three worlds cast - involving feedback between theory, fact, and the brain. Brews ohare (talk) 17:48, 7 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The above assertion is made by Richardbrucebaxter in removing the phrase "Many hold that nomological determinism must be false in order for free will to be possible" and replacing it with "One can debate whether, as a matter of fact, nomological determinism actually applies". In fact, inasmuch as nomological determinism suggests (according to this article, though probably not in fact) "that the present dictates the future entirely and necessarily, that every occurrence results inevitably from prior events" it seems logically irrefutable that free will is not possible if one accepts this proposition. That leaves open only the question of whether this proposition applies to reality. The original statement has some content if one agrees that nomological determinism has many varieties, including physical, psychological, religious or theological determinism, spatio-temporal (relativity theory) determinism, so one might be a bit vague about the relation of nomological discussion to free will.

I'd say this revert is perhaps too succinct.

A further change in this revert is to replace the phrase: "Positions that deny that nomological determinism is logically relevant, stressing other options, are classified as compatibilist to replace it with "Positions that deny that nomological determinism is relevant, saying that we could have free will either way, are classified as compatibilist

The primary change it would seem is to delete the adjective "logically", apparently suggesting that it is not a logical distinction at stake, but a broader consideration of relevance that is important. However, the compatibilist position is firstly a logical one, that the truth or falsity of nomological determinism is a false dilemma. If that position is accepted as one of logic (that is, there are other possible positions), it opens the door to the possibility that the real world does not obey this dichotomy and so discussion of constraints instead of discussion of nomological determinism makes sense.

The literature appears to take the view that compatibilism is the view that free will is compatible with determinism, and incompatibilism is the view that it isn't. This compatibility argument is first an argument over definitions of free will and their logical implications, and until that is settled they are not arguments over what actually applies in fact. It doesn't appear historically that this debate has taken the form of arguments over facts, like the consequences of dopamine production in the brain, but over abstractions, (for example) whether determinism is actually a provable proposition in principle given that it requires an impossible (at least if one omits theology) omniscient observer. In any event, the in-line explanation for this reversion as "Incompatibilism does not assert the non-applicability of nomological determinism" seems irrelevant to what was actually changed here.

What should be done here is not a revert, but a rewrite. Brews ohare (talk) 18:22, 15 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Brews Ohare - thanks for detailing your explanation. I have commented on sections of your reply;

In fact, inasmuch as nomological determinism suggests (according to this article, though probably not in fact) "that the present dictates the future entirely and necessarily, that every occurrence results inevitably from prior events"

The whole point of Pfhorrest's (arguably unnecessary) clarification of "Determinism" with "Nomological Determinism" in the introduction was to make it absolutely clear that is the definition of determinism in this context. Besides, how can a definition change based upon fact? If we are academically rigorous about it, things become false, we don't change their definition (perhaps one could do a thesis on variation of definition based upon social/corporate consequence - particularly in the legal realm).

In fact, inasmuch as nomological determinism suggests "that the present dictates the future entirely and necessarily, that every occurrence results inevitably from prior events" it seems logically irrefutable that free will is not possible if one accepts this proposition

This is not the case for compatibilists. (Perhaps less intuitive - but even this is disputed, eg see section Believing in free will)

That leaves open only the question of whether this proposition applies to reality.

Presumably you are suggesting that the proposition is not making any statement for which assumptions are not held by anyone in reality, and it is therefore irrelevant. That is certainly true if it is "logically irrefutable that free will is not possible if one accepts this proposition".

However, the compatibilist position is firstly a logical one, that the truth or falsity of nomological determinism is a false dilemma

I don't think anyone is arguing that a hypothesis, presumption, or yet-to-be-established-truth of physical "determinism" or "indeterminism" in the universe is a false dilemma (they are mutually exclusive); the application of such to free will has perhaps been considered thus.

Regarding the edit summary, I had limited characters and it should read "incompatibilism does not assert that FW requires the non-applicability of nomological determinism (but rather that its existence negates the possibility of FW)".

Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 06:37, 16 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi guys, still don't have time for a long reply, but just for the sake of mediation: I mostly agree with what Richard is saying here in response to Brews' comments on the talk page here, but my interpretation of Brews' edits to the article was that "applies" was intended to mean "is the case", i.e. incompatibilists, though agreeing with each other that nomological determinism makes all the difference in the question of whether we have free will, then debate with each other about whether nomological determinism is true; those who say it is are Hard Determinists, those who say it's not are Metaphysical Libertarians. Compatibilists disagree with them both, in saying that that is not the important question on which the issue of free will turns at all; it could be either way and we could still have free will or not depending on other factors.

That's all for now. --Pfhorrest (talk) 19:25, 16 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It does look like we need a lot of semantic clean-up. I guess I haven't been very clear. For the record, I take the view that there are logical constructions made up of definitions and their logical consequences, like geometry, and there is the question of how to involve these constructions in a theory with application to reality, like surveying or astronomy. I think everybody here agrees with this distinction. I just want to be clear that I do too. Brews ohare (talk) 20:11, 16 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

In this connection the words "true", "applies" and so forth are unclear unless one knows which context is in mind. So "true" might mean a logical tautology or it might mean that experimental observations support the assertion. In the case of compatibilism both meanings might be used so it is clearest if we keep the adjectives "logically" and "empirically" close at hand to keep the argument straight. Brews ohare (talk) 20:19, 16 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Below I'll quote the comments by Richardbrucebaxter so I can intersperse some clarifications of my words. I hope further commentary will be forthcoming. Here are the comments and the interspersed clarifications:

Richardbrucebaxter: I would not suggest that 'a definition can change based upon fact'; my suggestion here is that this definition of nomological determinism is too narrow to cover its actual usage in some discussions of nomological determinism. Perhaps the defintion provided is actually for ontological determinism? Brews ohare (talk) 16:44, 19 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Brews Ohare: the definition is a standard understanding of determinism ("that the present dictates the future entirely and necessarily... etc"), and certainly with respect to how it is understood for incompatibilism. The use of "nomological determinism" may possibly be in error - Pfhorrest could comment further perhaps if he has time, though not what it is trying to represent here. Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 00:38, 20 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Richardbrucebaxter: If "every occurrence results inevitably from prior events" is viewed as an axiom, then it is logically irrefutable that free will is not consistent with this axiom. Compatibilists do not argue this point. What they argue is that this axiom is inapplicable to reality. For example, this. Brews ohare (talk) 17:28, 19 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Brews Ohare: This is not a good example of compatibilism - a philosophy that relies upon the inability to establish (neurological) determinism sounds a lot like incompatibilism. Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 00:38, 20 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Richardbrucebaxter: Perhaps not all compatibilists make this argument. It seems some wish to redefine free will so it is logically compatible with strict determinism (Dennett?), a possible approach, but convoluted if one wants consistency with the common-sense understanding of "free will". See Harris "They trade a psychological fact - the subjective experience of being a conscious agent - for a conceptual understanding of ourselves as persons." Brews ohare (talk) 17:05, 19 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Brews Ohare: Not all compatibilists (if any) would argue that that determinism as currently defined in the introduction is a threat to the validity of such an experience (of being a conscious agent). Again, it may come down in no small part to the way one separates their mind from their body, and this operation can even be influenced experimentally - see again section believing in free will. Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 00:38, 20 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Richardbrucebaxter: I can't untangle this sentence. Brews ohare (talk) 16:44, 19 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Brews Ohare: It is better just to say a proposition is irrelevant to begin with (I was attempting to find a correct meaning for "applies to reality": basically if a statement is implying/"assuming" something held by everyone, then it draws an obvious conclusion and so cannot possibly distinguish between two commonly held opinions [regarding the supposed relevance of the proposition to their model of free will] - this is what I gather you were arguing). Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 00:38, 20 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Richardbrucebaxter: The false dilemma is the supposition that the universe of logical alternatives is that either everything is determined or it is not. This dilemma is false because of the word "everything", which limits choice to exclude a formulation like "some things are determined and some things are not". An even more open formulation is that "some things are constrained and some are not." I'd like to hear more from you on the technicalities of this point. Brews ohare (talk) 16:44, 19 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Brews Ohare: I will ignore the use of "nomological determinism" here but rather focus on the definition provided in the introduction (see above). It is clear that physical determinism (which is what is claimed as incompatible with free will for incompatibilism) implies that everything physical is determined on some level. One is free to deny physicalism here, however it is not going to help as for non-physical objects to have any influence on the construct that construct cannot be deterministic. Considering the subject is free will, the ability to influence physical reality is rather important for a non physical object. But it is unclear what you are actually implying here - is it perhaps that a deterministic universe can contain undetermined events? Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 00:38, 20 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps with these clarification we agree? Brews ohare (talk) 16:44, 19 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I am not so sure... Is it possible you have tried to unravel "nomological determinism"? But I don't understand why you would be attempting to do this based upon when it was introduced. But I thank you for your additional clarifications. Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 00:38, 20 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note I have done some research into nomological determinism, and its usage seems very appropriate for this article (/incompatibilism).^[1] If there are any problems with it, then the article on determinism should be a first point of concern. Personally, if I thought clarification was required, I would have opted for "physical determinism" or "causal determinism", as it is more direct in its description (but that is not what has been chosen in this reference). A second concern was whether "that the present dictates the future entirely and necessarily, that every occurrence results inevitably from prior events" is representative of nomological determinism (or is too narrow). I can't see any problems with this either - although the explication of "necessarily" and "inevitably" doesn't seem to add meaning to the article. Cheers - Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 07:26, 20 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The indentation in the above is confusing so I'm not always sure who's saying what, so I'm going to reply to everything down here for now. If you guys could could tidy it up so that your responses are always exactly one colon deeper than the section you're responding to, including evenly indenting each paragraph of a multi-paragraph response, that would help a lot.

Anyway, what I labelled "nomological determinism" has several common names in the field, and James' ontological determinism is pretty much the same thing. It is the proposition that everything is completely determined by whatever exists at any given time (hence the "onto", 'being') plus whatever the laws of nature are (hence the "nomo", 'law'). Given the total state of the universe at any one time, and the laws of the universe, the total state of the universe at any other time is logically entailed.

A similar kind of determinism, "logical determinism", holds merely that every possible question about anything at any time has an answer which is equally true at every other time; including, notably, that questions about the future, like "what am I going to eat for breakfast tomorrow?", all have answers which are already true now, and have always been true. This is only different in that it doesn't entail that you will do whatever you will do because of how things are now plus the laws of nature (moments might not necessarily succeed each other in any kind of law-like fashion), but it still entails that whatever you are going to do, there is already a fact which is true right now about that, before you do it or even decide to do it. (This distinction might be a concern, for instance, if there is a God who knows the entire future, but who also intervenes in history with miracles, meaning that you couldn't tell the future from the present because God might intervene along the way, but that God still knows exactly what's going to happen because he knows what he's going to do, too -- which, yes, raises interesting questions about God's free will, but that would be a long irrelevant tangent here).

I'm not sure off the top of my head if there's an all-encompassing technical term which captures both of these, but when people discussing the incompatibilist sense of free will just say "determinism" without qualifiers, it is pretty universally understood that this is what they mean. The past, present, and future are all set in stone. Anything that ever happens was always going to happen. (But I'm notably not saying "and there's nothing you can do about it". That would be fatalism. The important difference from fatalism is that whatever will happen in the future will happen in part because of whatever you do about it, but that there has always already been a fact about what you will do, a fact which might or might not be entailed by the past and the laws of nature but which either way has always been true).

Anyway. Yes, there are plenty of possible steps in between the above (lets just call it "D") and "the universe is completely and totally random with no patterns or laws to its events". But the dichotomy between metaphysical libertarianism and hard determinism is not a dichotomy between those two extremes, and compatibilism isn't defined by falling somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. The dichotomy between the two mainstream incompatibilist positions is one over the question of whether "D" is true or not. Metaphysical libertarians could fall anywhere on that spectrum of possibilities except the extreme at one end of it (where "D" is), though they usually fall closer to that end than the other (most libertarians will agree that the universe as a whole behaves in a fairly predictable and determinate way, just that some parts -- namely people -- do not). It doesn't matter that proving or disproving "D" may be impractical or even impossible, that's never stopped people from speculating and arguing about their speculations before. (And both medieval theology and modern physics gave them some ammunition to throw at each other on this matter).

Both of those positions are incompatibilists because they agree that if "D" is true, then the statement "free will exists" (lets call that proposition "F") cannot be true. They try to argue from the very definition of free will that F and D are logically incompatible. This is where issues of definition come up, and where compatibilists come in, and why compatibilists are not just somewhere else on that spectrum of "how much determinism is there". Compatibilists say, in one way or another, that the definition of free will that incompatibilists are using is a faulty one that does not track with our ordinary usage of the term, and they try to show that we usually say people have free will or not in this or that circumstance based on considerations wholly other than "could we, in theory, have calculated what they were going to do centuries ago?". They say that it doesn't matter whether or not D is true -- the truth of F hinges on something else completely, and it is a confused understanding of what "free will" means which leads people to think there is a dichotomy between it and determinism.

So incompatibilists argue amongst each other over the factuality of D, and agree on the definition of F; meanwhile, compatibilists argue amongst each other and against incompatibilists over the definition of F, and don't care about the factuality of D. And the approaches that different compatibilists take are are as radically different from each other as any of them are from incompatibilism.

Some compatibilists, like Dennett, argue that it doesn't matter whether or not things are strictly determined, but that it does matter whether or not we can determine them, in the sense of predicting them. He argues that, even setting aside the huge issues of somehow knowing the complete state of the universe at any given moment and knowing the true fundamental laws of nature, even if we could do those implausibly difficult things somehow, mathematical chaos and complexity makes it impossible even in principle to calculate precisely what will happen in the future faster than it actually happens; so complex systems like people are fundamentally unpredictable, even if they are strictly determined, and that's "good enough" for free will in a sense very similar to the incompatibilist one.

Other, mostly older, compatibilists, like Hobbes, argue that free will is nothing more than freedom of a more familiar sort, like what we would now call freedom of action. You can see most clearly here the way in which compatibilists completely sidestep the issue of determinism. Brews, surely you would agree that even if every action everybody will ever take has always been fixed in stone since the dawn of time, there is still a sense in which we can talk about whether someone has freedom of action, yes? They are unrestrained, and so free to do whatever they want. There may be a fact about what they will want, and whether they will be free to do it, and so whether or not they will do it; but it still makes sense to ask "in the determined future, will they be free to do this?", in the sense of asking "will they be restrained and prevented from doing what they want?". There might be a determined answer to that question, but if we took "free will" to mean, as Hobbes did, freedom of action, then there would be a determined answer to whether or not the person in question would have free will at some time in the future. Stick that in your incompatibilist pipe and smoke it. (That's just friendly rhetoric there, no hostility intended).

