I think this is his conclusion:
...if we want to know which meaning to attach to a confusing sensation, we should ask why the sensation is there, and under what conditions it is present or absent.
Then I could say something like: "This sensation of freedom occurs when I believe that I can carry out, without interference, each of multiple actions, such that I do not yet know which of them I will take, but I am in the process of judging their consequences according to my emotions and morals."
This is a condition that can fail in the presence of jail cells, or a decision so overwhelmingly forced that I never perceived any uncertainty about it.
There - now my sensation of freedom indicates something coherent; and most of the time, I will have no reason to doubt the sensation's veracity. I have no problems about saying that I have "free will" appropriately defined; so long as I am out of jail, uncertain of my own future decision, and living in a lawful universe that gave me emotions and morals whose interaction determines my choices.
Certainly I do not "lack free will" if that means I am in jail, or never uncertain of my future decisions, or in a brain-state where my emotions and morals fail to determine my actions in the usual way.
Usually I don't talk about "free will" at all, of course! That would be asking for trouble - no, begging for trouble - since the other person doesn't know about my redefinition. The phrase means far too many things to far too many people, and you could make a good case for tossing it out the window.
But I generally prefer to reinterpret my sensations sensibly, as opposed to refuting a confused interpretation and then calling the sensation "false".
This sounds pretty compatibilist to me. EY gives a definition of free will that is manifestly compatible with determinism. Elsewhere in that post he argues that different definitions of free will are nonsensical and are generated by misleading intuitions.
But as the quote demonstrates, and as discussed in a different post, EY is less interested in providing a definition for free will and then asserting that people do or do not possess free will, and more interested in explaining in detail where all the intuitions about free will come from, and therefore why people talk about free will. He suggests that if you can explain what caused you to ask the question "do we have free will?" in the first place, you may not need to even bother to answer the question.
EY gives a definition of free will that is manifestly compatible with determinism.
True, and EY seems to be taking up Isaiah Berlin's line about this: suggesting that the problem of free will is a confusion because 'freedom' is about like not being imprisoned, and that has nothing to do with natural law one way or the other. I absolutely grant that EY's definition of free will given in the quote is compatible with natural determinism. I think everyone would grant that, but it's a way of saying that the sense of free will thought to conflict with determin...
ErinFlight said:
Thinking about it, I realized that this might be a common concern. There are probably plenty of people who've looked at various more-or-less technical or jargony Less Wrong posts, tried understanding them, and then given up (without posting a comment explaining their confusion).
So I figured that it might be good to have a thread where you can ask for explanations for any Less Wrong post that you didn't understand and would like to, but don't want to directly comment on for any reason (e.g. because you're feeling embarassed, because the post is too old to attract much traffic, etc.). In the spirit of various Stupid Questions threads, you're explicitly encouraged to ask even for the kinds of explanations that you feel you "should" get even yourself, or where you feel like you could get it if you just put in the effort (but then never did).
You can ask to have some specific confusing term or analogy explained, or to get the main content of a post briefly summarized in plain English and without jargon, or anything else. (Of course, there are some posts that simply cannot be explained in non-technical terms, such as the ones in the Quantum Mechanics sequence.) And of course, you're encouraged to provide explanations to others!