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TheAncientGeek comments on Philosophical schools are approaches not positions - Less Wrong Discussion
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With naturalistic libertarianism you need to determine that physical indeterminism exists, which you can do with experiment based on EPR and Bell's theorem and suchlike, and you also need to verify that the brain uses indeterminiosm in some appropriate way. I stated earlier that naturalistic libertarians put forward falsifiable hypotheses.
That doesn't follow. In the FW universe, individuals could feel they have FW because they do, in the other, the feeling could be caused by something else.
I don't see why. The way fo verifying the existence of naturalistic FW I outlined above doesn't particularly dpeend on the feeling of FW, and could even be applied in a third hypothetical universe where FW exists, but people don't feel they have it.
That's the "starts with" problem again. It might well be the psychological motivation for getting interested int he subject, but that doesn't at all means it is the sole evidence that can be brought to bear, or the only thing that needs explaining.
Free will is what the feeling of free will seems to be. Since we feel that we could have done otherwise, as when we regret an action, the actual ability to have done otherwise is something to look for when looking for the reality of free will.
When you are trying to find if something exists, you are looking for something that has all the characteristics it is supposed to have, and that is one of the characteristics it is supposed to have.
ETA Bu that is just the beginning. A decision that could have been otherwise has potentially far greater importance than a "decision" that was inevitable, because it potentially brings about a different future.
Not if it's ours or like ours. Here I'm taking the two stage model as the definition of FW; ordinarily I wouldn't. We feel we have FW because we notice that our intentions cause our actions, and because we aren't aware of any sufficient cause of our intentions, and because we are usually liable to think our minds are much more transparent to ourselves than they actually are. Since we see no cause and think it's transparent we often infer there is no cause.
You are implicitly taking it that "has a cause" means "no free will". I am taking it "that having an external cause" means no FW. It seems reasonable that FW means causing one's own actions, so it is not exclusive of all forms of causality.
When I wrote "we aren't aware of any sufficient cause of our intentions," you should charitably interpret that as "any sufficient external cause." That doesn't change the result. Suppose the two stage model is correct for us. In a universe as like ours as possible but deterministic, human beings would think their actions lacking in any external cause. They would think so for the same reason we think so about ourselves.
There's a difference between would and might. Lack of knowledge of causes, etc, could explain the feeling of Fw. The actual existence of FW could explain the feeling of FW. Your response to the second hypothesis is "Not if i[the universe is] ours or like ours". You are taking one of the possible , mechanisms for a feeling of FW to be the only possible one, or as somehow masking the other, without supplying a reason for believing it to be so.
Yes, masking, or better, confounding. If 50% of the time when you say "horse", your horse-beliefs are actually caused by cows, then you're not a reliable horse detector. The research by Libet, Wegner, etc. applies to the selection of options stage, not just the generation stage, and shows significant influence of "external" causes. Scare quotes: "external" by most libertarians' lights. (In my view, this is not a problem, but I'm a dyed in the wool compatibilist.) Supposing our universe to have some decisions fitting the libertarian two-stage model, nevertheless in other cases we are just as prone as the guys in the other universe to think ourselves "initiators" of causal chains.
From what I have seen of such research ""external" equates to "unconscious", ie free will is tacitly taken to be conscious volitional control. That idea is part of the cluster of issues that make up the problem of free will, but its not the same as libertarian free will. As far as I am concerned, the beliefs and values of my unconscious mind are my beliefs and values..I don't think I am taken over by an external force when my System 1 decides something.
Understanding the topic conceptually is important, and is often what goes missing in the naiver empirical approaches.
Compatibilist free will is almost trivially compatible with determinism, which is a strong clue that is is not what the historical debate has been about. So now we have three things: libertarian free will, compatibilist free will, and conscious control.
I'm with you on System 1, and that is a big flaw in the way Libet and Wegner present their results. But more importantly, on further thought, their causal diagrams are probabilistic. So possibly, you're right: our beliefs about lack of cause could be caused by an actual indeterminacy, while in an otherwise similar deterministic universe their beliefs are caused by something else. I was wrong to object to that claim.
I still see no appeal in such indeterminism, but that's another story.