Still other, more recent, compatibilists, like Frankfurt, argue that free will is a functional ability of actors, and so compatible with determinism in the same way that Hobbes' definition is, but something much more subtle than just freedom of action. Freedom of action is the ability to do what you want to do. Your will is whatever 'want' you have which moves you to do whatever you do. Freedom of will is then the ability to will what you want to will; to exercise control over which of your wants are effective in moving you to act. In programming terms, it's the ability to reprogram yourself. In broader cybernetics terms, it's a feedback loop or a control mechanism. Whether or not you have such a mechanism functioning in you, and thus whether you have free will, is a physical fact about you, just like whether you are in chains and thus have freedom of action is a physical fact about you. Those facts, and the other facts which feed into that system and the facts about your actions which are the output of it, may have always been set in stone since the dawn of time; but nevertheless if you do in fact have such a mechanism functioning in you, you have free will by this definition, even if you having free will was determined.

That last sense seems to be the operational definition of free will which most people working in the various physical sciences operate under. Neurologists and biologists looking at whether or not the human brain has nerve pathways that would function as such a mechanism, or whether brain structure is malleable enough for such a mechanism to even possibly exist in it; psychologists and sociologists looking at whether people's intentions to change their patterns of behavior can be effective on changing their behavior, or if all such changes in behavior have to come from outside conditioning (if the brain is even malleable enough to allow for any such change at all). All of these areas of investigation are asking what determines (i.e. influences, directs) a person's behavior, under the assumption that the universe is at least macroscopically law-like and deterministic enough for such causal relations to be discovered, and that if a person's behavior is determined entirely by some particular mechanism (like genetics or social conditioning) then they don't have free will, while if it's determined some other way (like some such feedback loop or control mechanism) then they do or at least could have free will. These different possibilities are all called different types of "determinism" (biological, cultural, psychological, etc), but nobody is asking whether or not the whole universe is completely deterministic or even "how deterministic" it is (though I think some neurologists are asking how much microscopic randomness gets chaotically amplified by the brain, apparently operating under an incompatibilist definition of free will there). They're asking whether certain specific things causally determine certain specific other things, which is not a question about whether "determinism" simpliciter is true or not at all.

I'm not really sure where I was going with this from here when I started, so I'm going to stop now, but I hope this helps clear at least some things up. Oh, and to tie this back to my suggestions for the article: I was suggesting that we divide it up into sections for each different definition of free will. Incompatibilism would all fall under one such definition, and in that section would be not only the incompatibilist philosophical arguments for why that is the right definition of free will that tracks our ordinary usage, but also discussion from physics and theology about whether or not determinism is factually true. Another section would discuss views like Dennett's, that it's predictability, not determinism, which threatens free will. Another section would discuss the classic compatibilism of Hobbes et al, and among the criticisms of that would be that freedom of action and freedom of will mean different things. Then another section would discuss the modern compatibilism of Frankfurt et al, and most of the science topics would go under there as they seem to take that as their operational definition while they investigate factual issues of biological, cultural, and psychological determinism, etc. --Pfhorrest (talk) 08:36, 20 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks again for the excellent overview Pfhorrest - it is all very reasonable. I think you have a good handle on the various forms of free will, and it would make sense to lay them out separately like you have discussed here (and in your diagram). I will add my comments to your proposed layout above (your nested list in talk section Pfhorrest's flowchart). Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 22:41, 22 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Pfhorrest's comments

Pfhorrest: Thanks for the discussion. It's pretty long, and I'd like to take up a few points I found germane to my own questions on this issue.

"So incompatibilists argue amongst each other over the factuality of D, and agree on the definition of F; meanwhile, compatibilists argue amongst each other and against incompatibilists over the definition of F, and don't care about the factuality of D."

1.) So it is incompatibilist to suggest that "D" is not factual. On that basis is it incompatibilism to point out that physics requires omniscience to verify "D" even within its peculiar domain, so while "D" might be true of the universe, that proposition is not testable. The most that can be tested in practice is to predict events within some error bar of uncertainty, an error bar that is enormous in fields like weather prediction, and not so good for predicting asteroid behavior either (the good old insoluble many-body problem). Thus, it would seem, those that hold "D" to be factual are way out on a limb, much further than their willingness to argue would suggest.

→From some standpoints, the "factuality of D" being a statement without consequences, it's not worth discussing. Brews ohare (talk) 16:08, 20 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Many compatibilists might generally be inclined to agree with you, but nevertheless people do still discuss it. It's like theism vs atheism: the question at hand between them may be an unscientific one, both statements may be unverifiable and unfalsifiable, nevertheless people do take positions on it, and those positions are notable. --Pfhorrest (talk) 09:26, 26 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

2.) From Bohr's standpoint, cause and effect can be established only to the degree that the "effect" can be separated from the "cause". So where observation of a phenomenon severely disturbs the phenomenon under observation, cause and effect become inseparable. He's on solid ground at an atomic level. However, he says that observing mental causation (free will) is not possible for this reason. Thus it is not that "D" is not factual but that "D" is not a useful concept in some arenas. Would you place the discussion of applicability of the terms "cause" and "effect" under the "arguments over the definition of free will" camp, that is, as a branch of compatibilism?

3.) Other authors also suggest "cause" and "effect" need re-examination in this context. Is it useful to classify discussions of cause and effect under "compatibilism".

4.) Isn't "compatibilism" departing from any useful distinction and becoming an et cetera category?

5.) As you suggest, it would be a more useful structure for the article to build it around definitions of free will than to stick it in its present narrow confines of determinism vs. everything else. That organization might contain more topics than you have itemized. Brews ohare (talk) 15:50, 20 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

So it is incompatibilist to suggest that "D" is not factual.

If by that you mean it not a fact, i.e. that it is false, then it's incompatibilist to appeal to that (or its negation) in an argument about free will. A compatibilist could still talk about determinism being true or not completely outside the context of free will, like to point out that physics requires omniscience to verify "D" even within its peculiar domain, so while "D" might be true of the universe, that proposition is not testable.

→ I intended your meaning of "factual" in the quote from you, which I took as meaning D "having empirical validity", as opposed to being only an hypothesis about reality. I take your remark as a narrowing of incompatibilism to the position that "D having empirical validity is pertinent to a discussion of free will". On the other hand, a compatibilist cannot discuss this point in the context of free will, but could discuss it in other domains. So I am confused that a compatibilist can address the point that physics requires omniscience to verify "D" even within its peculiar domain, so while "D" might be true of the universe, that proposition is not testable., but should they proceed from such a discussion in a broad subject domain to suggest it has bearing upon "free will" they suddenly become incompatibilists. That change of labels depending upon the breadth of the topic is very confusing to me. Brews ohare (talk) 16:19, 21 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not saying that talking about it or not changes how they are labelled necessarily, I'm just saying it's not the kind of thing people fitting such labels are likely to talk about. A compatibilist by definition says that the truth or falsity of "D" has no bearing on the truth or falsity of "F". A compatibilist might for other reasons want to discuss the truth or falsity of "D", but seeing as they hold it to have no bearing on the truth or falsity of "F", they wouldn't be wont to infer anything about the latter from the former. If someone we didn't know how to label was talking about "D" (perhaps about the difficulties in determining the truth or falsity of "D") and drawing some conclusions about "F" (or what we can or cannot know about "F", etc), then that would make us think they were an incompatibilist, because they would appear by such comments to believe that "D" did have some bearing on "F". If they had claimed to be a compatibilist and then did that, that would suggest that there was some confusion either about what they mean by the label or what they mean by the inference. --Pfhorrest (talk) 09:26, 26 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ → Got it. Thanks. However, I believe your explanation hardens my opinion that the "compatibilist"-"incompatibilist" designation does more to confuse matters than to illuminate important distinctions. The matter of importance (IMO) is what constraints act upon a human agent facing specific inputs, and how their response is affected by pre-conditioning. Brews ohare (talk) 16:14, 26 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

But if by that you mean that "D" is not a question of fact at all, then that's not really an option -- "D" is defined entirely as a question of fact. It may be an impossible-to-answer question, but it's still a question of fact, not a question of some logical definition. We don't get to define whether the universe is deterministic, just what determinism is.

→ I don't understand this remark.My view is that the definition of "D" is the position that "the past and present determine the future". The question of whether "D" has empirical validity is entirely a separate matter. Is that what you are saying too? Brews ohare (talk) 16:19, 21 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, pretty much. I was just making sure to be clear whether you meant "factual" as opposed to something like "definitional" (i.e. as "pertaining to questions of fact"), or "factual" as opposed to "false" (i.e. as "in fact"). It seems you meant the latter, as did I, so we are clear here I think. --Pfhorrest (talk) 09:26, 26 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thus, it would seem, those that hold "D" to be factual are way out on a limb, much further than their willingness to argue would suggest.

Like I said, that never stopped anybody from arguing about anything. Besides which, most of the libertarian vs determinist stuff stems from either older, mechanistic theories of physics (determinists arguing that it appears that every fundamental interaction is a deterministic, mechanical event like billiard balls clacking together, and inferring from that that the whole universe must be like a huge deterministic machine),

→ Pfhorrest: This is the argument of Laplace requiring an omniscient observer. It is empirically untestable, being an extrapolation of classical physics beyond anything empirically verifiable, even in principle. So as a basis for asserting "D" has empirical validity, it is invalid. Brews ohare (talk) 16:19, 21 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

See above about theism vs atheism. People argue for these positions and those arguments are notable, but I'm not saying anything about whether they are sound arguments or not. --Pfhorrest (talk) 09:26, 26 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

or from even older theological issues (received doctrine was that God knows everything, which implies that determinism is true). I'm not familiar with anyone in modern times giving philosophical arguments that determinism must be true -- our best current physics suggests it's not. The only argument still going on is about whether or not that has anything to do with free will.

→ What is this continuing argument about? Because "D" is an empirically unprovable assertion, any argument about the pertinence of "D" to free will places that particular discussion of "free will" in the realm of things empirically unprovable, that is, the realm not only of theory but of theories without consequence. Free will may indeed be empirically unprovable, but that doesn't mean that "D" is pertinent because, of course, not every unprovable statement is applicable to free will. Is this how you would frame the "argument still going on"? Brews ohare (talk) 16:19, 21 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The contemporary argument essentially stems from Peter van Inwagen's "Essay on Free Will", which is where the term "incompatibilism" was coined and where that position was revitalized in modern philosophical circles. (Throughout the modern era compatibilism of one variety or another had dominated philosophical thought on free will). Basically, Van Inwagen presented an argument appealing to people's intuitions about what free will means, and attempting to logically show that if determinism was true it would run afoul of that intuitive understanding of free will. He also boiled down and pretty much accepted a common compatibilist argument that randomness undermines freedom and so determinism is necessary for free will. Between the two of those he ends up more or less a hard incompatibilist, concluding that any way you slice it, D or not-D, F must consequently be false. So he's not really concerned about whether D or not-D, but he does think D (and its negation) have a lot of bearing on F.

In his wake, people like Harry Frankfurt have tried to argue that the concept of free will he appeals to is malformed, and that free will properly understood has nothing to do with D vs not-D, but is rather a functional matter to be investigated case-by-case, psychologically, neurologically, etc. That's pretty much where the argument stands today (or last I've heard), with Van Inwagen and Frankfurt as figureheads of the incompatibilist-compatibilist debate. Nobody's really arguing about D or not-D anymore (not professionally at least; but go to any campus philosophy club and listen to the freshmen talk about their favorite subject, it's usually this and centers around libertarianism vs determinism with the occasional bright student arguing compatibilism or hard incompatibilism like the pros).

→ → Thanks for this outline. Very helpful. You don't spell out why D or not-D is not an issue anymore. My argument for why it is not a reason for debate is that it is like arguing over whether fairies can fly. It is a debate for the sake of debate about something that is demonstrably meaningless to human experience. I guess I am a Frankfurtian, eh? Brews ohare (talk) 15:59, 26 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

As far as I'm aware the reason why D or not-D is not an issue (in academia) anymore is that during the modern era (i.e. during the reign of classical, Newtonian physics) most of the educated intellectuals were "soft determinists", compatibilists holding that nomological determinism was true but that that didn't mean we had to throw away all our concepts of free will and everything that rides on them (like moral responsibility). Basically the compatibilists won in the academic arena, and intellectuals for the most part stopped caring whether or not determinism was true when it came to free will (though they generally held that it was true, until quantum mechanics raised issues with that -- even Einstein fought vigorously against admitting the possibility of indeterminism, for reasons entirely unrelated to free will, viz. the famous "God does not play dice" quote).

As for arguing over whether fairies can fly, like I said earlier it's like arguments about theism vs atheism: whatever we personally think of the merits of the argument, for encyclopedic purposes it is certainly notable that there is an argument taking place. You are sounding more and more like a Frankfurtian compatibilist, and as one myself I would be happy to just agree "yeah incompatibilism is nonsense, lets not even worry about it" in a personal discussion. But for the purposes of the article here, we can't be so dismissive of incompatibilism because it is hugely notably not only historically and popularly but it is still a live issue discussed by prominent academics today. --Pfhorrest (talk) 21:49, 26 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

From some standpoints, the "factuality of D" being a statement without consequences, it's not worth discussing.

This might be the starting point or motivator for compatibilism of some variety, but it might also be taken, together with adherence to an incompatibilist definition of free will, to the conclusion that the question of free will is not worth discussing.

Would you place the discussion of applicability of the terms "cause" and "effect" under the "arguments over the definition of free will" camp, that is, as a branch of compatibilism?

Same as above. Bohr's concerns sound like a plausible starting point or motivator for something like Dennett's variety of compatibilism ("even if it is deterministic, it's still unpredictable because observing it changes it, and that's good enough"). But in and of itself it doesn't necessarily fall into one position on free will or another.

Other authors also suggest "cause" and "effect" need re-examination in this context. Is it useful to classify discussions of cause and effect under "compatibilism".

If they are discussing that in a context of the incompatibilist definition of free will not making sense (because it hinges on a poorly defined concept of cause and effect or such), then yes. Otherwise, no, and I wouldn't see how it could be related to free will at all in that case.

