Talk:Compatibilism and incompatibilism

Infinite regession?

Ok, so first I would like to define Will (not free will yet) as the driving force behind our actions. Free will is the theory that said driving force is not in turn driven by any force that would make it un-free. I think those definitions are vague enough to be reconcilable with any theory compatibilist or not. So you have in front of you, many paths that you could take depending on which path Will forces you to take. However, why does Will choose a specific path over another? Here the two schools of thought split.

Compatibilists: Under this view, Will indeed has driving forces behind it that determines how it will force you, those forces often qualify as forces that do not make will un-free. But what of those forces? what determines them? more forces? what determines those then?

Uncompatibilists: Since they reject determinism I assume that they take will to be probabilistic. So to borrow a term from Quantum Mechanics, when the the "wave-function" of decision collapses, why does it collapse to a certain possibility and not another one? (QM says that observation causes a function to collapse, but what causes it to collapse a certain way?) What "determines" for lack of a better word, where the function collapses? Whatever detemines it, that determining factor must also be probabilistic if the wave function itself is to be truly probabilistic. But then the determining factor, if probabilistic, also needs to collapse, what decides where it shall collapse? You can see where this is going...

So it seems like trying to reconcile any definition of free will with determinism, or rejecting determinism, will lead to something very strange...someone explain to me wtf is going on here? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 149.4.203.60 (talk) 21:08, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Ill Logic

I'm really trying to understand compatibilism, but it just doesn't make sense to me. The core sentence from the article (I think):

"Whilst a compatibilist will not try to deny that whatever choice you make will have been predetermined since the beginning of time, they will argue that this choice that you make is an example of free will because no one is forcing you to make whatever choice you make."

This surely is a contradiction! I'm not being forced in my choice? If history X predetermines choice A, then choice A is forced by history X. Does belief in compatibilism require one to give up logic? Because, if so, I'd rather start praying to the flying spaghetti monster.

Compatibilists differentiate between something being causally necessitated by the laws of nature, and someone being compelled to do something by someone else. They believe you are free if you are not compelled, and that you are casually necessitated, and that that is not compulsion, so you are still free.1Z 12:40, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Thank you. Your wording is more clear than the article. It seems that compatibilists indeed stress a difference between necessitation and compulsion. I believe the distinction is ultimately imaginary though. this paper basically sums up how I would argue this matter. <signing this and previous comment with my newly created account> Astarica 11:49, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm still quite confused about this, if someone compels you to do something, you are not free, right? But the person who decided to compel you to do that action was compelled(I'm sorry but I use terms rather loosely) to do so, either by natural forces(free) or someone else(not free), if the latter, that someone else was also compelled by something and so on. Unless this continues indefinitely in the end it appears that everything is ultimately cause by a natural force and therefore, free. The definition of what is free or not also seems to be very faulty. I only glanced at your essay Astarica, but in an example there was a person who was forced to know eat because he was stranded in a desert and was not free correct? Why then, are his actions not free? because it seems to me that his actions were necessitated by nature: the natural law here being that there was no food in the dessert and you cannot eat that which is not there. It seems to me that Compatibilism can always find an argument to make any action "free" under their definition. A even bigger problem with the definition is that it seems to me by any standards that the forces of nature would be more compelling than anything another human could do (this has been said many times I am sure buy i will repeat it: whatever a human does to compel you, you can always choose otherwise, you can choose to ignore the gunman and die), how can a human truly force another one besides by gabbing their limps and manipulating them(one could even argue that said limbs no longer perform the owners actions under said situation).

Also:

"Further, according to Hume, free will should not be understood as an absolute ability to have chosen differently under exactly the same inner and outer circumstances. Rather, it is a hypothetical ability to have chosen differently if one had been differently psychologically disposed by some different beliefs or desires."

