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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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Free will can be defined as:
I don’t see where that conflicts with determinism, honestly. It’s two different levels of analysis.
If you define free will as, by definition, something that breaks the laws of physics, then free will, by definition, does not exist.
Kinda like when someone defines “magic” the same way. If “magic” is by definition something impossible, then by definition it doesn’t exist.
The questions get a lot more interesting when you define these things in a way that doesn’t make them, by definition, non-existent.
Maybe this type of reasoning should be called Trivial Dismissal.
Another example. If you define God as a man in the sky who controls everything, you’re not really an intellectual tour de force if you conclude he doesn’t exist. It’s the more interesting definitions of God that lead to more interesting discussion of whether God exists.
That seems to me like an entirely inadequate description of free will, because the interesting question isn't how decisions lead to actions, but where the decisions themselves come from, i.e. whether the decisions are made freely. Unfortunately I've yet to see any definition of free will that doesn't rely on hand-waving the definition of words like "free" or "could". We have intuition about what those words mean, but they don't appear to have any rigorous definition that applies in the context of defining free will.