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grooverocker t1_j8gbjqe wrote

Reply to comment by SvetlanaButosky in “The principle of protecting our own thinking from eavesdroppers is fundamental to autonomy.” – Daniel Dennett debates the sort of free will it’s worth wanting with neuroscientists Patrick Haggard and philosopher Helen Steward by IAI_Admin

Dennett and compatibilists at large are not arguing for the existence of libertarian freewill, which is the kind of freewill Sam Harris is good at debunking.

The idea of libertarian freewill (that the will is a law unto itself, free from external causation) either belongs in the category of magical thinking or debunked hypotheses à la phlogiston theory and the luminiferous aether.

Dennett agrees with all of that. Compatibilists agree that the universe is deterministic, that's why they're compatibilists.

Dennett brings a far more subtle and important point to the table which he has coined "the freewill worth wanting." This stance is what (among other things) differentiates responsibility from inculpability. There are reasons why, in a brute deterministic world, some people are held responsible for their actions while others are not.

It seems to me that there are two misunderstandings incompatibilists often make,

  1. They operate under the old rubric of libertarian freewill in their discourse, in which case they're talking past the compatibilist.

  2. They haven't done their due diligence with the "and then what happens?" component of the two philosophies. This is where the major differences between the two schools show themselves! This is where- I'd argue- you'd find the reasons why compatibilism is the superior philosophy compared to incompatibilism.

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EleanorStroustrup t1_j8hl78m wrote

> Dennett agrees with all of that… Dennett brings a far more subtle and important point to the table which he has coined “the freewill worth wanting.”

“I am a hard determinist, but I’m going to take this other thing that isn’t free will and call it free will, and argue that we have that instead (while not always making it clear that I’m not talking about actual “free will” despite using that phrase), as if that’s a meaningful thing to do”.

Going back to basics:

> Some "modern compatibilists", such as Harry Frankfurt and Daniel Dennett, argue free will is simply freely choosing to do what constraints allow one to do. In other words, a coerced agent's choices can still be free if such coercion coincides with the agent's personal intentions and desires.

If everything is determined, the concept of an agent loses all meaning. There is no agent who can make choices. There are just indistinguishable particles. Debating the nuances of what it means to “freely choose to do what constraints allow” is also internally inconsistent if you accept determinism, because we don’t make choices. What we’re left with is “free will is simply having the perception that you are an agent who is capable of choosing to do something that you think is an available choice”, which is just worthless as a position. It means nothing.

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