→ I don't know how to classify these discussions. Maybe you can help here? For instance, one such school of thought takes the view that the ordinary conception of "cause" and "effect" is clear only for rather simple systems, and for complex nonlinear feedback systems like the brain, "cause" and "effect" are not useful concepts and will not be used in an advanced theory of such systems. I'm just guessing that the idea is that the response of such a system to external input is not certain because the system has some internal autonomy in the way it assesses the meaning of these inputs. The connection to free will is the bald assertion that some correlate of "free will" will appear in this advanced theory, but divorced from at least the everyday notions of "cause" and "effect". Another school takes the view that the common definitions of "cause" and "effect" are too constrained, and some older, more general definitions should be reinstated. Where do such arguments fit in (beyond the label of pure speculation)? The applicability to free will is simply this: the assertion is made that mental events can cause physical ones if the definition of cause is understood correctly. Then free will can exist if the definition of cause is considered carefully. Brews ohare (talk) 16:25, 21 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That position doesn't seem to say anything either for or against nomological determinism, or for or against its relevance to free will, so I don't see a way to categorize it as either compatibilist or incompatibilist (by which I mean, someone who holds that position could fall into either camp; the position doesn't seem to be a position on the issue which divides them). It seems like someone holding to such a position would still agree that if nomological determinism were true, then a brain placed in given starting conditions and given certain incomes would still output the same behavior every time, and that if nomological determinism were false then they it wouldn't necessarily do so; it's just defining causation in a non-necessitarian way, saying that even if D were true, it wouldn't be right to say that the inputs "caused" the outputs. If they go on to conclude from that that free will is possible even in a nomologically deterministic universe, then that would make them a kind of compatibilist, probably along the lines of Dennett (using a definition of free will very similar to, but subtly different from, the incompatibilist one). --09:26, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

→ → I'd guess the argument is that "a brain placed in given starting conditions and given certain inputs would still output the same behavior every time" is a non-statement, that is, it is equivalent to saying "if fairies existed, they could fly". The preconditions "a brain placed in given starting conditions", exist only in the imagination and cannot be realized even in principle. So one can have it any way you want: "a brain placed in given starting conditions and given certain inputs will not output the same behavior every time" is equally unverifiable. Just to elaborate, if the same brain were given the same inputs at two different times, one could argue the brain was not "the same" because it learned something. If two identical brains were presented with the same inputs, they might not actually be identical, or their "sameness" might be established by the very fact that they have the same response to some repertoire of inputs. Then saying they are the "same" brain and exhibit the same outputs, begs the question. If they don't respond the same, one adds the non-compliant input to the repertoire defining "same brain". Nominological determinism is entertainment, not philosophy. Brews ohare (talk) 15:38, 26 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That's fine for your own take on the issue, but since there are notable people who disagree we can't be so dismissive in the article's own voice. --Pfhorrest (talk) 21:49, 26 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't "compatibilism" departing from any useful distinction and becoming an et cetera category?

That would be my personal stance, but historically the definition used by incompatibilists has been so prominent (and the two main incompatibilist positions seen as so exhaustive of the possibilities) that the field is divided between "incompatibilists, and all those other positions who disagree with them". --Pfhorrest (talk) 23:39, 20 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ I'd hazard that a reorganization of the article should avoid this emphasis except as an historical observation. Would you agree? Personally, I find the incompatibilist-compatibilist framework confusing as well as outdated. Brews ohare (talk) 16:19, 21 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's still important to note that divide in the lede, just because that is the dominant framework out there in the professional philosophical world, and it seems to track an important aspect of the lay understanding of free will too. The predominant view among the unwashed masses appears to be some form of metaphysical libertarianism; people with a little bit of education start to dismiss that as magical voodoo thinking and become hard determinists; and it's only when you get to significantly well-educated people that you get people rejecting that dichotomy (compatibilism) or saying "we're screwed either way" (hard incompatibilism). So I like the lede structure of saying (roughly) "free will is freedom from... something. Most people say it's this (incompatibilists), and then argue whether we are free from that (libertarians) or not (determinists). Other people say it's not that, but something else entirely (compatibilists), and then argue about what else it is, and when we might or might not be free of that." As for structuring the body of the article, I think it will be enough just to have the incompatibilist section first; I would be happy to break compatibilism out of its bubble and have different sections for all the different compatibilist concepts of free will instead of lumping them all together in one supersection. --Pfhorrest (talk) 09:26, 26 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note I have issues with almost all of the content of these edits:

Incompatibilism places free will at odds with a deterministic universe.

This is OK, but is not what this paragraph is explaining.

It is an assertion of the incompatibility of one's presumably distinct experience of will and a (determined) physical reality. Although substance dualism offers such a distinction, a less extreme form of naturalism known as non-reductive physicalism may also suffice.

This doesn't make any sense anymore - "such a distinction" is now referring to a subset of the preceeding sentence.

...that some mental states are correlated with some neurological states

This is not what (non-reductive) physicalism supposes.

One such construction suggests the emergence of mental properties accompanying physical properties

This rewording is correct, but confusing - as more than one philosophical model of mind presupposes emergence of mental properties.

implying mental states are cooperative system-wide responses, best understood on a global basis rather than one of individual component

This is an interesting interpretation... but requires a reference (or two).

It is said that mental events supervene over physical events, which some say is simply an association, and some view as a causal relationship

I am not sure the purpose of stating this. The definition of supervenience is association in this context - and it is only referring to one construction of non-reductive physicalism anyway.

Non-reductive physicalism can therefore be categorized either as property dualism or as monism.

It is best not to presuppose its correct categorisation in the article (as some will debate against classification as either - there is more than one formulation of non-reductive physicalism). This sentence also implies that epiphenomalism is a form of non-reductive physicalism - which it is not - but rather it is a form of property dualism (and/or substance dualism according to Heligan). Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 19:52, 22 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Richardbrucebaxter: I'd like to propose to you that the edits you have reverted are an attempt to make this paragraph understandable to a wide audience that most probably has only a foggy notion if any about technical jargon. With that in mind, reversion of changes is really not a helpful response: what would be helpful would be a rewording. It isn't really about explaining matters for the versed, but for the unversed. So let's look at one of these reversions you mention above.

"Incompatibilism places free will at odds with a deterministic universe." -This is OK, but is not what this paragraph is explaining.

→ This statement is taken from the article incompatibilism and is intended to remind the reader what this is. That is completely unnecessary for you, but the first-time reader might appreciate a reminder as they already have swimming around in their minds almost a dozen technical terms they never saw before they began to read this article, and probably couldn't answer a pop quiz about which is which.

Following your reversion, this sentence is replaced with "Incompatibilism requires a distinction between the mental and the physical, being a commentary on the incompatibility of (determined) physical reality and one's presumably distinct experience of will."

This lengthy sentence, instead of reminding us what incompatbilism is, says what it "requires", suggesting a broader content, leaving the reader wandering off to wonder just what has been omitted. It then states that incompatibilsm holds that "physical reality" is incompatible with "one's experience" of will. We are thereby led to wonder if this observation is a nonsequitor held by a faction called "incompatibilists", or some logical consequence of the earlier statement about what incompatibilism requires. They also are wondering if "one's experience of will" is actually "free will" or how it is different.

However you view the reaction to this sentence, my point here is that instead of reverting the simple statement back to this mucky original, an attempt should be made to fix this thing to say whatever it is it really wants to say, instead of leaving the reader feeling there's a lot more mud out there that isn't being cleaned up.

IMO the entire paragraph now reading as follows:

Incompatibilism requires a distinction between the mental and the physical, being a commentary on the incompatibility of (determined) physical reality and one's presumably distinct experience of will. Although substance dualism offers such a distinction, a less extreme form of naturalism known as non-reductive physicalism may also suffice. Although one might suppose that mental states and neurological states are different in kind, that does not rule out the possibility that mental states correspond to neurological states. Under non-reductive physicalism, although physical states do cause mental states, they are not ontologically reducible to them. In one such construction, mental events supervene on physical events, describing the emergence of mental properties as correspondent to physical properties. This relationship is known as causal reducibility. Non-reductive physicalism is therefore often categorised as property dualism rather than monism, yet other types of property dualism do not adhere to the causal reducibility of mental states - such as epiphenomenalism.

should be discarded, and if there is anything here that really helps to understand the section The mind-body problem it should be restated. In my mind the potentially useful part of this paragraph is that about mental events as a form of emergence, and probably it should introduce what is stated in the section Determinism and emergent behavior. The rest of this paragraph has as its main point the attempt to show that the preceding description of the mind-body problem can be re-expressed in terms of jargon like "incompatibilism", "non-reductive physicalism", "monism" and "substance dualism", which IMO requires first an essay describing why this is a useful thing to do. I haven't any confidence that it is. Brews ohare (talk) 17:34, 23 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I see that this paragraph has come up before here and here. Garamond Lethe has agreed that this paragraph is undoubtedly murky. But all attempts to change it have been reverted without any improvement. What can be done here? Brews ohare (talk) 14:25, 24 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Brews you need to conduct a proper edit history - and am surprised this has escaped your memory. The paragraph has already been revised with respect to Garamond's comments, taking into account some of your suggested text stating the basics (eg "Although one might suppose that mental states and neurological states are different in kind, that does not rule out the possibility that mental states correspond to neurological states"), including the splitting up of longer sentences. There is at least one artefact from third party attempts to modify it (edit 20:54, 30 September 2012‎ by 75.2.130.83) - which introduced a grammatical ambiguity I have corrected at this time. As stated previously, unless mind-body problem content is linked to free will, then it is not relevant. I am certainly not going to trade on accuracy (accepting for example your 22 November edit), and would question the omission of this assumption made by incompatibilism (a distinction between mental and physical), taken for granted in both the definition of hard determinism and metaphysical libertarianism. Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 15:11, 26 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Richard: Thanks for your surprise over my memory, which I am sorry to say is not what it once was. Although some changes have been made, as you point out, the paragraph still is gobbledygook. Although precision in discussion can militate against clarity, there are many authors (e.g. Kim, Harris) who manage nonetheless to be readable. Brews ohare (talk) 16:21, 26 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It is not your responsibility to educate me, but maybe that effort will also benefit the article Free will. Here is my dilemma:

The compatibilism-incompatibilism stances don't seem to me to be the whole story. Here is a stance that I'd like to have fit into the Free will framework:

Some things may be determined on the basis that physical theory suggests the future is determined by the past, at least on a macroscopic level coarser than atomic theory. There are, however, two caveats in this supposition: (i) even according to theory, an omniscient observer is needed, because infinitely precise description of all details of the past and present are necessary to predict the future, and so the claim that the future is determined by the past cannot be tested, and (ii) it might be that some things escape the grasp of physical theory and cannot be presumed to be subject to such theory.

Given these observations, it seems a tenable hypothesis that despite determinism in the sense of physical theory, it is entirely able to co-exist alongside an hypothesis that the matters of free will lie outside its grasp.

One might take this view as one more version of the division of reality into separate camps where different rules apply.

One such view is that of Bohr, that these are two facets of reality with different descriptions necessitated by the inability verify a prediction when the observation itself affects the outcome. Thus, in his view, any observation of free will "causing" an event is not possible.

I would appreciate some rambling about how these ideas can be fit into the article. Brews ohare (talk) 01:24, 20 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You are referring to incompatibilist free will here. Our (in)ability to establish something as deterministic is irrelevant - all that matters is our underlying assumptions.

i) may be true, but one can't prove the tenets of the empirical method either

ii) is only possible if either a) the deterministic physical theory is incomplete, b) the physical theory is not deterministic, or c) the subject is not physical and has no physical consequence

You appear to have assumed a) for the next sentence - an incomplete deterministic physical theory.

I believe Bohr assumed b) following the Copenhagen interpretation. Yet from the quotation you added, he did not presuppose that our observations of probability in nature (apparent indeterminacy) corresponded to free will. It is possible that influence on nature could be hidden behind our inability to verify a prediction when the observation itself affects the outcome, but this is presuming that the underlying construct is indeterministic. With both a) and b) any observation of free will "causing" an event is not possible. In the case of a) then we cannot even detect/measure the indeterminacy (else the deterministic theory would have already been recognised by the scientific community as incomplete and replaced with a more accurate probabilistic theory; as is commonly accepted today).

Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 20:56, 22 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Richard: I'd just like to see the landscape here. Thanks for taking a look at this.

I'll get back to this shortly. Brews ohare (talk) 22:18, 22 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Richard: Let me look at your remarks here.

You begin with my statement (i) about an omniscient observer being an unrealizable entity, thereby placing the Laplacian notion of a deterministic universe beyond empirical test. You say this statement may be true (it appears inescapable to me if we accept the usual notions of testing), but you say (as I understand it) you can't prove empirical testing is a valid approach either. Of course, this is a question of ontology (if I've got that term correctly) and that is an elephant in the room that this entire article on Free will avoids entirely. The cogito ergo sum approach to what is real is quite at variance with empirical testing, as it places subjective observations available to the individual at a higher priority than any group knowledge. I guess divine revelation is next. For most, any interesting treatment of free will falls under the rubric of being empirically testable. Other approaches are curiosities. What do you think?

You next address the point (ii) that physical methods may not be appropriate to all of experience. I suspect a common view is that this situation is evolving, and one may take either the stance that eventually everything will be explained by some form of empirically verifiable theory, or not, and perhaps our notion of "empirically verifiable" will evolve too. How do you see it?

Your interpret Bohr as adopting a nondeterministic view of nature. Of course, the probabilistic formulation of atomic physics was his forté, but when it comes to free will I interpret his remarks as less clear-cut. Subjective observations of one's interior mental life are used in some psychological methods, and they are notoriously capricious: the method of observation markedly affects what is observed. I take Bohr's reservations about observing free will in general terms to be along these lines, although he also detailed his views that an attempt to examine mental events at an atomic scale defied any possible scheme of measurement. What do you think? Brews ohare (talk) 13:58, 24 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Part of this discussion could assess the idea of Model-dependent realism, the notion that reality is a mosaic, a Venn diagram, an assembly of overlapping areas, each area with its own "reality" and vocabulary, mutually translatable one to the other in regions of overlap, but outside this overlap having no necessary connection. So a probabilistic view of reality can be established at atomic dimensions for small numbers of atoms, which overlaps a statistical mechanics for ensembles of many atoms, which overlaps a thermodynamics for huge systems of gases, solids and liquids. How does this relate to neuroscience and free will? Does neuroscience overlap mental phenomena but not include all of it? Is its vocabulary translatable to that of mental activity in limited arenas like addiction, but has no bearing upon free will in broader terms? What does the literature say? Brews ohare (talk) 14:38, 25 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

For discussion purposes:

Free will is the ability of agents to make choices. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long been debated in philosophy. Historically, a preoccupation has been nomological determinism, the notion that, in fact, the present dictates the future entirely and necessarily, that every occurrence results inevitably from prior events. On this basis one might assert that an agent cannot make choices, there is no "free will", a position called hard determinism. The opposite view, that nomological determinism is not a fact, is that of metaphysical libertarianism. Nomological determinism, however, is not a claim that can be tested, it is undecidable whether this claim is a property of nature.^{[F 1]} So the incompatibilist debate over whether this proposition is "fact" can be regarded as "academic" in the pejorative sense of that adjective.^{[F 2]}

Positions that deny that nomological determinism is relevant are classified as compatibilist. One school of compatibilism is devoted to a discussion of nominological determinism, and so is "academic", like the incompatibilist arguments. However, a compatibilist position with testable consequences is that constraints upon free will do exist, examples being addiction and psychological disorders, and one may discuss the nature of such constraints, the mechanisms by which they affect our decisions, and the role of pre-conditioning upon agent response, such as brainwashing, education, and evolutionary programming. This complex of issues addresses the point that "free will" is less free than everyday subjective observation might suggest to us.

