Posted: Aug 01, 2019 1:59 pm
GrahamH wrote:nunnington wrote:Presumably, ughaibu is not referring to a folk psychological view of free will in this thread. I think he has talked about the "reality" of free will, but I can't find a post where he says what he means by that. Granted, we can talk about a folk psychological view of reality, but ughaibu seems to be to referring to something else. Admittedly, this is a long thread, so I may have missed.
It is sparse.ughaibu wrote:
Now let's consider a minimal notion of free will sufficient for contract law: the parties have free will if they read and understood the contract and signed it of their own volition and not under threat. There will be edge cases for which arguments can be made, but these are legal questions and irrelevant here. We can make a contract with a friend to exchange two books, then a week later make another contract to exchange the same books back. It's difficult to see how at least one of these contracts wouldn't satisfy the definition.
Now let's consider a maximal definition: an agent has free will when they could have done otherwise. If at any time an agent can do A, then at all later times the agent could have done A.ughaibu wrote:6. therefore, if there is free will, the libertarian position is correct.
The first (minimal) definition leaves own volition undefined and only considered explicit threats as coercive influences.
The second definition entirely ignores why an agent makes a choice and only seems to touch on physical . logical possibility. i.e. that we have no solid grounds to consider an action impossible. That's bugger all use here.
So it seems to boil down to the agent being unaware of unconscious determinants of actions. If you can't see the strings there are no strings, it's free will. If you can see some strings those are just reasons for your free will choices.
The only occasions you don't have free will are those where you want to do one thing but find yourself coerced to do something else. Then you have free will but not freedom of action.
Well, volition is a morass in psychological terms. I mean, I can do something though I don't want to, or out of guilt, which is a kind of internal coercion. And, as you say, the unconscious/conscious status of volition is unclear, hence Freud's notion of the slip of the tongue. If I say to the old lady next door, "I hope you don't get better", in one interpretation, I simultaneously wanted to be polite, (I hope you get better), and (unconsciously) wanted to insult her. The idea of an unconscious wish, or a repressed wish, which gets acted out, against my better judgment, is a further complication. I also wonder how you establish someone's volition, of course you can ask them, a hazardous undertaking, or you can infer it. But I suppose that the psychological aspects are hors de combat for ughaibu.