Posted: Nov 27, 2016 1:18 pm
ughaibu wrote:Earlier you denied that "in the actual world, some agents, on some occasions, engage in an activity under their own volition in full apprehension of the consequences and not under threat or coercion".
Yes, I did, on the grounds that I'm not persuaded that there is any such thing as an agent.
ughaibu wrote:This is bullshit, pretty much every time that you take a piss you engage in an activity under your own volition in full apprehension of the consequences and not under threat or coercion. If you find yourself committed to claims that are false, you have fucked up somewhere. You then have a choice, figure out which of your assumptions or inferences is mistaken, or cease to be part of any rational discussion that intersects your claim.
I agree that this is what it 'feels like', but that is not the same as saying what it is. Lots of people (to temporarily analogise) strongly 'feel' god and lots of other stuff.
The brain is capable of all sorts of things. The conscious self-awareness that you and I call 'me' is, imo, likely just a user illusion, produced by churning brain activity (and crucially, after that activity, not before it). I have never heard anyone explain how it could be otherwise, but if you want to have a go, feel free, but 'it really really feels like something else' is not going to be persuasive, because that's exactly what a system under an illusion would obviously say.
ughaibu wrote:Let's move on from the legalese notion of free will and consider the notion as relevant to the so called problem of free will. For this discussion, an agent has free will on any occasion on which that agent makes and enacts a conscious choice from amongst realisable alternative courses of action. This definition, too, is defended by both compatibilists and incompatibilists.
I don't think that's correct. I don't think it's defended by many incompatibilists, because it presumes that there's such a thing as an agent.
ughaibu wrote:All healthy human adults unavoidably assume that they have the ability to make and enact conscious choices from amongst realisable alternative courses of action, and hundreds of times every day they confirm the reliability of that assumption by successfully making and enacting conscious choices from amongst finite sets of two or more courses of action that they know, from experience, are realisable.
I agree with you that they assume it.
ughaibu wrote:There are very few other things about which we can say that we unavoidably assume their reality and hundreds of times a day demonstrate the reliability of that assumption. There is the existence of an external world and there is gravity, unless we're in outer space. So, our warrant for holding free will to be real is equal to our warrant for holding the external world to be real, and at least as strong as for holding gravity to be real. It is stronger than our warrant for holding evolution or global warming to be real.
So, the first problem for the free will denier is to explain why they do not deny the reality of evolution, global warming, moon landings, Shakespeare's authorship, etc, etc, etc, but do deny the reality of free will. The second problem is that experimental science is one of the human activities that requires the assumption of free will, so the denier cannot appeal to experimental science for their denialism. And if their denialism is based on a god-of-the-gaps argument, as GrahamH's is, then they need to take on the further commitment of denying big-bang cosmology and pretty much any realism about the ontologies of science since Pythagoras.
I don't think the analogy with 'the external world' holds up. For starters, we don't know the reality of it and have, over the centuries, often discovered that it is not what we thought it was, such as realising, after much investigation, that despite appearances, the blindingly obvious assumption, empirically confirmed, that the sun moves around the earth, was (is) essentially an illusion.
As for science, if anything, it's neuroscientific investigation which is hinting that this particular beloved assumption (that we have free will) may also be an illusion.
Basically, a supposed agent is essentially some kind of hommunculi-esque entity acting inside our brains independently of the laws of physics and intervening in them, and to me this is not much different from the sorts of things elves and other supernatural entities are supposed to get up to. I don't think I have the equivalent of an elf in my head and I can't think of a good reason to.
Perhaps you do. If so, can you explain to me how it might work, the mechanics of it?