The above focus upon constraints avoids the historical debate over whether free will actually exists, and instead takes the view that the nature of its limitations are the issue, and leaves to the future a determination of how severe these limitations may prove to be. It might evolve with further observation that our "free will" is largely illusory, or that it extends only to long-term decisions; future developments will tell the story.

Notes

_______________

Comments

Perhaps this proposal can be adapted to meet Pfhorrest's criteria? Brews ohare (talk) 17:40, 26 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I would probably agree with all this as a personal essay on the subject, but as an encyclopedia article there's no way that we can be so dismissive of incompatibilism and still claim to be sticking to NPOV. --Pfhorrest (talk) 21:52, 26 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Pfhorrest: My dismissal of incompatibilism is based on the idea that it is an argument about nothing, because the exaggerated position that the future is determined by prior events cannot be set up to be a testable statement. How would you suggest overcoming the objection that the classical statement "the present dictates the future entirely and necessarily, that every occurrence results inevitably from prior events" is not a statement about anything empirically testable? One might rephrase the statement of hard determinism to become an actually testable statement. If that is done, then the argument is no longer the classical one, but a different one, so that doesn't seem to fix things. Would you bring up questions of ontology, for example, whether experimental testing matters? If that is the route, the article has to face the problem that if the classical debate is in a space orthogonal to testable propositions, it hasn't practical implications, and it all is a bit "academic", eh? Brews ohare (talk) 05:41, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The book cited above, Solomon and Higgins, seeks to distinguish between prediction and cause. That is an approach to placing "cause" outside the realm of the testable, as a cause may lead to an event without our being able to prove it. Are there some better approaches out there that are not ultimately reducible to placing determinism in the realm of things not scientific? Brews ohare (talk) 05:57, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

This all sounds like you're arguing more about the subject than about how the article should summarize notable views on the subject. It sounds like I would mostly agree with you in a discussion about the subject itself, but the topic of discussion here is not which positions on free will are right or wrong or scientific or unscientific or tenable or untenable. It's just about which positions are held by notable authors in the various relevant fields. So no matter how much I might agree about the untenability of incompatibilism when wearing my philosopher's hat, when wearing my encyclopedist's hat I have to acknowledge that there are notable people out there who support incompatibilism, and that dismissing it out of hand in the article's own voice, even for what I may think are good reasons, would be to bias the article against those notable positions -- toward my philosophical point of view, sure, so as a philosopher I wouldn't object, but as an encyclopedist (which is the hat we should all be wearing here on Wikipedia) I have to object on the groups of WP:NPOV.

Put another way, our purpose here is not to tell people the truth about free will. It is to report the consensus of experts in the field(s) on that matter. Since there isn't a consensus among said experts on this matter, all we can do is report the various different positions they hold, without bias toward any of them. "Wikipedia's articles are intended as intelligent summaries and reflections of current published debate within the relevant fields, an overview of the relevant literature. The Verifiability policy is related to another core content policy, Neutral point of view, which holds that we include all significant views on a subject." (from that last link). To do as you suggest here would be like writing the article on God from a strong agnostic, ignostic, or apatheist point of view (with theism and atheism analogous to metaphysical libertarianism and hard determinism), rather than a noncommittal neutral point of view which merely reports what different people say about the subject without commenting on who if anyone is right. --Pfhorrest (talk) 10:00, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Pfhorrest: I have no objection to anything you say above. You may observe that my remarks are populated with questions, not assertions, about how to proceed. (None of these got a response.) I'm searching for a way to accommodate your suggestion that incompatibilism be given more room in the introduction and not be relegated to a playground dispute in the history section.

One way to approach this might be to view the incompatibilist efforts as a search for a way to make the subjective intuition of free will a more precisely described phenomenon and relate it to things like behavior with more rigor. One might take the optimistic view that this goal is a work in progress, and introduce the discussion of emergence as a modern example of searching for a place for free will in a testable surrounding. One could continue with the notion that examining the constraints upon free will without a clear idea of what free will actually is, is a bit of a chimera. If we say dopamine affects behavior, we are on pretty solid ground, but if we say it affects free will, one might ask: How does that add dimension to the discussion? The basic issue is: How do we connect cogito ergo sum and other introspective experiences with publicly accessible experience like science? Brews ohare (talk) 13:03, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

As you are aware, Popper, Hawking and others approach this issue using mental constructs, theories, which are undeniably subjective in origin and are subjectively employed in conjunction with objective external observations that are connected to each other and also are suggested by these theories. Duhem and Quine take the view that this program doesn't cover the territory and is too limited. Brews ohare (talk) 13:49, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

These remarks, like their predecessor, obviously require fleshing out with sources. At the moment they are just explorations of direction. Brews ohare (talk) 13:03, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It is a digression, but I am attracted to the history of our understanding of pain. Pain is a subjective phenomenon entirely, but over time it has been related with more and more detail to information processing in the body. See Charlie Rose. The pain one feels can be connected to certain receptors and communication channels and to certain brain activities. Isn't there an important analogy here to what "free will" might bring to a study of intention and its implementation? It is an example where one can use personal observation of subjective pain to set up a study of an objective formulation of pain. Brews ohare (talk) 14:08, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

A revised version for discussion purposes:

Free will is the ability of agents to make choices. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long been debated in philosophy. It is a universal subjective perception that we can make choices, and historically there has long been argument over the reality of this perception, going back to early Greek efforts to square notions of fate with those of personal responsibility.^{[F 1]} That conflict can be seen as part of the struggle to reconcile models of external reality (fate in this instance) with subjective experiences of reality (free will).

A successor to the notion of fate is nomological determinism, the notion that, in fact, the present dictates the future entirely and necessarily, that every occurrence results inevitably from prior events.^{[F 2]} On this basis one might assert that an agent cannot make choices, there is no "free will", a position called hard determinism.^{[F 3]} The opposite view, that nomological determinism does not encompass free will, is that of metaphysical libertarianism.^{[F 4]} This framing of the question of free will is a particular form of the more general question of whether free will is an assertion about objective fact (viewed by hard determinists as supporting determinism), or lies outside it (as suggested by metaphysical liberalists). Both these positions are designated as incompatibilist, an "either-or" formulation of the question.

More shaded views of the question are designated as compatibilist. Some take compatibilism as limited to the view that determinism is compatible with free will.^{[F 3]} One way to arrive at such a position that is agnostic about the validity of determinism is to suggest that some subjective personal experiences like free will do not fall squarely into the realm of objective fact, but nonetheless have implications that can be objectively verified. An analogy is the experience of pain, an entirely subjective matter,^{[F 5]} but one that can be related to the objectively observable operation of receptors, communication channels and brain activity. The consequence is that the subjective sense of free will is empirically connected to observable actions, but constraints upon free will do exist, examples being addiction and psychological disorders, and one may discuss the nature of such constraints, the mechanisms by which they affect our decisions, and the role of programming upon agent response, such as psychiatric treatment, conditioning, and evolutionary limits. This complex of issues addresses the point that "free will" is less free than everyday subjective observation might suggest to us.

The above focus upon constraints avoids debate over whether subjective free will actually exists in an objectively verifiable way, and instead looks for the connections between subjectively experienced free will and observable events. It ducks the interesting questions of mental causation and the hard problem of consciousness. It takes the view that translation of subjectively reported free will into intention and into behavior has observable limitations, and leaves to the future a determination of how severe these limitations may prove to be. It might evolve with further observation that our "free will" is largely illusory, or that it extends only to long-term decisions; future developments will tell the story.

Notes

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Comments

No offense but this seems to be wandering all over the place on at best tangentially-related topics that don't warrant placement right in the lede. And you still seem to be wanting to write about incompatibilism from a compatibilist point of view, even if you are trying to be more charitable to it here; but that's not enough for NPOV still. To use the theism analogy again, it would be like writing about monotheism as a stepping stone on the way from polytheism to atheism, or perhaps more broadly writing of religion as having been the best method of explanation people had before they found science; even if you're being a little complementary to it, you're still discounting its present proponents as wrong, which we can't do in the article's own voice. (We could attribute such a line of thought to someone else, if someone notable has made such comments, but putting that up in the lede rather than in the relevant part of the body would still be biased from undue weight).

Perhaps you could just say what you think the problem with the article as it stands is? Because this is starting to look like a solution in search of a problem to me. --Pfhorrest (talk) 20:31, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

To make things more specific, do you have objections to this paragraph, which in my mind is completely uncontroversial and adds about 3 millennia to the history of this topic:

Free will is the ability of agents to make choices. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long been debated in philosophy. It is a universal subjective perception that we can make choices, and historically there has long been argument over the reality of this perception, going back to early Greek efforts to square notions of fate with those of personal responsibility.^{[F 1]} That conflict can be seen as part of the struggle to reconcile models of external reality (fate in this instance) with subjective experiences of reality (free will).

Note

Brews ohare (talk) 20:39, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I don't object to mentioning the Stoics' contemplation of the issue, and it could be a good start for a paragraph summarizing the historical significance of this issue, which could be fitting for the lede somewhere, or also deserving its own section. (Actually I think that would be a good idea regardless, and would free us up to organize the sections on different definitions by their prominence or logical relation rather than chronology, which can be covered in its own section). --Pfhorrest (talk) 05:37, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ Good. Brews ohare (talk) 15:48, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think it's fitting where you've put it, which disrupts the flow of the "Free will is... something like this, or like that, depending on who you ask" solution we've got to use since we can't give a straightforward definition. ("Free will is the ability of agents to make choices" isn't an uncontroversial definition by itself; some positions say "sure, we make choices, but since we couldn't have made any other choices, we didn't make them freely and so we don't have free will"; that's why the "free from certain kinds of constraints" that's in the present first sentence is important, but then begs immediate followup explanation of what kinds of constraints we're talking about). --Pfhorrest (talk) 05:37, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ The ability to make choices when you cannot make any other choice is a self-contradictory statement. The ability to make choices between limited alternatives is subsumed under "choice", as a special case of "choice", namely "choice under constraint". In other words, the ability to "choose among alternatives" is what choice means, and if the alternatives available are a subset of the possible, that is limited choice. So this argument appears to me incorrect. Perhaps you could elaborate? Brews ohare (talk) 15:48, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not defending the position, just putting forth that some people hold it. Our purpose here is not to argue about what positions are correct or incorrect, but just about what positions are out there, and how to present them. --Pfhorrest (talk) 10:15, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ → Pfhorrest: It seems difficult to hold a position that contradicts a definition of choice. It seems more likely that they aren't proponents of logical error, but redefine choice, or are arguing over a subset of alternatives for choosing between. Can you suggest where I might find more detail? Brews ohare (talk) 15:26, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It is about the definition of choice, as you say. Closely related to the difference between having a will simpliciter, and having free will. Hard determinists would not deny that people deliberate upon their actions and choose which one to do out of the various actions they would be physically able to do if they so chose, but they say that since what choice they would make is determined (because the deliberation by which they make that choice is a deterministic process), their choice is not free. People "choose" their actions the way a curve-fitting algorithm "chooses" the best curve to a set of data, according to hard determinists.

At the risk of confusing rather than clarifying, here's an analogy: you can have the political liberty to live a certain lifestyle, yet lack the economic means to live that lifestyle. That lifestyle is free for the living, you've just got to go live it (analogous to the alternate choices laid out for you to choose actions from); but economic circumstances prevent you from living any lifestyle other than the one you're in (analogous to determinism preventing you from making any choice other than the one you will make). If this paragraph is confusing then just ignore it, I'm not completely confident in this analogy.

Anyway, the point is that there is a difference of definition here again. Most compatibilists would define choice as you do, and say that if you have a choice you are by definition free to some degree, and free will is nothing more than that ability to make choices, to undergo that deliberative process, deterministic though it may be or not. Many incompatibilists disagree and say that certainly people choose in the sense of come to conclusions after a deliberative process, but that whether those choices are freely made or not depends on whether that deliberative process is deterministic or not. --Pfhorrest (talk) 02:50, 30 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Aside from also interrupting the flow of the definitional sentences which should come first, "It is a universal subjective perception that we can make choices" sounds like an intuition pump, and as such is not encyclopedic in tone (I'd certainly agree to it in an argumentative essay, but it doesn't sound right in an encyclopedia article). --Pfhorrest (talk) 05:37, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ This statement can be quoted verbatim from many sources - would that help? It is not an essential segue in any case and could be rephrased. Care to offer an alternative? Brews ohare (talk) 15:48, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ Here's an example: "We live our lives under the practical assumption that we are free to make our own choices." Here's another one: "One of the strongest supports for the free choice thesis is the unmistakable intuition of virtually every human being that he is free to make the choices he does and that the deliberations leading to those choices are also free flowing." Brews ohare (talk) 16:23, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ Here's another example: "Most people feel that they possess free will, in the sense that they can freely choose what to do from a number of options. As Dr. Samuel Johnson said to Boswell, ‘We know our will is free, and there's an end on't’ " Brews ohare (talk) 16:47, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That helps establish that that is a notable position to be included in the article, attributed to those who hold it, but it still sounds wrong to say it in the article's own voice and with that force. I might be OK with just adding some qualifiers cited to some quotes like that, a la "Many {authors|positions|something} do not question the existence of a widespread subjective experience of the ability to make choices[1][2][3]" or some such. But I still don't think the first paragraph is the place to have that sentence, and a better place doesn't immediately jump out at me; possibly somewhere in the section on hard determinism or hard incompatibilism (preceding doubts about whether we really have free will despite those perceptions), in the section on free will as an illusion, or discussing the position (I'm not sure we've got material on this in the article right now or not, might be somewhere under metaphysical libertarianism) that we can know from introspection that we do in fact have free will. --Pfhorrest (talk) 10:15, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ → I guess the inclusion or not of this kind of remark is a matter of taste, as many authors have done this and many have not. Personally, I think the reader coming to the article will find that they agree with these quotations, which are not assertions about the validity of these subjective notions, but simply suggesting it is these ideas that have led to further exploration of this subject for millennia. That might encourage reading the article to see what has been said about this notion. Brews ohare (talk) 15:26, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

