Thank you.
I had read those.
That makes one person, at least. Thanks.
I think your notion of freewill is practical, and while you offer some compatabilist position,
Yes, I want to argue that free-will, as most people use the term, is compatible with causality, science and physicalism.
I do not see why you only follow the cause and effect back until it starts to get fuzzy, as you put it.
You mention that at this point it starts to get unpredictable, but to me that is no reason to abandon the concept of cause and effect.
I don't want to abandon it. (That's the compatibilism bit.) I think that it's likely that whatever's happening at the neural level that results in our making choices and decisions is entirely causal.
What I'm arguing against isn't causality, it's determinism. (I think that lots of people think of them as being one and the same. I'm trying to pry them apart with the concept of probabilistic causation.)
"I'll say that an action of mine is a free act of my own will if it resulted from my own purposes, goals, ideas, evaluations and decisions. In other words, an act of mine is free if the decision to do it arose inside me, so to speak, from a suitable employment of my own internal decision processes, and wasn't imposed on me from outside by some external force. That's typically what people mean when they say, as they might in a court of law, 'He acted of his own free will'.
The 'iron block' kind of determinism seems to do violence to this idea of free-will, by insisting that while it may seem like my acts are the result of my own decisions, which in turn arose from my own inner states and processes, in reality those states, processes and acts they give rise to, were precisely determined by how things were long before I ever appeared. Put another way, the details of my internal deliberations and the results that they give rise to were totally imposed on me by the causal force of the universe outside me."
I'm not arguing for the existence of a soul, a spiritual mind or anything else that lies outside the realm of scientific physicalism. I'm just speculating that the part of physical nature (however causal it might be) that represents our own inner cognitive decision processes, might not be entirely determined by the rest of the universe surrounding us. The rest of the universe might not be dictating the results of our decisions to us at all, or imposing all of our choices on us.
Our decision processes probably are causally determined, to a pretty high degree of probability, by our inner states that existed a very short time previously. (A second, a millisecond.) As we extend those causal chains out temporally, especially in a system as complex as the human brain, I'd guess that determinism gets more and more probabilistic pretty fast. That needn't mean that causal chains between A and B don't exist, only that earlier state A wouldn't precisely determine what the details of subsequent state B will be.
When it comes to predicting in precise detail what a person is going to do, without looking into their heads at all (so to speak) at the time they act, without taking into account that person's own purposes, desires and motivations for doing whatever it is that they are doing, instead basing our behavior prediction merely on a description (however accurate it might be) of the rest of the universe surrounding that person, then I question whether an accurate prediction is possible, even in principle.
It certainly isn't possible in practice. Which makes me kind of wonder what sort of empirical justification exists for the assertion that free will is an illusion.
I think you revert to the freedom being assessed by conscious perception.
I do want to preserve the meaning of 'free-will' as it's used in everyday speech, in ethics, and in more technical applications like courts of law.
