It's what we experience in ourselves when we make choices. It's what we assume about other people when we ascribe moral praise or blame. It's expanded on tremendously in ethics and moral psychology. (And in Buddhism, I might add, with its minute phenomenological investigations of the inner process.)
So you're defining it as a sensation? A feeling? Okay. Do you consider it wholly subjective, or is there an objective nature to it that is consistent from person to person?
My own view is an outgrowth of the common-sensical idea that our choice is free when it isn't coerced by anyone or anything else. That is, when our choices are the result of our own neural/psychological process. While our choices might indeed be made in response to the external circumstances in which we find ourselves, but aren't determined in some precise predictability sense by those external circumstances.
Can you explain what you mean by "choice", how this "choice" is characterised, and on what basis do we identify it?
You use the term "coerce" as well: what do you mean by that? Is an interaction at the molecular level "coerced" to behave as it does? Or are you only talking with regard conscious activity?
It begins as kind of a given, Sarkus. Then we work back from there. The goal of philosophy is to understand the reality we experience, not to make it go away by denouncing it as mere "appearance".
For those that wish to argue that it is simply an appearance don't make it go away, though. That is to fundamentally misunderstand their position. A mirage might appear to be something that it is not, but the process, the experience itself is very real. The questions would seem to be: what is that experience, what is that process, and does the experience match the process?
Surely if the latter is concluded that the experience does not match the process, then one can still say that the process gives the appearance of X, while not actually being X.
Is that controversial?
We take the raw material of our experience and then try to make better sense of it, by making it more consistent with our scientific understanding perhaps. So we aren't likely to have a clear and distinct mathematical-style definition of free will. It's much fuzzier, more of a work-in-progress.
Sure. Provide such a definition then, if that is your position?
Things aren't much different with ideas like 'material object'. We encounter things like the tables and the chairs all the time. But can we precisely define them? Or is it more a matter of investigating them and trying to come to a better understanding of them by considering their composition, whole-part relations, ideas about essentialism, how these things behave in different circumstances and all that?
How can you investigate if you aren't agreed on what it is you're investigating. I'm not saying you need to agree as to what it fundamentally is, only that you define, for purposes of discussion / investigation, the notion.
Scientists investigating compound Z don't need to agree as to what compound Z actually is, how it comes to be, whether it is an illusion or not, or how it will be effected. They only need to agree on what it is that is being investigated.
People here seem to have an aversion to that.
I don't think that it adds anything to discussion to play Derrida, to demand that somebody produce a dictionary definition of 'free will', then to pick words out of that definition and demand that they receive a similar definition. You can see that will lead to an infinite regress as we define words in terms of words in terms of words in terms of words... That's not philosophical discussion, it's more of an excuse to avoid philosophical discussion.
I disagree. While in some situations that approach might be as you say, I think that with issues such as "free will" it is of incredible significance. Otherwise you could simply brush things under the carpet, hoping the vagueness of definition, of clarity, provides the necessary wiggle room to avoid facing what you might otherwise wish to avoid.
The exact same game can be played with a word like 'determinism'.
Sure, if you wish to understand what the person means and are not happy with their definition, then is it wrong to probe what they mean by the terms they use to ensure understanding?