Does Hume, with his early 18th century knowledge, not realize that "some different beliefs or desires" would just as well be part of the collection of "exactly the same inner and outer circumstances" and likewise result from predetermined cause? Astarica 11:49, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Hume only says that free will is the HYPOTHETICAL ability to have chosen differently IF one had been differently disposed. That's not the same as saying that we COULD have been differently disposed given the history before that which brought about our psychological disposition. Make sense?128.232.241.117 (talk) 23:04, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

Just a note

This article sucks. Determinism is true or false, it doesn't exist or fail to exist. KSchutte 20:29, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

this comment sucks Thorsmitersaw —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.78.145.1 (talk) 14:31, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

Free Will Example

The example involving someone holding a gun to a reader's head is not only very unencyclopedia-like, but it is also a very poor example of a situation that lacks a free will element. Just because a choice would most likely result in the chooser's death (such as defying the gunman in this case), does not mean that it is not a valid choice. Free will is entirely present in this scenario, and a better example is needed. VoidTalker 17:24, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Compatiblists have traditionally taken this kind of situation to define all there is about FW and the lack thereof. I am not convinced myself, but it is notable.1Z 13:02, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Are they not just "choosing not to die". How it this "forced"? And why does it require other people to be "forced". This whole thing seems to be a giant argument by definition (bait/switch). Voice-of-All 03:50, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Indeed, the very definition of free will by compatibilists seems to be faulty(as i meantioned in above post). In fact they seem to almost REVERSE conventional definitions, saying that forced actions (forced by nature) are free and that resistible compulsions (or persuasions might be a more accurate albeit euphemistic term) from other humans are not free. WTF?

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ([1]) defines Free Will as: "a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives." If we are to use this definition, free will and Determinism are able to be reconciled quite easily. Consider the fact that at the present moment (the time of my writing this) I am able to stop writing this post, yet you (in the relative future moment) see more text following. Why do/(did) I choose to do so? Can we agree that, given this is a closed system absent of a convergent system manifesting in opposition to my writing (e.g. my being struck by a meteor,) that my writing is a result of the aspects of my being/personality? If the former is true, then we must also agree that my being/personality is a culmination of all the events (system convergences) that happened in my life, which necessarily change the state of my brain (because a change in personality must result in a change of the brain,) which itself a product of many events (evolution) that have (necessarily) led up to this moment. If we rely on the aforementioned definition of free will, the existence of a choice denotes free will; even though it is a result of all of the previous factors, it is ultimately my own.

• Note: this is a strictly scientific view; I would kindly ask that any commentators refrain from arguments based on theological statements and would also ask that you would, please, keep an open mind. Koroshima (talk) 17:27, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

TBD

There is too much emphasis on Hume. Kant probably needs separate treatment.1Z 19:24, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Dilemma of Determinism. Vaguely written. Merge with pessimism?1Z 19:36, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

For What It's Worth

I see this a little differently. Of course, I can't insert my personal opinions as original research, but is there some pre-existing other philospher whose opinions I can insert?

Basically: I think that incompatibilism is entailed by dualism. In dualism, I have a "soul" that drives my body around (although how that happens is an akward problem for dualists). If my body acts as it does - including the things I say, the things I type - as a result of a chain of physical causes, then my "soul" isn't really in the driver's seat at all.

But I am not a dualist. My body = My self. It is incoherent to say "my hormones made me do it", or "my neural connections made me do it", because those things are me. The way that this body responds to sensory input, conditioned by its prior history, and by its genetic history, as encoded in the connections in the brain - these things are what I am. Self-reflective philosophising included.

Thus, my actions are not "forced", they arise in out of me being who/what I am in response to the environment I am in. If tat ain't free will, what is?

Who can I quote, to add this POV in?

That is very interesting, though one could argue the who you are is "forced" or perhaps more accurately, "determined" by things such as which sperm made it to your mothers egg and such. That being so, I would suppose that this can be said to be a new definition of of free will, and all attempts to redefine what free will is fail to answer the real question we are concerned with here: Should human's be morally responsible for their actions? (or if "morals" even exist without free will) Instead, new definitions always split that question into two different ones, do humans have free will?, and does free will imply moral accountability under this new definition? This is done in an attempt to solve the first question beyond doubt, but usually it fails. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 149.4.203.60 (talk) 20:46, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Paul Murray (talk) 02:33, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Paul, I agree. Maybe we should write a paper on the subject so we can reference it.

I am a materialist and I think you are too. I think dualism can be a useful approximation in some situations but entirely misleading when considering notions of free will.

I think we are both monists. Interestingly, the only monism that gets mentioned in the article is Anomalous monism in the section on incompatibilism. The description of it there sounds a bit like what I think but when I click on the link to Anomalous monism, that article makes the theory look like a load of rubbish. I think there is a number of possibilities:

• I'm misunderstanding something.
• The article on anomalous monism is badly written.
• Donald Davidson has essentially the same idea as us but is trying to describe it in dualist language and hence it ends up sounding like a load of rubbish.

