What is your position on free will?

[America Needs a 13-6 Progressive SCOTUS]

Going to pick option 2.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Free will exists and is fully compatible with determinism. The whole issue is a pseudo-problem born of an incoherent understanding of modality.

[Alcibiades]

I just want to say that this is a badly designed poll. The three options should be the three main positions on free will in contemporary philosophy: libertarianism (free will exists and determinism is false), compatibilism (free will exists and determinism is true), and hard determinism (free will doesn’t exist and determinism is true).

[Alcibiades]

As for my own answer, while I’m a bit more sceptical of compatibilism than Antonio is, I also struggle to see how a full-throated libertarian conception of free will is supposed to work: if our actions are not determined at all, then how can they really be free (in the sense that I think most people care about free will, as a necessary condition for moral responsibily)? If they just spontaneously, randomly happen (which is what a complete lack of casual determination seems to imply), it seems we cannot be held responsible for them.

[Blue3]

Option 4 (so I'm not voting)

-We will likely never know with certainty
-Even if it's an illusion, it doesn't feel like one, and it wouldn't really change society or daily actions, so the answer doesn't truly matter
-Even if it's an illusion, with quantum mechanics ruled by probability, I'm not sure if "determinism" is the right way to frame it

[Statilius the Epicurean]

I don't know what "free will" means here.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

I believe that it exists insofar as I fear the consequences of people believing that it doesn't exist.

[°Leprechaun]

It has been predetermined that I would pick option 2.
If I am correct it has been predetermined how everyone else voted, which means that free will and determinism are mutually exclusive.
I could be wrong, but unless you can prove me wrong, I will stick with my vote.
The op has allowed you to change your vote.
If you do, are you exercising free will?

[Battista Minola 1616]

I just want to say that this is a badly designed poll. The three options should be the three main positions on free will in contemporary philosophy: libertarianism (free will exists and determinism is false), compatibilism (free will exists and determinism is true), and hard determinism (free will doesn’t exist and determinism is true).

This may be a stupid question, but has "free will doesn't exist and determinism is false" ever been brought forth or explored as a position in philosophy?

[Big Abraham]

I think he should be freed. Will did nothing wrong.

[Alcibiades]

This may be a stupid question, but has "free will doesn't exist and determinism is false" ever been brought forth or explored as a position in philosophy?

Galen Strawson (of ‘most famous father-son duo in philosophy’ fame) has, in a sense (his position is actually that free will is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism, and so it’s completely impossible).

Speaking more generally, one way this position could come about is by agreeing with a point that many compatibilists have made, and that I gestured towards in my post directly below the one you quoted, namely that free will may actually require determinism in some sense. Unlike the compatibilists though, such a philosopher would then say that determinism is in fact false, and thus that free will doesn’t exist. Their picture of the world would be one in which human action happens completely randomly and spontaneously, depriving us of any meaningful control over what we decide to do.

[It’s so Joever]

Death is inevitable

[Attorney General & PPT Dwarven Dragon]

It exists. It's just that God knows where all the paths lead and knows us better than we know ourselves. He does push people along a certain road from time to time, but a lot of the time he doesn't personally give a damn, but having created us, he can know what we'll do.

[Kleine Scheiße]

Psalm 38:7

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Free will means freedom from but not apart from God, which means do as you want under Moses Laws of 10 Commandments

Like as a teen or adolescent person, you have free will from parents since puberty but under rules raised by your parents

[John Dule]

Free will exists and is fully compatible with determinism. The whole issue is a pseudo-problem born of an incoherent understanding of modality.

I'd be interested to hear some elaboration on this.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Free will exists and is fully compatible with determinism. The whole issue is a pseudo-problem born of an incoherent understanding of modality.

I'd be interested to hear some elaboration on this.

Free will, in the sense that actually matters to discussions of human agency, is the idea that a person's actions are a product of their own conscious choices. We sometimes act in ways that weren't dictated by our free will, to the extent that a lot of our behaviors are driven by instincts (I don't really choose to pull my hand away from a hot stove). But obviously we also have plenty of latitude for conscious choices as well, or else the distinction wouldn't even make sense in the first place.

Under this framework, whether the universe is deterministic or not has no bearing on the existence of free will. My choices don't become less free or less genuine by virtue of being part of a larger causal chain. Indeed, as Alcibiades points out, it would probably be more damaging to our common sense of free will if indeterminism is true, since it would mean our decisions are ultimately random and thus in some sense meaningless. I don't think that means free will wouldn't still be a thing in such an universe (I think the existence of free will is a self-evident truth) but either way, I'd rather live in a deterministic one. Viewing our own choices as parts of a causal picture allow us greater control over them, and thus ultimately greater freedom to act according to our more fundamental values and preferences. If I know putting myself in a certain situation will lead me to make choices I come to regret, I can do a better job avoiding that situation and thus have more agency over my own life.

The problem with discussions of free will is that they tend to be riddled with ambiguous if not outright incoherent understandings of what we're even talking about. A concept that's often bandied about is "the ability to have done otherwise". Now, to me, it's pretty obvious that I do have the ability to do otherwise. Instead of typing at my computer right now, I could pick it up and throw it out the window. There is no force external to me that's preventing me from doing that. But I don't want to do it, and I have specific reasons for not wanting to do it. These reasons, taken together, determine my choice not to throw my computer out the window, but they don't take away my ability to do so. For some reason, proponents of libertarian free will disagree with this - they think I'm not truly free to throw my computer out the window if I have deterministic reasons not to want to do it.

The root of the problem, to the extent I understand it, seems to be that "the ability to have done otherwise" is construed as a metaphysical concept. That's where we get to the problem of modal logic. For some bizarre reason a lot of philosophers seem drawn to the idea that modal concepts (possibility, necessity, impossibility and contingency) are fundamental metaphysical entities. I never understood the appeal of these views, as I always saw these concepts as being easily reducible to easier-to-grasp concepts of uncertainty and counterfactuality. They also lead to some embarrassingly bad lines of thinking, such as Gödel's attempt to resurrect the beaten-down corpse of the Ontological argument (I'm sure you'll get a kick out of that given your religious views).

Anyway, if you take possibility to be a fundamental metaphysical category, then "the ability to have done otherwise" seems to mean not only that you're physically capable of another course of action, but that you're capable of wanting it irrespective of all the reasons you might have not to want it. So I'm only free to throw my computer out the window if there exists a possible world where all the other facts are the same but somehow I did in fact throw my computer out the window. To me, this is patently ridiculous. We'd have to imagine that somehow all "free" beings are prime movers, even though all evidence points to us being as subject to the laws of causality as everything else in the universe. I guess a lot of people feel like the kind of free will I subscribe to is not true free will? To me, it's the only definition of free will that makes any sense, and libertarian free will advocates are only making hard determinism more plausible by holding to an impossible standard.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Well, treating "if a property is positive, then it is necessarily positive" as an axiom that doesn't even need to be argued for is absoutely absurd, so...