Hal Finney wrote:
>The question of free will has generated an enormous
>amount of philosophical literature. I'd suggest reading
>at least the first part of this page on "Compatibilism",
>http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/. Compatibilism is the
>doctrine that free will is compatible with determinism. Probably the
>most well known advocacy of compatibilism is Daniel Dennett'e 1984 book
>Elbow Room. From the page above:
>
> > Compatibilism offers a solution to the free will problem. This
> > philosophical problem concerns a disputed incompatibility between free
> > will and determinism. Compatibilism is the thesis that free will is
> > compatible with determinism. Because free will is taken to be a
>necessary
> > condition of moral responsibility, compatibilism is sometimes expressed
> > in terms of a compatibility between moral responsibility and
>determinism.
> >
This is all getting far more complex than it needs to be. I think the
problem lies in unexamined assumptions about what the term "free will"
means, setting up the compatibilist/ incompatibilist debate when there is no
call for such a debate in the first place.
Here is my definition: a decision I make is "free" when I feel that I could
have decided otherwise. That's it! It covers every eventuality; if I don't
have this "free" feeling, then it isn't free will. Now, where in this is
there a theory about randomness and determinism? In fact, the feeling I get
when I am exercising free will is neither that I am being controlled by
deterministic laws of nature nor that I am doing something random; it is a
unique feeling which, like an itch or a pain, has no correlate in the
"objective" world and can only be understood by actually experiencing it. I
realise that as a matter of fact, I *must* be subject to either
deterministic laws, randomness, or some combination of the two - there are
no other possibilities - but this knowledge no more negates the legitimacy
of my subjective experience of freedom than the knowledge that pain is just
lectrical impulses in a nerve negates my experience of toothache.
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Wed Apr 13 2005 - 08:58:20 PDT