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elharo comments on How would not having free will feel to you? - Less Wrong
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Is there a standard definition of "free will" that everyone is assuming, and for some reason I don't know? If so could someone please point to or summarize it?
I confess that the more I try to think about this and related questions, the more I find myself confused. At this point I'm not even sure what the question is. "How would not having free will feel to you?" is a grammatically correct English sentence; but it seems no more meaningful to me than a sentence such as "How would not having open feet feel to you?"
That is, I am not sure what we are even talking about here. What is the difference between free will and will?
I think you nailed it, actually, there is none. The whole point of my post was to highlight this problem with the definition. Because having free will feels so natural and intuitive to most people, they tend to assume that everyone means basically the same thing by it, even if they have trouble spelling it out. But the complement of free will is not intuitive at all, and requires some thinking and retrospection. As you can see from the replies, the results are all over the map. Some feel that the complement of free will feels indistinguishable from free will, meaning that the whole term is vacuous for them. Others think that the lack of free will feels like knowing what you will do and being unable to change it. Or even wanting to change it. Yet others feel that not feeling the connection between your thoughts and actions feels like lacking free will. Some argue that my tentative classification in the OP is flawed to begin with.
That's the my whole issue with the free will debates: people think that they talk about the same thing, but they do not, so the debate is pointless until at least some basic definitions are agreed upon.