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OrphanWilde comments on My summary of Eliezer's position on free will - Less Wrong Discussion
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Intentional preservation of vagueness. You're either a troll or a mystic. I think the "troll" description is probably less insulting in this context.
Oh good grief. You can call anything vague if you set the bar high enough. Am I being significantly more vague than EY was?
ETA:
Woops, looks the people who wite the Skeptic's Dictionary are mystical trolls too:
"Free will is a concept in traditional philosophy used to refer to the belief that human behavior is not absolutely determined by external causes, but is the result of choices made by an act of will by the agent. "
Yes. I understood precisely what Eliezer was referring to.
Whereas I have no idea whatsoever what you're referring to. Elaborating:
You state that the question of free will comes down to: "Whether some organisms have the ability to make choices that aren't fully determined by outside circumstances."
When asked to define "outside circumstances," drilling down, it becomes anything outside the central nervous system.
Which leaves the question in an uncomfortable position whereby it is calling dualism a form of determinism. Indeed, any solution which posits a non-reductionist answer to the question of free will is being called determinism by your definition.
Worse still, your formulation is completely senseless in the reductionist form you've left it; you deny non-reductionist answers, but you implicitly deny all reductionist answers as well, because they've -already- answered your question: No choice happens whatsoever that is "fully determined" by things outside your central nervous system, that denies the very -concept- of reductionism. Your question maintains meaning only as rhetoric. To say Eliezer hasn't answered it in that context is to complain that he didn't preface his arguments with a statement that the brain is the organ which is making these choices.
Which leads me right back to "You have to be trolling."