"That conflict can be seen as part of the struggle to reconcile models of external reality (fate in this instance) with subjective experiences of reality (free will)" likewise interrupts the flow of definition where you've placed it, but is also a digression away from the subject matter entirely, into an area that sounds like original research. --Pfhorrest (talk) 05:37, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ It isn't original research to say the central issue of Stoicism is the reconciliation of fate with the individual's choice. Here is a source. Will that help? Brews ohare (talk) 15:48, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, but connecting that to a larger "struggle to reconcile models of external reality with subjective experiences of reality" seems like OR to me, and if not then at least undue weight at this prominent location in the article. The digressive nature of it is my main objection; it's getting away from what should be the point at this place in the article, stating what free will is [held to be by different people], and further still digressing from talking about free will itself to that issue's place in some larger issue. If that's a notable opinion then it could deserve a mention somewhere, but not in the first paragraph. --Pfhorrest (talk) 10:15, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ → All that is going on here is to point out that the notion of free will and its conflict with the ways of the world goes 'way back. The line: "struggle to reconcile models of external reality with subjective experiences of reality" does indeed place free will in a wider context, which is IMO a valid context. It is why the mind-body problem is relevant. Why do you object to this? Brews ohare (talk) 15:26, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Even if there are notable scholarly opinions on this, it doesn't belong in the lede, and I'm not sure where in the article structure it would belong; it seems a digression much like that of the mind-body problem material you've been adding, and could maybe go in a section with that on the relationship between free will and other philosophical issues or some such. --Pfhorrest (talk) 05:37, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ Inasmuch as the entire topic of free will is about the ability to make choices, and the article presently suggests determinism is the major issue conflicting with this notion of free will, I cannot understand why the Stoic's formulation is fundamentally different except that they did not spell fate out in Laplace's terms, based upon laws phrased in second-order time derivatives, but as a sophisticated variation of "que sera, sera". Do you not see the parallel here? Why is this a digression? Brews ohare (talk) 15:48, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

See above. It's not the part about the Stoics that I'm objecting to (though that would be a digression at this place in the article too, but maybe not at the start of a historical paragraph later in the lede), it's connecting that to some broader objective vs subjective project. --Pfhorrest (talk) 10:15, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ → Isn't your stance merely an arbitrary curtailing of the context for the issue of free will? It may be, as you say, that this history does suggest that there is a connection to a "broader objective vs subjective project". If that is the wider context for free will, and I'd guess that it is indeed, why do you object to pointing that out? Brews ohare (talk) 15:26, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, I am beginning to come around to the idea of a section in the article dedicated to discussing the broader philosophical context of the problem of free will, and a corresponding paragraph in the lede summarizing that. I am thinking it might be worked in as part of a first "Overview" section (incorporating everything currently in the mind-body problem section as well), to be followed by the "History" section discussed above, and then a large, subdivided section on the different positions and issues relevant to them. Since those seem to be your main areas of interest, I would be happy to see you be bold and start developing them. But I still object to the changes to the present lede structure you are suggesting. Additions are good, new sections of the body, new paragraphs of the lede, but I still think many of your proposed changes to what's already there are firstly unnecessary and also lose something in the process. --Pfhorrest (talk) 02:50, 30 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If you've looked at the above paragraph, how about the second:

A successor to the notion of fate is nomological determinism, the notion that, in fact, the present dictates the future entirely and necessarily, that every occurrence results inevitably from prior events.^{[F 1]} On this basis one might assert that an agent cannot make choices, there is no "free will", a position called hard determinism.^{[F 2]} The opposite view, that nomological determinism does not encompass free will, is that of metaphysical libertarianism.^{[F 3]} This framing of the question of free will is a particular form of the more general question of whether free will is an assertion about objective fact (viewed by hard determinists as supporting determinism), or lies outside it (as suggested by metaphysical liberalists). Both these positions are designated as incompatibilist, an "either-or" formulation of the question.

Note

I don't think there is much to complain about here either.

The next paragraphs may deserve more discussion. Brews ohare (talk) 03:40, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know that I'm comfortable flatly stating that nomological determinism is "a successor to the notion of fate". A related concept certainly, but I don't know of anything establishing a chronological relationship between the ideas. --Pfhorrest (talk) 05:37, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ I think this is a stylistic issue - the analogy could be made more elaborately. Brews ohare (talk) 15:48, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

"On this basis one might assert" sounds speculative and so not encyclopedic in tone; we'd need to say (as the article currently does) that some specific parties do assert that nomological determinism is true and that it contradicts the existence of free will.--Pfhorrest (talk) 05:37, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ No problem. Brews ohare (talk) 15:48, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Describing metaphysical libertarianism as the view "that nomological determinism does not encompass free will" just doesn't make any sense to me. Metaphysical libertarianism is the position that we do in fact have free will and that that contradicts determinism.--Pfhorrest (talk) 05:37, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ I provided a source and a quote. The issue is that if one is to assert that we do have free will, one must also assert that free will is a fact lying outside the realm of determinism, or, as the source says, mechanism does not govern human decision making. The extreme version of this position is to state that determinism doesn't apply at all, anywhere. So, I'd say the view that metaphysical libertarianism holds that "nomological determinism does not encompass free will" is orthodoxy. Can you develop your objections further? Brews ohare (talk) 15:48, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I meant that the way you phrased it does not make sense, as in, it's not at all clear what it's saying. The source you quoted concurs with my stated definition here (although it also is a bit confusing with its use of "mechanism" to mean apparently nomological determinism, but that's easy enough to see past). A much clearer way of phrasing that would be "our wills are not (nomologically) determined, and are thus free", which is much closer to the quoted "mechanism is [not] a true explanation of human action, and therefore responsibility is possible"; both imply that determinism/mechanism and free will/responsibility are mutually exclusive, and that the latter is the case rather than the former. Talk of nomological determinism "encompassing" free will just doesn't parse clearly. --Pfhorrest (talk) 10:15, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ → Pfhorrest: I see we have a different picture here. Yours is that the hard determinist says P and the libertarianist says not P. My view is that the determinist says P is the universe and the libertarianist says Free will is not P, so the universe is bigger. Is this our difference? Brews ohare (talk) 15:26, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It sounds roughly like it, although "P" and "not P" could apply to any dispute; the difference is in what "P" fleshes out to. I'm saying they disagree over P = "for all x, D(x)". You seem to be saying both sides agree on Q = "for all x in S, D(x)", and only disagree over P = "A is a subset of S". (I think we've reached agreement already that both sides also agree on a proposition R = "for all x, if D(x) then not F(x)"). I don't see the usefulness in breaking it down like that, since it still boils down in either case to "everything is determined, including human will and action" vs "some things are not determined, like human will and action", plus mutual agreement between them that something determined is not free. --Pfhorrest (talk) 02:50, 30 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The next sentence similarly does not make any sense. "This framing of the question of free will is a particular form of the more general question of whether free will is an assertion about objective fact (viewed by hard determinists as supporting determinism), or lies outside it (as suggested by metaphysical liberalists)." Both hard determinists and metaphysical libertarians agree on all definitional issues regarding free will -- they agree completely about what free will is (or would be if we had it) -- and their only argument with each other is over the question of fact: is determinism in fact true (implying, by their definitions, that we must not have free will), or do we in fact have free will (implying, by their definitions, that determinism must be false). Virtually every party to the debate agrees that there is some question of fact about whether or not we have free will (except those who say that the whole question is malformed nonsense to begin with, including perhaps hard incompatibilists, who seem to define free will in a way that makes it logically impossible right out the gate). Even though there is also argument about what exactly is being asked by that question (i.e. the issue of what it even means to ask if we have "free will"), there isn't any prominent debate about whether or not there is a question of fact to be asked at all. --Pfhorrest (talk) 05:37, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ This argument is perhaps the crux of the matter. I don't think this is a correct formulation of the division between libertarians and determinists. As the article points out, the hard determinist position is that everything is determined. The libertarian position is that "free will" is not determined. To my mind this is the same thing as saying there are exceptions to the determinists' "everything", that determinism may have its place, but it is not all-encompassing. Do you have objections to this formulation? Brews ohare (talk) 15:48, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That sounds correct to me, but I don't see how it conflicts with what I said above. Hard determinists and metaphysical libertarians are arguing over whether the assertion of fact "Everything, including human will and action, is nomologically determined" is true or not; "not" would mean "Something (such as human will and action) is not determined". Determinists hold the former to be a true fact, libertarians hold the latter to be a true fact, and they argue over which of the two is in fact true. Neither is arguing over whether or not it is even a question of fact at all. --Pfhorrest (talk) 10:15, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ → Sorry, Pfhorrest. I could not make head nor tail of this remark. Please rephrase. Brews ohare (talk) 15:26, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

What I meant was, it sounds to me like you are claiming that determinists and libertarians disagree over whether the question of free will is a question of fact at all (as opposed to a question of definition, or of value, or of taste, or what have you). I was saying that it looks clearly to be a taken by both as a question of fact: a question of whether or not everything, including human will and action, is determined. One side says yes to that; the other side say no, some things, like human will and action, are not determined. But they both agree that they are arguing over the factual question of whether there are exceptions to determinism (and whether human will and action falls within those exceptions); neither side thinks they're arguing over definitions or values or tastes or anything like that instead. --Pfhorrest (talk)

→ It is worth noting that the argument that " all x are determined; z is not determined; therefore z is not an x ", is completely separate from what exactly "free will" (z) is or is not, and from what things (if any) actually are determined (x). That avoids a lot of trouble. Brews ohare (talk) 16:58, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, but if you only say "Everything in this (non-universal) set of x's is determined", leaving open the possibility of z's which are not x's and therefore possibly not determined, then you are not asserting nomological determinism. Nomological determinism says that everything, period, is determined. If you reject that, then you reject nomological determinism, and can't be a hard determinist; that leaves you with metaphysical libertarianism if you're an incompatibilist and find that "z" is something sufficient to enable free will; hard incompatibilism if you don't find "z" sufficient to enable free will; or compatibilism otherwise. --Pfhorrest (talk) 10:15, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ → Of course, that is what I am saying. Brews ohare (talk) 15:26, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, but I don't see why you're saying it. The hard determinist says "everything is determined". The metaphysical libertarian replies "human will and action aren't". The metaphysical libertarian might want to append, tangentially, "but still a lot of things are, there is a big set of things which are determined, human will and action just aren't in that set"; but that is a separate statement apart from their disagreement over the question "is everything (in the entire universe of discourse, not just some subset of it) determined?", and that question is the one that divides these two positions. --Pfhorrest (talk) 02:50, 30 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ It might be worth noticing this separation of determinism from everything has received discussion in the literature. For example, a rather long discussion of the matter can be found in John T Roberts (2006). "Formulations of determinism". In Sahotra Sarkar, Jessica Pfiefer, eds (ed.). The philosophy of science: an encyclopedia. A-M, Volume 1. Psychology Press. pp. 198 ff. ISBN 0415939275. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link). A quote is:

"Alternatively, one may hold that some aspects of the world are deterministic...and others are not. ... In this way, one can formulate the idea that, for example, the world is deterministic in its physical aspects, but not in its mental aspects".

Brews ohare (talk) 20:48, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, and such a person would not be a hard determinist. Descarte is a great example of that position; he is virtually a pioneer of mechanical materialism, holding the whole physical universe to operate like clockwork, but he is also the figurehead of substance dualism and held that immaterial souls nondeterministically intervened in the otherwise-deterministic operation of the physical world. He was an archetypical metaphysical libertarian, and appealed to mental substances as the source of indeterminism enabling free will despite otherwise widespread determinism. --Pfhorrest (talk) 10:15, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ → I agree entirely. I'm not sure what you think is the topic here. I was attempting to elaborate a picture of libertarianisim. Brews ohare (talk) 15:26, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You seemed to be arguing that this "some things are determined, something aren't" position was somehow contrary to the claim that the question "is everything determined, or are some things not?" was what divided hard determinists and libertarians. I was saying no it's not contrary to that at all, that's just a common libertarian position. Libertarians take the "some things are not" tine of that fork... and very frequently add "but some things are, too", which is fine and dandy and not problematic at all so I don't see why you bring it up. Libertarians still say "not everything is determined" (with or without adding "even though some things are"), which is what distinguishes them from hard determinists who say "everything is determined". --Pfhorrest (talk) 02:50, 30 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

--Pfhorrest (talk) 05:37, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Pfhorrest: Thank you again for looking into this matter and taking the time to respond. Brews ohare (talk) 15:48, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Pfhorrest: I believe this exchange has identified the main source of your objections, namely as I understand it, you do not want to relate "free will" to subjective perceptions, which are the well-spring leading to the metaphysical considerations of free will. I think to disconnect the two is not at all how philosophers have handled this matter. Brews ohare (talk) 15:26, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I wouldn't say that's an accurate take on my position at all. First of all that's far from an overarching theme to my objections to your proposals, that's just one specific objection to one part. But that aside, my concern was... here, have another analogy: we're writing an article about a certain category of paint brushes, describing what makes a brush fall in or out of this category of brushes, and the different kinds of brushes in this category. Then you get on a tangent about the importance of brushes in general to the world of painting and the improvements they make over finger painting and how they help distinguish painting as an art from say pencil or charcoal drawing. I was saying that that that is kind of a digression away from the narrower scope of this article on these kinds of brushes. I've since come around, above, to the idea that we would in fact want to mention the historical predecessors and descendents of this kind of brush and the influence of its use in the art of painting; but it still needs to be confined to a tight connection between this kind of brush and its influences, and not a digression into matters of brushes or painting in general. --Pfhorrest (talk) 02:50, 30 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

A revised version for discussion purposes It incorporates revisions to accommodate comments by Pfhorrest:

Free will is the ability of agents to select among alternatives. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long been debated in philosophy. We commonly believe that we can make choices,^{[F 1]} and historically there has long been argument over the reality of this perception, going back to early Greek efforts to square notions of fate with those of personal responsibility.^{[F 2]}

A more recent replacement for the idea of "fate" is nomological determinism, the notion that, in fact, the present dictates the future entirely and necessarily, that every occurrence results inevitably from prior events.^{[F 3]} On this basis, some assert that an agent cannot make choices, there is no "free will", a position called hard determinism.^{[F 4]} The opposite view, that nomological determinism does not apply to free will, is that of metaphysical libertarianism.^{[F 5]} This framing of the question of free will is a particular form of the more general question of whether free will is an assertion about objective fact (viewed by hard determinists as supporting determinism), or lies outside it (as suggested by metaphysical liberalists). Both these positions are designated as incompatibilist, an "either-or" formulation of the question of whether "free will" exists or is an illusion.

More shaded views of the question are designated as compatibilist. Some take compatibilism as limited to the view that determinism is compatible with free will.^{[F 4]} One way to arrive at such a position is to note that some subjective personal experiences do not fall squarely into the realm of objective fact,^{[F 6]} but nonetheless have implications that can be objectively verified. An example is the experience of pain, an entirely subjective matter,^{[F 7]} but one that can be related to the objectively observable operation of receptors, communication channels and brain activity. If free will is placed into this category, one focuses upon the relation between the subjective experiences of free will and objectively observed events.^{[F 8]} It is found that constraints upon free will exist, examples being addiction and mental disorders, and one can discuss the nature of such constraints, the mechanisms by which they affect our decisions, and the role of programming upon agent response, such as psychiatric treatment, conditioning, and evolutionary limits. This complex of issues addresses the point that "free will" is less free than everyday subjective observation might suggest to us.

