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Oscar_Cunningham comments on [Poll] Less Wrong and Mainstream Philosophy: How Different are We? - Less Wrong
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Other: "Free will" is a confused term, so the question is unanswerable. If one takes the mechanism that results in the confusion about free will and labels that "free will", then of course compatibilism holds.
I voted 'accept compatibilism' but essentially agree with this statement.
Upvoted in agreement. (I responded other as well.)
In no other field of discourse that comes to mind do we generally take a non-existent thing P and re-label the psychological cause of belief in that thing 'P' merely so that we get to keep using the word. What would be the precedent?
If P is a confused term, then asserting 'P exists' is either false or meaningless, not 'trivially true because we can redefine it in some principled way'.
"Centrifugal force"
Centrifugal force isn't a psychological cause. It's not as though we learned that centrifugal force is a hallucination caused by iron and B12 deficiency and redefined 'centrifugal force' to mean 'a deficiency of iron and B12.'
Redefining 'free will' to mean 'the sensation of feeling as though one's actions are in no way determined by causes outside oneself' (or whatever it is that we're supposed to be salvaging here) strikes me as more similar to redefining 'sin' to mean 'the sensation of feeling guilty' or perhaps 'the sensation of feeling that one has transgressed against a supernatural order.' Or redefining 'karma' to mean 'the intuition that we live in a just universe.' Or redefining 'soul' to mean 'the brain's tendency to treat itself as though it were immaterial.' Where do we take metaphysical or religious ideas and salvage them by re-assigning them cognitive states? Maybe I'm missing some obvious pool of cases of this sort.