6 Comments

You saying free will denier is interesting: people usually say “X denier” when its about a subject of great societal importance, where it should be obvious to most the consequences and facts, and deniers are supposed to be very bad for society or the world

(Examples would be: climate change denier, holocaust denier, climate mastery denier, etc etc)

Do you think your debate opponent here fits these criteria ive mentioned? ( ie, obvious facts and their opinions if listened to is harmful)

Expand full comment

Further thoughts of my experience with the philosophy of free will (sorry if this is repetetive)

Thinking back on the debates i had with my dad, it seems like we were thinking on different planes and levels on the idea of free will

I was thinking in very abstract and Systemwide(?) ways about free will. My world model was: People are generally rational or at the very least try to make good decisions for themself; if one has free will, then people would on average make optimal decisions for themself, cause it seems super stupid to deliberately make bad decisions; People tend to make a lot of very bad decisions; This serves as strong evidence (to my mind at the time) that free will doesnt exist, cause why on earth would people be that stupid if they had free will?

In a way i was thinkiing about free will and decisions in a very "FOOM" or optimized way; People should be increasing all of their capabilities way more if they really were free. I also had the impression that life and life decisions should be way more random and spread out if free will was true, and people seemed to consistent statisticlly for that to make sense

(there are various errors in this thinking, but my dad never pointed those out, instead going with intuition based arguments)

He was very practical and intuition based on the subject, and more focused on psychological motivations. Whenever i would argue the points i said earlier, he would do something that required an action from me, and ask why i did it, and say that me doing it/choosing to do it showed that i believed in free will and were being difficult for no reason. He could get very upset by my discussions, and his answers never really satisfied me, and just made me teenage rebellious

As i sade in an earlier comment, I funnily enough acted MORE like free will existed when i came to the conclusion that free will didnt exist, and more like my dad acted generally. I think what happened was this:

When i "believed" in free will, my mental model of the world was in a way, dreamlike and overly optimistic of human behaviour: My model of free will was kinda like giving everyone superintelligence or superconcientousness, and that people could and should move away from irrational preferences and worldviews cause it was bad for them, why would they do that?

When that model failed to predict the world i came to the conclusion that free will didnt exist (also partially because of my own performance anxiety and depression)

When i then moved to "not believing" in free will, my mental world model moved to: people Are driven by X motivations and Incentives (Some prosocial motivations, some antisocial like Alcoholism genes and etc) , to do Y actions in the expectation of Z results, and they have B capabilities (IQ, genetic concientoussness, learned skills,) and sometimes different levels of C luck;

That mental model worked way better to predict the world, and since i had mapped "free will" concept to another model, i came to the conclusion that free will didnt exist. I think my dad actually had the mental model that i just shared, but had put it with the name of "free will"

Theres probably a lot of reasons why this happened:

1: My autism, ADHD, and high sensitivity led to me struggling with mentalising unless i had math or rigid rules to do cognitive labour. Normal situations could overwhelm me unless i had math and rules, which SEEMED to condradict with my dads usage of the word "free will" which seemed just random.

2: i have some form of alexothymia, which is difficulty recognizing and identifying once own emotions. So i often did not realize my own intuitions or feelings, and led to a variety of weird and wacky situations (like my family saying im suprised, and me genuily responding "IM SUPRISED!?"

3: The word free will most often being brought up in conversations and situations with negative emotional connetations, or when i had messed up and grown up repremanded me: A common situation when i grew up was me doing something that upset people, people rhetoriclly asking "why did you do that", me taking the question literally and explaining: and then several times in church getting "You are blaming other people, that is bad, stop: you have free will"

so free will became associated with negative feelings and situations, it came to mean "chaos and randomness" for me, rather than "agency and decisions" which was what it meant for my dad.

4: because of point 3, my solution to handling the world was to reject free will cause then i could actually put probabilities on my actions rather than everything being random chaos. And whenever i tried to act more like i believed in free will (with my mistaken world model) People felt i was a perfectionistic jerk, and my dad got upset when i say i did those things because people had free will and he would say stuff like "Your acting the opposite of free will, you are not respecting peoples free will" which just confused the heck out of me

(i think when i learned the word "preferences" from rationality and economics, that that word actually matched to what my dad meant when he said that)

My ultimate solution to the free will problem was when i was 19 and realized "hey, this question doesnt enable me to have better predictions, the question is meaningless so i should just stop asking my dad why he thinks free will exists"

And so i stopped talking about it most of the time.

-

I hope that was interesting? idk

Expand full comment

Dr. Huemer, this sounds like a pretty interesting debate. Unfortunately I missed its live broadcast so that’s a shame.

I have recently become interested in the free will debate. I have mostly heard the line of reasoning from Sam Harris and his arguments it. I have heard a bit of Daniel Dennets as well.

Currently I am stuck on the definition of “free will” since there seem to be a few. I have come across:

Libertarian Free Will

Colloquial/Common Sense Free Will

Compatibilism’s Free Will

Determinsm’s Free Will

These all seem to have subtle differences that are important and certain assumptions built in. Since I was unable to see your debate, what definition of free will are you using?

Also, who won the debate?! 😆😁

Expand full comment

I find panels with more than 3 people too crowded. But I appreciate you taking the time to defend the common sense view Dr. Huemer. Much appreciated.

Expand full comment