Kip Werking:

A. On your definition, free will is something that people uncontroversially have. Nobody ever doubted that people have the sort of local control you discuss. Nobody ever doubted that people are more like rocks than computers. So, compatibilist definitions of free will are boring, and odd, to me for at least that reason.

I say, "Hooray, I made it add up to normality!" Philosophy should be as normal as possible, but no more normal than that.

Yes, I probably was referring to your paper.

Thus, if you're willing to say that God, souls, etc., do not exist, but draw the line and say "wait a minute, I'm willing to deny the existence of all of these other absurdities, but I'm not going to give you free will. [Maybe adding: that cuts too close]. I'm even willing to redefine the term, as Dennett does, before admitting defeat", then you fit Tamler Sommer's wonderful observation that "[p]hilosophers who reject God, Cartesian dualism, souls, noumenal selves, and even objective morality, cannot bring themselves to do the same for the concepts of free will and moral responsibility." There seems to be some tension here.

The primary thing I want to save is the sensation of freedom - once you know what it does indicate as a matter of psychological causality, there's no reason to interpret it as meaning anything else. As for moral responsibility, that's a question of morality and would take us into a whole different class of arguments.

I am not attached to the phrase "free will", though I do take a certain amount of pride in knowing exactly which confusion it refers to, and even having saved the words as still meaning something. Most of the philosophical literature surrounding it - with certain exceptions such as your own work! - fails to drive at either psychology or reduction, and can be discarded without loss.

But the sensations that people feel when choosing, and the phenomenon of choice itself, is in a different class from belief in God. Choice may not work the way people think it does, but they do, in fact, choose (in this our lawful universe).

By the way, I sometimes think of "soul" as referring to substrate-independent personal identity, though of course I don't use the word that way in my writing. You'll note that Jeffreyssai did, though.

The point is this: you, Eliezer (and Dennett, McKenna etc.) might be cool customers, but the idea of an alien/God/machine creating me five seconds ago, implanting within me a desire/value to pick up an apple, and then having the local control to act on that desire/value SCARES THE LIVING FU** OUT OF PEOPLE—and not just because of the alien/God/machine.

This might not give rise to a sensation of freedom, if the desire to pick up the apple is strong enough that there is never a moment of personal uncertainty about the choice.

Fear of being manipulated by an alien is common-sensically in a whole different class from fear of being deterministic within physics. You've got to worry about what else the alien might be planning for you; it's a new player on the board, and a player who occupies an immensely superior position.

Natural selection is sort of an intermediate case between aliens and physics. Evolution manipulates you, creates impulses within you that were actually chosen by criteria at cross-purposes to your deliberate goals, i.e., you think you're an altruist but evolution ensures that you'll want to hold on to power. But evolution is stupid and can be understood using finite human effort; it is not a smarter alien.

The alien is part of what scares people, that's why evolutionary psychology creates stronger fears than deterministic physics.

B. On my pet definition of free will, the one I came into the debate with, and strongly feel pulled towards, free will is that power which solved an apparent problem: that my entire life destiny was fixed, before I was born, by circumstances outside of my control.

"Before" = mixing timeful and timeless perspectives

Your entire life destiny is deterministic(ally branching) given the past, but it was not written before you were born.

I sometimes say, "The future is written and we are the writing."

So you can see why I might want to rescue even "free will" and not just the sensation of freedom; what people fear, when they fear they do not have free will, is not the awful truth.