Yaris678 (talk) 13:21, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, I'm no philospher, or even academic, and I doubt I could write a paper. The opinions above are about as articulate as I am able to be - hence my point: hasn't someone already expressed this better than I ever could? The view that determinism is a non-problem.

As for my personal views: used to be a fundie christian, now atheist/scientific materialist and all that.

With respect to monism: dualism of any form always has the problem that if everything is made of two irreconcilably distinct kinds of something, how can those somethings form a whole thing?

BTW: "My body = my self" comment - I think it's a feminist slogan. Maybe theres a vein of compatibilism to mine, there.

But really, it's all beyond me. I tried to read the anomalous monism article, but it's drawing distinctions so fine they just slip through the sidewalk-grate of my mind. The mind/brain doesn't have "tokens" in it - it grows into place in response to stimuli and genetics. You can't stand in the same river twice, and every mental event is diffent from every other. Heck - on reading the article further, maybe my ideas on mind and self ar close to what it is describing. With a backgound in computing, I know that its impossible fo a computer program to predict what another comnputer program will do, and I think that kinda means that it's not possible to "know" what's going on in another mind without being that other mind. So the idea that mental events may "subsist" (great word: means nothing) in the physical and not be reducible to it bothers me no more than the fact that a mathematical statement may be both true and not provable.

really, the question is not "what is real", because everythihng is, but "how ought we rightly understand this stuff", which has no answer at all until you're clear about what "rightly" means.

Feh - I don't worry myself with this kind of stuff anymore.

Paul Murray (talk) 03:50, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

This wording needs fixing, but I don't see how

Regarding:

"One libertarian view point based upon indeterminism which has been proposed under the assumption of naturalism, a subset of physicalism."

I'd like to fix this, but I can't figure out what the author meant. Nevertheless I'm loth to delete it. Help! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 211.30.9.229 (talk) 11:55, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Roman Catholic Church

It would be interesting if we could precisely identify the views of the Roman Catholic Church on this. I believe that the Church supports a compatibilist position, since it disagreed with the Calvinists on the issue and had its Jesuit theologians argue that a reasonable man can freely cooperate with divine grace when the time is right. ADM (talk) 16:14, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

QM, again

One famous proponent of this view was Lucretius, who asserted that the free will arises out of the random, chaotic movements of atoms, called "clinamen". One major objection to this view is that science has gradually shown that more and more of the physical world obeys completely deterministic laws,

My understanding of QM is that while wave functions propagate in a deterministic way, nevertheless wavefunction collapse is probabilistic. Unless you take the many-worlds view.

Paul Murray (talk) 04:40, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Illogical Section on Compatibilism in Theology

The section called "Compatibilism in Theology" has some weak arguments, I think this section should either be made logical (seems impossible) or deleted. For example it begins it's argument by asserting that there could be a "free-willed G*d", well if there could be a "free-willed G*d" then there's no reason there could not be free-willed humans QED, it is pretending to be a philosophical and logical argument after all so it has to play by the rules of such argumentation. Firefight (talk) 03:21, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

In reply to the challenge by Firefight: If this section were in fact arguing for anything, it would be appropriate to question the validity of the argument, question the neutrality of the reference, etc. However, this section is not an argument, but a summary. Critics need not agree with the theologians to acknowledge that they do have a great many things to say about compatibilism. Nor does one need a neutral source to point out that this is a fair summary of what the theologians are talking about--a link to an example of it seems adequate. Capetown2010 (talk) 12:19, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

Splitting this article

There was easily enough information for these pages to warrant the same split present in some of the other wikipedia languages. Not only that, but these pages desperately needed editing for flow and to be concise. Finally, the Determinism page (even after some editing) has way too much info about these two views. For these reasons I have created the pages Incompatibilism and Compatibilism respectively. I have greatly edited the latter. For now Determinism links to those two pages, but I realize I have done a lot of editing without giving time for community input.

I will wait to see your reactions before I move information out of Determinism into each of Incompatibilism and Compatibilism.

Let me know what you guys think. -Tesseract2 (talk) 07:28, 28 August 2010 (UTC)

UPDATE

I have redirected links to this page to one of two articles that it has spawned. In time, if there are no objections, I will go through the pages that "Link to here (Compatibilism and Incompatibilism)" and link them instead to one article or the other.-Tesseract2 (talk) 14:12, 2 September 2010 (UTC)