Hey 1poorguy, thanks for the email alerting me to this place and this thread! And I see Goofyhoofy here!

unquarked: "Clearly the notion of free will is a near-unanimously accepted human construct."

The devil is in the details. What do you mean by 'free will'?


1poorguy: "Last I heard from him, he was having a sort of crisis about this."

The crisis was that other people didn't see compatibilist choices as real choices. I hate the idea of communicating poorly and the idea that I see things so differently from most people that we can't communicate. I didn't have any crisis with the naturalist / compatibilist conceptions of choice.

Goofyhoofy: "So what? It is still your brain making the decision, not some cosmic collision of particles forcing it."

My brain making the decision is sufficient for me. I acknowledge, though, that the state of my brain is fully determined by 'cosmic collisions of particles forcing it.'

My own short summary of the issue:

Free will is often defined in such a way that it is a four sided triangle. The definition itself is inherently contradictory, and cannot possibly exist. It requires a person's choice to be determined by a subset of reality (a person, willing the choice) while simultaneously being undetermined by the whole of reality (free to possibly have been a different choice.) This is incoherent. I certainly don't have any experience of making such a choice nor do I pretend I can make such a choice.

For me, choices that meet some minimum level of consideration and without coercion from another can be considered to be taken out of one's own free will - even though the agent making the choice couldn't have chosen otherwise in exactly identical circumstances.

When IBM's Watson was playing Jeopardy, was it exhibiting free will when it chose its answers?