shminux comments on How would not having free will feel to you? - Less Wrong
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Uh, sorry, I should have phrased it differently. What I meant was not just that this angle is probably not very popular, but also that it is hard to find, given that the specific language philosophers would use would be unfamiliar and non-obvious to someone outside the field. Additionally, it would be a topic more likely to be studied in neuroscience, psychology or even psychiatry than in philosophy of mind. Routine paywalling doesn't help, either. But yes, I also admit to a certain prejudice against a discipline which has multiple warring schools arguing opposite points with no ability to reconcile them. It's like if physics was mostly arguing about interpretations of QM.
Anyway, thanks for the links, I'll see if I can find something relevant. Feel free (as in "free will") to link if you come across something, as well. I'm looking at the Searle's article you linked (pdf), and it has one working definition of the feeling of free will:
There is some more here.
I found no descriptions like "perception of lack of free will may manifest in the following ways..." As a result, the definition above is directly contradicted by some of the no-free-will accounts posted in the comments to the OP. That it takes only one post by an amateur on an online forum to poke holes in a well-cited paper of a renown professional philosopher is not very encouraging.
I donno, that description seems to me to capture in a general way most of what people have pointed to as the experience of (or lack of) free will. Searle might say that the experience of the lack of free will is the experience of there being no such gaps where we generally expect them. That is, the experience of anticedent causes or reasons being causally sufficient for an action in the way perceptions and the causes of perceptual experiences are causally sufficient to make me believe that there's a tree in front of me.
I mean, in some sense anyone who gives you an answer to the question 'how does it feel to have/not have free will', where 'free will' is understood as metaphysical free will (the kind that's at stake in discussions about determinism, say) is confused. Metaphysical free will or lack thereof can't feel like one thing or another. We can however distinguish between free will (in a non-metaphysical sense) and coercion, or free will in action and the kind of non-free relationship we have with our perceptual beliefs. And the 'gap' thing is a fair account of that phenomenological distinction.
TheOtherDave gave one first-hand contradicting account. There the experience of "no free will" came from too large a gap, not from not having a gap. Alternatively, one can think of the feeling of being compelled and unable to resist some perceived external or internal force as "lacking free will", like an addict in the movie Flight both dialing her dealer and praying he wouldn't answer. The gap is still present, but what is absent is, in Searle's words, the stages of deliberating and deciding.
I am not sure what this "non-metaphysical sense" is. Perceptual? Then it seems like a tautology.
I don't see how the 'gap' disappears in the above examples.
Eh, I wasn't fair in my other reply. The idea of a gap seems like a neat one, and probably matches some of the free-will experiences, just not all or even a majority of them.