The above focus upon constraints avoids debate over whether subjective free will actually exists in an objectively verifiable way, and instead looks for the connections between subjectively experienced free will and observable events. It ducks the interesting questions of mental causation (how to account for the common-sense idea that intentional thoughts or intentional mental states are causes of intentional actions) and the hard problem of consciousness (how physical phenomena acquire subjective characteristics becoming, for example, colors and tastes). It takes the view that translation of subjectively reported free will into intention and into behavior has observable limitations, and leaves to the future a determination of how severe these limitations may prove to be. It might evolve with further observation that our "free will" is largely illusory, or that it extends only to long-term decisions; future developments will tell the story.

Notes

_______________

Comments

I have removed or rephrased statements that caused problems in Version 2, and added a couple of sources to support some statements. The first two paragraphs probably are acceptable at this point. The last two paragraphs here are the same as before, and are yet to be discussed. Brews ohare (talk) 17:17, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Anticipating some objections, there is some rewording of the last two paragraphs. Brews ohare (talk) 17:33, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Free will is the ability of agents to select among alternatives.

I still object to giving a blanket definition of free will like this. Someone or another will always disagree with it. In this case, we've still got the problem discussed in v2 about incompatibilists saying "selecting them isn't enough, you need to freely, non-deterministically select them!" No improvement here. I think we still need to say that freedom of will is the ability to make choices free from something, and then as immediately as possible go into a quick summary of the different proposed "somethings". --Pfhorrest (talk) 03:15, 30 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

We commonly believe that we can make choices,^{[F 1]} and historically there has long been argument over the reality of this perception, going back to early Greek efforts to square notions of fate with those of personal responsibility.^{[F 2]}

This is worded much more nicely, but I still don't like its placement right at the start. It would make a good start to a separate lede paragraph summarizing the history of the issue. What I'm suggesting is something like:

• Paragraph 1, as-is: Free will is... freedom from something, what exactly is a contentious point. Most commonly that something is said to be nomological determinism, leading to the two most common positions on free will, metaphysical libertarianism and hard determinism...
• Paragraph 2, as-is: But lots of people disagree that nomological determinism matters at all. They are called compatibilists, and they say that these other things are the more important questions...
• Paragraph 3 (optional, can be integrated into the above perhaps), as-is: There's also some other positions and issues of concern...
• Paragraph 4, as-is: The question of free will is important to all these different fields.
• Paragraph 5, NEW FOR YOU (maybe integrate with the above): The question of free will has relations to all these other philosophical issues, like philosophy of mind and moral responsibility...
• Paragraph 6, NEW FOR YOU: The question of free will goes back a long time, from the Stoics down to Van Inwagen and Frankfurt...

Then, in almost reverse order in the body:

• Section 1: Why the question of free will is important, with regards to philosophy of mind and moral responsibility and so on...
• Section 2: History of the debate about it, touching briefly on the back-and-forth between different positions.
• Section 3: The different positions in detail, including:
  • Incompatibilism, including relevant theological and physics issues
  • Compatibilism a la Dennet et al, including relevant chaos theory and complexity issues
  • Compatibilism a la Frankfurt et al, including relevant biological, sociological, and psychological issues
  • Compatibilism a la Hobbes et al, including relevant political issues

Gotta run right now, but will try to comment on the rest later tonight. --Pfhorrest (talk) 03:15, 30 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ok back. The above is really what should be my conclusion here, but here's more point-by-point critiques on why I think the changes to the existing material makes it worse:

On this basis, some assert that an agent cannot make choices, there is no "free will", a position called hard determinism.^{[F 3]}

This has the same problem of "ability to choose" vs "freedom of choice" discussed above, and I see no other improvement over the current phrasing that hard determinists "claim that nomological determinism is true, so free will does not exist". It also skips over the defining issue that leads us into talking about these incompatibilists in the first place, that "Many hold that nomological determinism must be false in order for free will to be possible". --Pfhorrest (talk) 08:40, 30 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The opposite view, that nomological determinism does not apply to free will,

This still has the same problem of determinism verbing "free will" in some way (applying to it, encompassing it) that does not clearly just state what defines metaphysical libertarianism. A much more straightforward way to put it is simply "will is not determined, and therefore free", not "determinism does not apply to free will". The latter could very easily be confused for saying "determinism is not relevant to the question of whether or not we have free will", which is very untrue of libertarians' opinions; they say very much that determinism is what matters in the question of free will, but that determinism is false, so our wills are free. --Pfhorrest (talk) 08:40, 30 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

This framing of the question of free will is a particular form of the more general question of whether free will is an assertion about objective fact (viewed by hard determinists as supporting determinism), or lies outside it (as suggested by metaphysical liberalists).

This is the issue we're discussing in v2 comments above. Libertarians and determinists are both making claims that it is an objective fact that we do or do not have free will. This whole sentence just seems confused though; if you think libertarians say the existence free will is not a matter of objective fact, what do you think they say it is? --Pfhorrest (talk) 08:40, 30 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Both these positions are designated as incompatibilist, an "either-or" formulation of the question of whether "free will" exists or is an illusion. More shaded views of the question are designated as compatibilist

This is misrepresenting the difference between incompatibilists and compatibilists again in the same way that was my initial objection to your edits. Compatibilism is not about picking middle points on a linear spectrum with libertarianism on one end and hard determinism on the other. On the spectrum of "how much determinism", most of it is occupied by libertarians (everywhere from "nothing determined" to "most things determined"), with one one extreme point ("everything determined") held by hard determinists. Compatibilists meanwhile say "that's not what free will is about", and don't have a position on that spectrum at all.

Also, "exists or is an illusion" is saying more than it needs to. Not all hard determinists necessarily say that there is an illusion of free will. The question is over whether "free will exists or not". (And that's an either-or question no matter how you slice it; the difference between compatibilists and incompatibilists is whether that question turns on the question of whether determinism is true or not). --Pfhorrest (talk) 08:40, 30 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Some take compatibilism as limited to the view that determinism is compatible with free will.

That "some" sounds weasely there, as that is pretty much how compatibilism is always defined. Investigating the source you cited that quote to, the author of that article admits to be coining a new term "impossibilism", for something which is otherwise known as hard incompatibilism, and arguing that the possibility of that position and the implausibility of counting it as a form of incompatibilism calls for a redefinition of compatibilism and incompatibilism. Hardly a reliable source to back up softening an otherwise universally agreed-upon definition with "some take ... as limited to". (Nevermind that you don't go on to say anything about what others take it to be).

Anyway, the rest of this paragraph and the next is actually pretty good, but is going into way too much depth on the details of one particular position for this point in the article (it's half the lede as you've written it). I think it could be well-incorporated into the opening paragraph of the section on compatibilism in the vein of Frankfurt et al, or maybe as part of the above-proposed Overview section introducing how free will relates to issues of neurology etc.

(That's a good idea to keep in mind in general for that section, now that I think about it: not only what other topics is the question of free will relevant to -- moral responsibility, philosophy of mind, etc -- but what topics are relevant to the question of free will, e.g. physics and theology are relevant to incompatibilists, complexity and chaos are relevant to Dennet et all, and the issues you describe here are relevant to Frankfurt et al. Then we go into more detail on those subjects in their respective sections).

So, what do you think about the organizational proposal above? Leave the lede as it stands alone, add two whole sections to the start of the body overviewing the relation between free will and other topics and the history of the debate, then add two new paragraphs to the end of the lede summarizing those sections. That will give you a nice big open space to be bold and develop the article in positive ways without any objection from me about disrupting the parts of the lede that I think really need to stay more or less how they are. --Pfhorrest (talk) 08:40, 30 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Some quick comments regarding 'Version 3 of "new introduction"' (I have not read the other versions):

A more recent replacement for the idea of "fate" is nomological determinism

Fate is not necessarily implied by nomological determinism (see for example compatibilism). Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 14:19, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ There is not intention to suggest these ideas are coextensive, only that both imply the inefficacy of will. Perhaps a different wording would be more acceptable? Brews ohare (talk) 18:56, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The opposite view, that nomological determinism does not apply to free will, is that of metaphysical libertarianism

Again, this is not what incompatibilism presupposes; it is that physical determinism negates the existence of free will not that the "application of determinism" negates the existence of free will (see talk section "Richardbrucebaxer: Incompatibilism does not assert the non-applicability of nomological determinism"). Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 14:19, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ This seems a fine point to me. In any event I accept that nomological determinism says free will doesn't exist, and delete the word "application". Brews ohare (talk) 18:56, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Some take compatibilism as limited to the view that determinism is compatible with free will

No, all compatibilists assume such. Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 14:19, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ Fine. Brews ohare (talk) 18:56, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

One way to arrive at such a position is to note that some subjective personal experiences do not fall squarely into the realm of objective fact,[F 6] but nonetheless have implications that can be objectively verified

'Subjective experiences with objectively verifiable implication' - is not something relied on by compatibilism to arrive at their position. Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 14:19, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ This claim is not made, it is sad you can get there this way, not that it the only way. Brews ohare (talk) 18:56, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

a) Subjective experiences themselves, if they represent a higher level physical consciousness and exhibit some level of "freedom" over lower levels of physical consciousness, this may perhaps provide a possible compatibilist interpretation of free will. Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 14:19, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ This hypothetical situation could be discussed, of course, but it is not something I have considered. Brews ohare (talk) 18:56, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

b) Objectively verifiable conscious experiences (brain activity believed connected with consciousness: not necessarily "subjective" / "do not fall squarely into the realm of objective fact") with objectively verifiable physical implication (brain activity believed unconnected with consciousness) - and the establishment of temporal relationships thereof perhaps provide a possible compatibilist interpretation of free will. (see below *) Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 14:19, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ I do not think there exist the things one might call "verifiable conscious experiences". Conscious experiences can be spoken of by subjects, but that is a report of the single observer, and that does not constitute verification in a scientific sense. However, "objectively verifiable physical implication" may indeed be obtainable in the form of objectively observable correlates of subjective reports. A report of "red" might be related to a certain range of wavelengths of reflected light, for example, and that might be found generally to apply to a large number of individuals. Brews ohare (talk) 18:56, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

An example is the experience of pain, an entirely subjective matter,[F 7] but one that can be related to the objectively observable operation of receptors, communication channels and brain activity

This is not a good example of "subjective experiences with physical implication" - as a) the observable operation of receptors etc could be independent of the experience of pain (eg ephiphenomalism), and b) pain is not necessarily an entirely subjective matter (eg see reductive physicalism) Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 14:19, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ There is a fine point here, but the broad argument is not impacted. Brews ohare (talk) 18:56, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If free will is placed into this category, one focuses upon the relation between the subjective experiences of free will and objectively observed events

Not necessarily. Even (physicalist) incompatabilist models are subject to the relation between the subjective experiences of free will and objectively observed events.* Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 14:19, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ The incompatibilists, as I understand the matter, would deny "subjective experiences of free will" have any status beyond illusion, and so can be dropped from consideration. Is that not so? Brews ohare (talk) 18:56, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It takes the view that translation of subjectively reported free will into intention and into behavior has observable limitations, and leaves to the future a determination of how severe these limitations may prove to be

This is stating that compatibilism is incompatibilism (or may be taken as such).

→ Can you elaborate? Brews ohare (talk) 18:56, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Richardbrucebaxter (talk) 14:19, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ I think my view is that compatibilism focuses upon constraints, a topic with real practical impact, while incompatibilists argue between themselves about the existence of "free will" in one sense or another, and never get around to anything of consequence. Brews ohare (talk) 20:47, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Richardbrucebaxter: Thanks for your remarks. Brews ohare (talk) 18:56, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Pfhorrest: Here are a few points you have raised for further discussion. Please elaborate further:

• Libertarians and determinists are both making claims that it is an objective fact that we do or do not have free will.

This statement is not the case, at least not according to all sources. A more open statement of the difference is that determinists claim that "it is an objective fact that we do not have free will", while libertarians claim that "we do have free will", but do not explicitly or necessarily claim that it is "an objective fact".

I don't even know what sense to make out of this. A determinist puts forth an opinion on a matter of objective fact: "as a matter of fact", he says, "everything, including human action, is determined". A libertarian responds with their opinion on that matter (a matter of objective fact, as previously stated): "no, actually; human action, in fact, is not determined". In proffering a contradictory opinion on the matter (of objective fact) which the determinist opined about, the libertarian puts forth his own opinion on that matter (of objective fact). --Pfhorrest (talk) 11:21, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ I went into this in a new section below. Brews ohare (talk) 17:40, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

All they say is that whatever sort of phenomenon "free will" might be, determinism does not apply to it.

They say that whatever sort of phenomenon will might be, it is not determined, and may consequently (via the incompatibilist thesis) be free. The way you keep phrasing this is like saying that "shackles do not apply to free actions", when you mean to say that someone is "not shackled, and thus free to act". It's a really weird way of putting it, and sounds more like you're saying shackles have nothing to do with whether an action is free -- when I'm sure you and I and everyone can agree that the presence or absence of shackles "applies" very much to the question of whether an action is free or not.

You might say that "shackles have not been applied to this man [i.e. he is not shackles], and he is thus free to act", and similarly say (still very strangely) that "determination is not applied to human actions [i.e. they are not determined], and we are thus free to choose"; or that "a free action is one not compelled by shackles", and similarly "a free will is one not determined". I'm pretty sure you're going for some combination of those in one sentence, but it's not working, and it's not necessary if we open, as the existing article does, with stating that all incompatibilists agree with the second ("a free will is one not determined"), and libertarians are those incompatibilists who say in addition to that "our wills are free, and are thus [on the basis of the prior statement] not determined". --Pfhorrest (talk) 11:21, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ I found this analogy to shackles impenetrable. Brews ohare (talk) 17:40, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Support for this more general view is the following quote: "[Determinism] admits that mechanism is true — that human beings, like the rest of the universe, are entirely subject to and produced by the physical states and laws of the universe — and therefore claims that no one is responsible for anything. The latter [metaphysical libertarianism] denies that mechanism is a true explanation of human action, and therefore responsibility is possible."

That quote seems to me to concur with my position, and I already addressed it earlier to say as much. --Pfhorrest (talk) 11:21, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ I went into this in a new section below. Brews ohare (talk) 17:40, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

As to the classification of "free will" as objective fact, there is lots of opinion to the contrary, going back arguably as far as Chrysippus. We have this from Cicero about the classification of free will as subject to fate or as voluntary:

"Between the two views held by the old philosophers, one being that of those who held that everything takes place by fate in the sense that fate exercises the force of necessity — the view of Democritus, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Aristotle — the other that of those who said that the movements of the mind are voluntary and not at all controlled by fate, Chrysippus stands as an honorary arbiter and wished to strike a mean between the two; although he leans rather towards those who hold the mind is free from all necessity of motion...nonetheless, he slips into such difficulties that against his will he lends support to the necessity of fate."

