The real compatibilist objection wouldn't be "you could have done otherwise if you had reasons/wanted to/something", it'd be "you could have done otherwise, period, the natural way we define the word "could", incorporating our uncertainty about our own and each other's thoughts and actions". I think you go into this, but your arguments are way, way too long and complicated when a few words would do the trick.

Abstract: In the 1980s the Libet experiment tried to prove free will is an illusion using empirical evidence. Despite some criticism, many philosophers and scientists still believe the experiment has demonstrated the validity of their belief that humans are merely biological machines.

In this debate, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Julian Baggini and Sarah Garfinkel try to answer whether experiments can ever be value-free and settle once and for all such questions as the existence of free will.

Critics of the Libet experiment suggests we can never obtain unbiased interpretations of experiments and that they inevitably represent a function of our desire to believe a certain outcome. When it comes to free will, however, to answer whether experiments can validate or invalidate its existence relies on the way in which we conceptualise free will.

On the one hand, it can be understood as our freedom to make decisions and act in accordance with our desires and preferences without external control; other conception stress the alienating role of the causal mechanical or chemical process in the brain or body that determine what our perceived desires and intentions ought to be.

Humans have free will, but only when observing themselves thinking about free will. That was easy, next!

The idea and existence of reality and my ability to perceive it makes my head hurt....

I will myself to not read it.

Could just be that groups of natural and unnatural systems can be seen as predictable while the whole picture is completely unknowable no matter how complex our knowledge of everything becomes. Even if you knew the start state of the universe, could you predict everything? I'd say not purely on the basis that micro and macro do end up meeting in (dare I say) completely unexpected ways. For eg, a bit flip in computing constitutes a binary digit being flipped by something as random as a perfectly timed cosmic ray hitting memory at the perfect moment in the right spot to cause a flip - rewind the universe and let it do its thing for the same amount of time and you MAY get that same flip but chances are, things will be very different purely based off early universe quantum effects. The same happens in biology and is an argument for different evolutionary steps. Maybe humans are the cause of a miraculous bit flip in the cosmic goo. We may not be special in the universe but the fact that we could be made a certain way based on random cosmic rays? 1 bit flip potentially happening on average every 30-something-ish hours to one bit in memory, extrapolated on a quantum yet universal level? I'd also have to say that I personally can see the argument for our own brains as analogous to quantum computing. If you accept certain ideas and some research, maybe brain patterns inherently recognise and interact with quantum entangled states. Is the chance of thought and the fact that it may be able to mediate and navigate these states as changes in thought patterns deterministic? Actually asking tbh...

Determinism always pisses me off, as I'm sure it does to it's arguers lol.

Scientifically, I think it's hard to argue free will as everything that will ever happen was set in motion from the beginning of time. Every action is just a reaction to something that was set in motion. However, philosophically, I feel free Will exists, but possibly is not able to be proven.

That being said. If we have no free will, but you believe we do have free will. You had no choice as that in itself is your predestined belief.

If we do have free will, but you believe you don't have free will, you are trapped by your belief into a thought process that is closed to all the possibilities in life.

To me, the belief in free will allows for accountability for one's actions and to take control of your destiny. If I am wrong and I don't have free will, I will never know and will have walked the path I was meant to walk.

So, I've been familiar with that quite for decades but hadn't come across it in some time.

Is he suggesting then all of existence expands out in change and then collapses in on itself and starts over? Even the universe? Cause if I were reborn, the world I was born into would be different and impossible to redo.

My favorite Internet talker says there isn't, so your paper sucks.

One question i have here is how can you do otherwise? Id argue you can think about doing otherwise, and convince yourself you would be capable to make a different choice should you be confronted with the exact same situation, but at the end of the day you made the other choice and the exact same situation will never arise again as you cannot go back in time.

RemindMe! 3 days

You do realize GS341 was only part of what he thought was a physical reality? And that ones life was always and will always be fully determined.

Or that it is the most “gruesome” of ideas, to quote. It's reality.

Or that he was just trying to help us in our individual lives, live better. And it wasn't real at all.

A map can be based on extrapolation or interpolation between known points.

> There can be no such thing as multiple possibilities which are truly in the present, since we are doing whatever is possi- ble in the present. So any talk of multiple possibilities is referring to the future, not the present.

This doesn’t follow at all. Firstly, if we accept that the present has only one possibility then different possibilities can exist in the past as well as much as in the future (ie they can’t). Secondly, multiple possibilities can exist in the present, if we accept the many worlds hypothesis. It is not necessarily the case that there is only one present.

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An easy rebuttal is that they have to justify why suffering is so important that everything else has to be sacrificed to reduce it. Considering all the people talking about this haven’t killed themselves, clearly they don’t think ending individual suffering is enough to justify ending life.

Not to mention that even if life on Earth were eliminated, that doesn’t mean the amount of suffering in the universe would drop to zero. For all we know, life would emerge and suffer again or aliens would continue suffering.

I'm not convinced by either the part with the apples or the temporal asymmetry.

I thought the point of asking if you could have done otherwise is to highlight that you cannot choose that which does not occur to you. Or that if a door was closed, you could not have gone through it on will alone.

And the apples seems like you're setting up an analogy and writing those against free will as making a mistake.

The apple reflects specific wavelengths into our eye, a cascade of neurons is triggered. We experience red. Just like we experience agency and a kind of "free will" in how we feel about ourselves.

Claiming free will is real, rather than something we experience, is what introduces the scale shift.

I think free will isn't real. Therefore, it was inevitable that I think that.

It may be that determinism is robust, but that wouldn’t mean that our deliberative processes don’t affect our behavior. Could be that what we experience as removing us from determinism is just as bound by determinist principles as anything else.

Schrodinger's thought experiment makes the point that a cat being simultaneously dead/alive is stupid and therefore there's aspects of physics involved that are not being understood.

Pop culture media constantly misrepresents this and frames it as if Schrodinger literally thought the cat is in a limbo state when the dude was saying such a thing is ridiculous.

It's one of my biggest pet peeves because Schrodinger basically was going "if we use your logic, look at this stupid cat in a box shit that we would get," and yet now people think Schrodinger held the very view that he was calling out as dumb.

Are you really the source of your actions? Everything effects something, what has effected your decision for that action. What effect do those effects, effect "your" free will.

Investigate yourself.

I’ve been writing (and annoying my wife) about this for almost a whole year now. Well said.

What makes you think people can't, in at least some cases, control their emotional responses?

> Now, you may think you are choosing how you act on that emotional response, but even that "choice" in how you react to the emotional stimulus is dictated by, it or pr dictated on all previous experience which have formed all your responses.

I think most accounts of what a "self" or "I" is would say that at least in part, the self is an embodied compression/distillation of learnings from your previous experiences. Saying your previous experiences determine how you respond to something doesn't necessarily remove an "I" from the system - unless, I guess, your idea of a self is some kind of entity that is completely separate from experience, which seems like an unusual way to define a self.