This doesn't sound to me like it's saying anything about the point of contention you're presenting it for. Cicero is saying that Chrysippus is trying to defend the existence of free will, but in the process ends up making points that would better support the determinism, and that he [Chrysippus] consequently tries to find some kind of compatibilism to reconcile the two. --Pfhorrest (talk) 11:21, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ Yes, that is Cicero's thesis; I may be stretching his remarks more than is allowed. Brews ohare (talk) 17:40, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

We might have a difference of opinion here as to whether Chrysippus' "fate" governs the objective world, while "voluntary free will" escapes fate because it is not part of the objective world. Further reading persuades me that Chrysippus postulated two realms, each subject to different rules, but the idea of "objectivity" probably has changed since his time.

I get the feeling that you might be attaching some unnecessary meaning to the word "objective", like "verifiable" or something, so let me offer this analogy: most modern theists support neither natural theology (the position that questions about God can be solved by naturalistic means) nor theological noncognitivism (the position that statements about God do not purport to describe facts at all, but rather just express emotions or such). Consequently, most modern theists hold that it is an objective fact that God exists -- that it's not merely a subjective experience some people have with no grounding in reality, but that God is really out there, and that someone who denies that is objectively wrong -- but they also hold that that fact is not empirically verifiable in any way. [Strong] Atheists, of course, assert the contradiction of that, that the fact is that God does not exist out there, and people who think he does are objectively wrong. They are arguing over a matter of objective fact, even though (at least) one side claims that the fact they put forth is not empirically verifiable.

I'm a physicalist and empirical realist myself, as I suspect you are as well, so I would argue in my own work that the theist claims of non-empirical objective facts are nonsense. Nevertheless, people do hold that position, and I would dispute an edit to the article on God which tried to say mainstream theists claim God's existence is not a matter of objective fact, just as much as I dispute your suggestions about libertarianism here. --Pfhorrest (talk) 11:21, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ I said more about this in a new section below. Dragging theology into this discussion isn't going to help, I see from your remarks; "fact not empirically verifiable in any way" strikes me as a misuse of language by introduction of personal definitions of words commonly used differently: the Humpty Dumpty approach of "paying words extra to mean what I want them to mean". Brews ohare (talk) 17:40, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The epistemological pluralism of Descartes, Kant, Popper, Nagel, Jackson etc. certainly separates "free will" from objective fact, although I'm unsure that they are classed as libertarianists. Are they? Brews ohare (talk) 16:15, 30 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not seeing the connection you seem to find so obvious between epistemological pluralism and a separation of free will from objective fact. Given your reference to Nagel's famous paper on qualia in the proposed changes, it seems like you're talking about distinguishing "what it's like" facts from "what it is" facts (1st person vs 3rd person knowledge). There are certainly some people arguing that free will lies entirely within the domain of the former rather than the latter (the "free will is just an illusion" folks), but libertarianism certainly isn't defined by following such a position. Both libertarians and most hard determinists agree that there is a "what it's like" experience of feeling free to choose, and might fall anywhere on the matter of the ontological status of subjective feelings; but they hold that if determinism was true nobody would really, objectively have free will, and any such feeling, whatever its ontology, would thus be just an illusion. Then they argue against each other over whether determinism is true. Libertarians say it's not, so our wills can be really, objectively free, not just an subjective illusion of freedom.

Since you like making the analogy to pain: it's like asking if a pain someone is experiencing is due to some kind of actual physical ailment like an injury or pinched nerve or whatever, or if it's just psychosomatic. The psychosomatic pain is still a subjectively real experience, but it may not indicate what pain usually seems to indicate about objective states of affairs, namely injury etc. Likewise, the perception of being free to choose is a subjectively real perception one way or another, and libertarians and most hard determinists will say yeah sure most people have that perception: they then argue about whether people really, objectively have the ability which their perception seems to indicate they do, namely freedom of will, which they define in a way incompatible with determinism. Compatibilists are arguing about some objective fact too; they just disagree about what objective fact is named by the term "free will". --Pfhorrest (talk) 11:21, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ You bring up the interesting point about "free will is just an illusion" and psychosomatic pain. The pain literature also deals with this prejudice against the subjective, and patients often complain that doctors just don't believe them when they claim to be suffering because they can't find any objective correlate. Medicine is full of such nonsense, and as you may know personally, medicine cannot find the source of a large percentage of patient complaints, and as far as that goes, cannot even find explanations for objectively obvious maladies. There is a trend these days to take subjective reports of pain more seriously as doctors have discovered pain is a far more subtle matter than they had thought, and requires sophisticated methods of treatment beyond the training of most.

→ You suggest that "Compatibilists are arguing about some objective fact too; they just disagree about what objective fact is named by the term "free will"." I find this simplisitic, if that is really what compatibilists are arguing about. This take on matters removes the traditional compatibilist, determinist, incompatibilist debates from anything of real interest to anyone not addicted to word play. Brews ohare (talk) 17:40, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• A much more straightforward way to put it is simply "will is not determined, and therefore free", not "determinism does not apply to free will".

The separation of these two views as somehow different hinges upon what is "determinism". If we take hard determinism as the statement that "everything is dictated by the past and present", then saying that "will is not determined, and therefore free" is a claim that "everything" is too strong a statement, that is, the universe is bigger than things governed by determinism. That is the same statement as "determinism does not apply to free will". Brews ohare (talk) 16:15, 30 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

See above: I am contesting the phrasing "determinism does not apply to free will" as not clearly communicating what (I hope) you're trying to say by it, which is that "will is not determined, and therefore free". That latter sentence does have the implication that the set of things which are determined is not universal, and will is one of the things which falls outside of that set (which, combined with the incompatibilist thesis, implies that that will could be free); but that implication is not equivalent to the sentence, it's just implied by it.

→ See new section. Brews ohare (talk) 17:40, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm saying the disagreement between hard determinists and libertarians turns on whether the statement "everything is determined" is true or false. To say that it is false is to say "not everything is determined", which is equivalent to "some things are not determined", which is what you seem to want to say, just in a weird way. ("Determinism does not apply to some things"). And just to emphasize, the negation of "everything is determined" is NOT "everything is undetermined", and I am not saying the argument is between those two things. --Pfhorrest (talk) 11:21, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ You seem to have captured my viewpoint, but still object to it. Brews ohare (talk) 17:40, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• The latter [ "determinism does not apply to free will" ] could very easily be confused for saying "determinism is not relevant to the question of whether or not we have free will", which is very untrue of libertarians' opinions; they say very much that determinism is what matters in the question of free will, but that determinism is false, so our wills are free.

The criticism is that the formulation [ "determinism does not apply to free will" ] can be misconstrued, so a clearer formulation is necessary. I believe it is the statement that "determinism is false, so our wills are free" that is the unclear formulation, for several reasons. The first part, that "determinism is false", is not a clear formulation of the libertarian position. I don't think libertarianists make the statement that determinism is a view totally inapplicable to any part of reality.

See above. By "determinism" here I mean nomological determinism (I though that was clear by now), the claim that "everything is determined (by the state of the universe at any one time plus the laws of nature)". The negation of that is NOT "determinism is a view totally inapplicable to any part of reality"; it is, to use your formulation here, "determinism is a view that is not totally applicable to all parts of reality". Which can be much more clearly put as "some things [some parts of reality] are not determined [do not have determinism applied to them]". --Pfhorrest (talk) 11:21, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ You have my position, but have not said what your view of it is. I gather you disagree with it. Brews ohare (talk) 17:40, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Such a position is untenable if determinism is formulated so that science actually fits into it, that is, if mechanism is properly viewed.

What does this sentence mean? --Pfhorrest (talk) 11:21, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If instead determinism is taken in the Laplacian sense, then determinism is clearly outmoded and actually does apply to nothing, in which case the statement that "determinism is false" is clearly true, but since such a concept of determinism applies nowhere at all, it is tautology to say it doesn't apply to free will either.

Weren't you just arguing not long ago that it is impossible to empirically determine the truth of "the Laplacian sense" of determinism? Note that the claim is that if one knew the total state of affairs of the entire universe and the complete laws of nature, one could with sufficient computational resources eventually correctly infer every fact about every other time; it is not the claim that such knowledge or computational resources are available, even in principle. It's a statement about the logical relationship between some things; it essentially gives a formula, it does not say that the values of the variables are known or can be found, or that someone capable of the computations necessary to solve the formula exists or could exist. It only asserts the formula itself. Our inability to solve the formula does not make it false, it merely makes it not very useful to us. --Pfhorrest (talk) 11:21, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ Indeed you are right about this, except for the apparent belief that untestable statements about the nature of reality can be true or false. I guess statements that have testable consequences can be classified as true or false according as their implications are true or false, but statements like "Omniscient observers can predict the future" are just nonsense. Brews ohare (talk) 17:40, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ Of course, true and false can be applied to logical arguments as well, but that is a matter quite separate from empirical truth and falsity. One could discuss whether the definition of "omniscient" implied ability to predict the future, but that is not a discussion about reality, but about how one wants to use words. Brews ohare (talk) 17:59, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Another objection is that the second part of the statement does not follow from the first. I take this non sequitor as an indication that this sentence is too abbreviated to be a proper position statement.

I am abbreviating some things in our discussion here when I think that we've already clarified them between us and don't need verbose restatement. In this case, I thought it was clear that incompatibilists (hard determinists and metaphysical libertarians both) agree with each other that "if everything is determined, our wills are not free". Given that premise they share, they then argue to each other "everything is determined, therefore our wills are not free" and "our wills are free, therefore not everything is determined", respectively.

→ Boy, that is exactly what I've been saying, but you seem to disagree with me. I am confused. Brews ohare (talk) 17:40, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm thinking that laying out some semi-formal logical statements here might help clarification on the different positions regarding free will and determinism (leaving out the much broader disagreements within compatibilism):

• F = "free will exists" = various things depending on the source
• U = a description of the total state of the universe at some given moment
• N = a description of the true laws of nature
• D = nomological determinism = "everything that will ever happen could be inferred from S and N"
• I = incompatibilism = "necessarily if D then not-F"
• L = libertarianism = "F and I", therefore "not-D" (and therefore "not-H")
• H = hard determinism = "D and I", therefore "not-F" (and therefore "not-L")
• C = compatibilism = "possibly F and D" = "not-I" (and therefore "not-H and not-L")
• M = the mind argument = "necessarily if not-D then not-F"
• X = hard incompatibilism = "I and M", therefore "necessarily not-F"

And for extra clarity, though this shouldn't be necessary if you understand logic:

• not-D = "not everything that will ever happen could be inferred from U and N" = "some things that will happen could not be inferred from U and N"

There are other possible statements too, like:

• "People experience a subjective feeling of freedom to choose from several possible alternative courses of action"
• "People undergo a deliberative process whereby they weigh alternative courses of action and select one of them"

These statements might (and usually would) be supported by any of the above positions, though incompatibilists would generally say that neither of these (nor their conjunction) is equivalent to F, because they are both clearly compatible with D, which would mean C and therefore not I. --Pfhorrest (talk) 11:21, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ Maybe we have to resort to translation like this. I am not sure yet. Brews ohare (talk) 17:40, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ I'd rewrite one principle to fix what looks like a misprint:

• D = nomological determinism = "everything that will ever happen could be inferred from U and N"

→ We need a few more propositions and need to classify them.

• MU = "The universe is multifaceted" - Not everything is accessible to scientific methods
• MF = "Free will is a facet of MU" - I'd call this a libertarianist position; you would not.
• MFC = "Free will as a facet of MU is constrained" - I'd call this a compatibilist position; you would not.
• MCO = "Constraints upon free will can be established empirically through correlated observable phenomena."
• MHP = "A failure to solve the hard problem of consciousness suggests MU or requires faith that MU eventually will prove false." - This isn't really necessary, just a matter to give pause.

Brews ohare (talk) 20:09, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

There are some other points to discuss, and it looks like agreement can be found, but maybe this should be hashed out first. Brews ohare (talk) 17:56, 30 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like the libertarianism-hard determinism differences can been seen differently depending upon the view of the world one entertains:

• If one's view is that the universe is entirely amenable to scientific methods, although science has not yet encompassed the universe, then of course "free will" is a reasonable subject for scientific method, and all that remains is to speculate about how that investigation may turn out. It may be that, like "particles" and "waves", the detailed definition of "free will" that is established as having application to the objective world will evolve. Any debate over whether "free will" will be established will be colored by the present view of what science says about things today, and Occam's razor suggests that "free will" will turn out to be like other scientific objects, that is, as more or as less determined according to how that theory looks at the moment. The libertarianism-hard determinism differences become debates about whether science has or has not reached a mature view of free will. For example, determinism phrased to accord with Newton's laws is not viable, but how about one phrased to fit string theory or multiverses?
• On the other hand, if one's view is that subjective observations like taste, color, pain are individual, never exactly repeatable, and essentially unobservable by third parties, and that free will is among these phenomena, then free will is not amenable to scientific examination. (The hard problem of consciousness is insoluble, at least for the present and possibly altogether.) One can, however, examine individuals claiming to exercise their free will and try to find objective correlates. That is how the study of pain and its treatment is proceeding. From this subjective-objective division one might reasonably suggest that the intuitive notion of "free will" is part of the way the human mind operates, it is a given, and scientific study may succeed in establishing many new correlates over time, for example with new methods like PET scans of the brain, but none of these scientific developments impact the internal intuitive experience of "free will", which is whatever it is. Whether "free will" is 'determined', or not, becomes an empirical matter; that is: Which reported subjective intentions lead to what empirical correlates? What empirical conditioning leads to which subjective reported intentions?, and so forth. From this stance, the universe is indeed larger than the subset of phenomena directly accessible to science, and the libertarianism-hard determinism differences can be seen as argument over (i) the completeness of the scientific aspects of the universe and (ii) which part of reality free will falls into.

Is this a conversation relevant to the topics above? Brews ohare (talk) 05:17, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

No, I think it is a misleading tangent that only confuses the issue. --Pfhorrest (talk) 11:21, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ It's my idea of background, sorry you don't appreciate it. Brews ohare (talk) 17:40, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Pfhorrest's comment: I don't even know what sense to make out of this. A determinist puts forth an opinion on a matter of objective fact: "as a matter of fact", he says, "everything, including human action, is determined". A libertarian responds with their opinion on that matter (a matter of objective fact, as previously stated): "no, actually; human action, in fact, is not determined". In proffering a contradictory opinion on the matter (of objective fact) which the determinist opined about, the libertarian puts forth his own opinion on that matter (of objective fact). --Pfhorrest (talk) 11:21, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

→ Pfhorrest: Can you comment upon this imaginary conversation? I say as a libertarianist to the determinist:

"Free will is not determined".

The determinist replies:

"Well then what is "free will" anyway? I think everything "objective" is determined. Apparently you think free will is not. So either "free will" is not objective, is not a matter of fact, which is what I've said already, or you think there are things that are matters of fact that are not determined, that is, things I classify as impossible. You think the Universe contains objective things that are determined (although you haven't said that yet) and objective things that are not. I think there is nothing objective not determined, and I wonder if you can tell me how you arrange to classify "free will" as an objective thing?"

In my opinion the libertarianist (defined in this way, which I do not agree with) is stumped at this point, as there are no acceptable observations nor any other criteria that place free will within the realm of the objective, within the subject matter of science. If "free will" were within the realm of science, after 3 millennia there would be some inkling that the scientific study of "free will" is advancing, and some objective experimental observations to report. The closest we've come to that is Libet's experiments and their successors, and PET imaging of addicted subjects that use subjective reports of intention and correlate them with observation of brain activity. Correlations between subjective reports of intention and observable events is the best we can do, and objective third-party observation of "free will" itself is not feasible. Brews ohare (talk) 16:52, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You say the quote below concurs with your position:

"[Determinism] admits that mechanism is true — that human beings, like the rest of the universe, are entirely subject to and produced by the physical states and laws of the universe — and therefore claims that no one is responsible for anything. The latter [metaphysical libertarianism] denies that mechanism is a true explanation of human action, and therefore responsibility is possible."

Your argument is:

"A much clearer way of phrasing that would be "our wills are not (nomologically) determined, and are thus free"; [This statement and the quote] both imply that determinism/mechanism and free will/responsibility are mutually exclusive, and that the latter is the case rather than the former."

You have somehow adopted the notion that "not determined" and "determined" are two attributes that can be attached to a phenomenon, which must be one or the other. That is fine for distinguishing attributes for sorting particular items, like "cubic" or "not cubic".

But let us consider assertions about the Universe itself. One can say here too that the Universe is determined or it is not determined. Such an assertion is not an exhaustive list of possibilities, however, and any suggestion that it is exhaustive is a false dichotomy inasmuch as it is applied to a diverse population, sortable according to many characteristics. The statement that "the Universe is partly determined and partly not determined" is perfectly understandable, and in fact agrees with everyday experience.

The quote agrees that there is at least part of the Universe governed by mechanism - by physical states and laws of the universe ("laws of the Universe" referring to scientific theories past or future), but says that "[metaphysical libertarianism] denies that mechanism is a true explanation of human action". Now "human action" is part of the Universe, we might agree, so apparently the phenomena governed by "physical states and laws of the Universe" do not exhaust the content of the Universe.

How can this quote support your view that we must choose that the Universe is either deterministic or not deterministic, and must rule out a partition where part of it is one and part the other? Brews ohare (talk) 16:25, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Pfhorrest: You might answer that you don't think the argument of libertarianists has merit, but that is what they say. It is both more generous and more accurate to say that libertarianists disagree with determinists, but do have a viable position that the Universe is more complex than the determinists can imagine. Brews ohare (talk) 16:29, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Pfhorrest's comment: "I'm a physicalist and empirical realist myself, as I suspect you are as well, so I would argue in my own work that the theist claims of non-empirical objective facts are nonsense. Nevertheless, people do hold that position, and I would dispute an edit to the article on God which tried to say mainstream theists claim God's existence is not a matter of objective fact, just as much as I dispute your suggestions about libertarianism here."

The idea of "non-empirical objective facts" is not simply nonsense but a misuse of definitions of the adjectives "empirical" and "objective". This position is not a viable view of what is going on, but an oxymoron. If your position is that such things have to be mentioned because they are a matter of discussion, that's fine. But libertarianists don't have to be lumped into this ridiculous category. Brews ohare (talk) 17:09, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Pfhorrest: It may be that my mind is inadequately subtle to catch fine distinctions you're making, or it may be that I confuse your statements about different positions as assertions about definitions and logic. At the moment I find that you are both agreeing and disagreeing with me, but I don't know if this is about the meanings of terms or about what are the positions of libertarianists and determinists. Brews ohare (talk) 17:51, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Pfhorrest: After reading this all over several times I have the idea that for you the determinists, libertarianists, and compatibilists all take the view that "free will" is an item that can be viewed as an objective, empirically verifiable phenomenon, and proceed to argue whether this phenomenon is "determined" or "not determined". Thus the argument begins with a very debatable posit that "free will" is an item that can be viewed as an objective, empirically verifiable phenomenon. I suppose that some of the discussion is then about how "free will" can be defined so the posit is valid. And some of the discussion is about what "determined" means. If these matters are decided, one could go on to the second phase and discuss the evidence, but that never happens because the first phase of the discussion never gets anywhere. Does this description capture your view of the situation? Brews ohare (talk) 18:30, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Here is a discussion by M. Quack (Physical chemistry boundary conditions of free will) that might prove interesting (there are many omissions here, not all indicated):

"We must first ask what we wish to define as "free will" in an empirical investigation. Here I would distinguish between two possible definitions.

The first, which at least in principle could be investigated empirically, I would call "objective free will". We would empirically grant that an individual had demonstrated "objective free will" in an experimental investigation if we were not able even in principle to predict his decisions, thoughts and resulting actions, for whatever reasons. This does not yet address the question as to whether a person "can help deciding how he does", that is, whether he can be made responsible for them. ... On the other hand, if we could develop an experimental or theoretical procedure with which we could predict all actions of an individual, we would dispute his objective free will. Even if the individual believed that he had decided freely, we would expose this belief as an illusion... It is without question that the hypothesis of "objective free will" defined in this fashion can in principle be tested, at least in the sense of a falsification according to Popper.

If we were to take the extreme viewpoint...that a single radioactive atom is an individual ...which can make decisions of its own free will, then it would empirically have objective free will in the sense defined here, however remarkable that might seem.

This leads us to the idea of subjective free will. This requires more than demanded by the "objective" free will defined above. Our intuitive concept of that which we generally assume in daily life to be ordinary free will can be defined more concisely in terms of the molecular psychology hypothesis. According to this point of view, there could exist an overlying structure, or I, which determines the decision making process in some form form "inside":. but is not predictable from outside. This idea of such an influence by an I would be unproblematic if the decision making process were deterministic and predictable. ...The illusion of free will could be part of the process in our brains, but the free will in the sense of the definition does not exist even as "objective free will": our action would be those of a predictable robot. ... the acceptance of subjective free will contradicts the laws of molecular quantum physics as they are known at present.

In conclusion, we can therefore state three possibilities for the situation of human free will, from the standpoint of the hypothesis of molecular quantum psychology:

1. There is no free will...Our impression that we decide freely is an illusion.
2. There is an "objective free will" but no subjective free will. The decisions are in principle not predictable and statistically undetermined.
3. There is a subjective free will, as we intuitively understand it, namely that a complex overall structure, the individual or the I, makes the decision in a sense that is probably determinable for the individual himself, but not predictable by an external observer. This makes necessary the assumption of the existence of objective free will, and additionally would require a violation of the current laws of molecular quantum physics. The experimental proof of a subjective free will would simultaneously be the proof of a new physics.

To me, this seems like the modern determinist's position. Any comments? Brews ohare (talk) 02:34, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'd add a caveat, that the observation of "free will" envisioned here is indirect, by observation of actions attributed (by some convention) to "free will", and not by any attempt to observe directly a mechanism of "free will" by which it "causes" things to happen. Brews ohare (talk) 05:29, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

A revised version for discussion purposes It incorporates revisions to accommodate comments by Pfhorrest and Richardbrucebaxter; the topic of free will is divided into two aspects, subjective free will and objective free will. I hope that will defuse much of the objections to the earlier versions:

Free will is the ability of agents to select freely among alternatives. There are two major divisions to the topic of free will. On one hand, there is the subjective intuition of free will:

"One of the strongest supports for the free choice thesis is the unmistakable intuition of virtually every human being that he is free to make the choices he does and that the deliberations leading to those choices are also free flowing."^{[r 1]}

— Corliss Lamont, Freedom of Choice Affirmed, p. 38

A second aspect concerns demonstration of the existence of free will, its exact nature and definition, aspects long debated in philosophy. Although we commonly believe that we can make choices, historically there has long been argument over the reality of this perception, going back to early Greek efforts to square notions of fate with those of personal responsibility.^{[r 2]}

The idea of "fate" is vague, and a clearer position about the control of the future is nomological determinism, the notion that, in fact, the past and present dictate the future entirely and necessarily, that every occurrence results inevitably from prior events.^{[r 3]} On this basis, determinists assert that an agent cannot make choices, there is no objective "free will", a position called hard determinism.^{[r 4]} The figure at the right is an artist's attempt to depict determinism.

If the brain is nothing but a complex physical object whose states are as much governed by physical laws as any other physical object, then what goes on in our heads is as fixed and determined by prior events as what goes on when one domino topples another in a long row of them.^{[r 5]}

— Alex Rosenberg, Philosophy Of Science: A Contemporary Introduction, p. 8

The opposite view, that objective free will is not determined, is that of metaphysical libertarianism.

"[Determinism] admits that mechanism is true — that human beings, like the rest of the universe, are entirely subject to and produced by the physical states and laws of the universe — and therefore claims that no one is responsible for anything. The latter [metaphysical libertarianism] denies that mechanism is a true explanation of human action, and therefore responsibility is possible."^{[r 6]}

— Judy Illes, Neuroethics: Defining the Issues in Theory, Practice And Policy

More shaded views of the question are designated as compatibilist, the view that determinism is compatible with objective free will.^{[r 4]}

These densely argued issues are described in much detail later. They have been described as "philosophical discussions which have addressed the internal contradictions between our intuitive world view and the questions of freedom of decisions, capability of guilt before God and man, and predestination through the omniscience and omnipotence of God or the eternal natural law."^{[r 7]} A "molecular physical chemical" argument by a molecular chemist (only one view) illustrates the sort of issues these discussions try to resolve; the argument leads to these three choices:^{[r 7]}

1. There is no free will...our impression that we decide freely is an illusion.
2. There is an "objective free will" but no subjective free will.
3. A subjective free will, as we intuitively understand it, namely that a complex overall structure, the individual or the I, makes the decision, would require a violation of the current laws of molecular quantum physics. The experimental proof of a subjective free will would simultaneously be the proof of a new physics.

This set of choices is only illustrative, and by no means settles the debate.

A different approach to free will is to focus more on the subjective aspects, and avoid debate over whether subjective free will actually has a corollary that exists in an objectively verifiable way. Instead it looks for the connections between subjectively experienced free will and observable events. Obviously, subjective free will does not fall squarely into the realm of objective fact. Nonetheless, it has implications that can be objectively verified. An analogy is the experience of pain, a largely subjective matter:

Pain is always subjective...[It] is always a psychological state, even though we may well appreciate that pain most often has a proximal physical cause.^{[r 8]}

— Merskey & Bogduk, Classification of Chronic Pain, 2nd ed., The International Association for the Study of Pain

It is difficult to establish whether an obscure pain experience is psychosomatic or just hard to trace to another cause, but often pain can be related to the objectively observable operation of receptors, communication channels and brain activity. If subjective free will is placed into this category, one focuses upon the relation between the subjective experiences of free will and objectively observed events.^{[r 9]} It is found that constraints upon free will exist, examples being addiction and mental disorders, and one can discuss the nature of such constraints, the mechanisms by which they affect our decisions, and the role of programming upon agent response, such as psychiatric treatment, conditioning, and evolutionary limits. This complex of issues addresses the point that "free will" is less free than everyday subjective observation might suggest to us. It takes the view that translation of subjectively reported free will into intention and into behavior has observable limitations, and leaves to the future a determination of how severe these limitations may prove to be. It might evolve with further observation that our "free will" is largely illusory, or that it extends only to long-term decisions; future developments will tell the story.

What is the origin of the subjective intuition of free will? This question is part of the hard problem of consciousness, how physical phenomena acquire subjective characteristics becoming, for example, colors and tastes.^{[r 10]} For example, "it is possible to know all the physical and functional facts concerning the operation of human brains without, for example, knowing what it is like subjectively to experience vertigo."^{[r 11]} And there remains the "hard problem of free will":^{[r 12]} Does conscious volition impact the material world?

Notes

_______________

Comments

I have removed or rephrased statements that caused problems in Version 3. I have decided to avoid careful identification of compatibilism, determinism, libertarianism which seems to raise objections and instead rely on the later sections of the article, and here only to provide a few quotations that seem uncontroversial to me. I've split the discussion up into "subjective" and "objective", which seems to me again to avoid much of the earlier problems. I've added a couple of sources to support some statements. Brews ohare (talk) 16:17, 3 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I believe the last paragraph expresses the present situation regarding "free will", the two main problems: the hard problem of consciousness and the hard problem of free will, remain open questions. The reader deserves candor on these points. IMO they are not close to resolution, and indeed have yet to display any understanding of consequence. Brews ohare (talk) 20:23, 3 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I've been gone for the weekend and am going to try to slowly respond to the rest of the comments made here as I can find time over the course of the day, but in the meanwhile I want to bring up this suggestion from earlier which seems to have been overlooked:

I think some of the material Brews wants to add would make a useful addition to the article. My only major point of contention is disrupting the very beginning of the lede, wherein, since we have no uncontroversial definition of free will to give (which is supposed to be the first thing you do in any encyclopedia article, define its subject), we must give as brief as possible an overview of how different positions define free will. Brews apparently is trying to find an understanding of that for himself and is not familiar with the established positions on that matter, and has not stated (even when directly asked) what is wrong with that definitional part of the lede as it stands, so I don't think all this thrashing about the definition is going to be constructive at all.

Because of that, I suggested earlier that a more productive course of action than continuing to argue over how to rewrite that very first part of the lede, would be to add two new sections to the very top of the BODY of the article, and two NEW paragraphs at the END of the lede, AFTER what's already there, summarizing these two new sections of the body:

• An Overview section incorporating Brews' earlier additions on the mind-body problem as well as other philosophical implications of the problem of free will (e.g. moral responsibility), and other issues which have implications on the question about free will (e.g. physics issues re determinism, mathematical issues re chaos and complexity, biological, sociological, and psychological issues of how people's brains and minds function, etc).
• A History section giving a chronological overview of the motivating factors for different positions on free will and the back-and-forth between their proponents.

To be clear I'm not saying "hands off the lede!" or anything, I just think that there is a lot of confusion as evidenced here on the talk page and the lede as it stands is already the result of much careful deliberation earlier, so we shouldn't go shoving things into it and destroying that. The above will give a place for Brews to add the new material he wants to add immediately without causing that problem. We can then continue to talk here about possible revisions to the first part of the lede.

Thoughts please? --Pfhorrest (talk) 21:51, 3 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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