You can see free will as 1 d : enjoying personal freedom : not subject to the control or domination of another. There no other person who controls your actions.

The next definitions is: 2 a : not determined by anything beyond its own nature or being : choosing or capable of choosing for itself

I think you can make a good case that the way someone's neurons work is part of their own nature or being.

You ontological model that there's an enity called physics_2 that causes neurons to do something that not in their nature or being is problematic

Not quite. It needs to have TWO labels. On the left it says, "DO NOT PRESS" and on the right it says "PRESS THIS BUTTON".

Hmmmm. Not sure that's quite right. The serpent wasn't an authority figure. Maybe label the button "DO NOT PRESS" and add a stranger (a door-to-door insurance salesman, perhaps) who claims that you'll never know what the button does until you try it?

Is it okay for a three-month-old baby, who does not understand what it is doing, to bite a kitten's tail?

No. Of course not. Why would you doubt it?

(And is it okay for the kitten to then claw at the baby?)

Yes. Of course. Why would you doubt it?

Okay, in both cases, the situation is basically the same - a juvenile member of one species attacks and damages a juvenile member of another species. Why do you think one is okay and the other one is not?

Delegation?

Huh??? Why would an omnipotent deity need to delegate?

Because it's really boring to have to keep trying to individually explain the same basic principles to each of a hundred thousand near-complete idiots?

Cain knew it was wrong to kill Abel

How do you know that? Just because he denied doing it? Maybe he thought it was perfectly OK to kill Abel, but wanted to avoid what he saw as unjust punishment.

If so, then he sought to avoid what it from every other person in the world (Genesis 4, end of verse 14: "anyone who finds me will kill me"). Either he thinks that everyone else is arbitrarily evil, or he thinks they'd have reason to want to kill him.

Also, let's look at man's next transgression:

"Ge6:5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually."

In other words, God's first genocide (the Flood) was quite literally for thought crimes. Does it seem likely to you that the people committing these (unspecified) thought crimes knew they were transgressing against God's will?

I'd always understood the Flood story as they weren't just thinking evil, but continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren't even considering doing non-evil stuff.

Okay, but we can still predict the output of the computer at any given, finite, time step.

Really? How exactly would you do that? Because the only way I know of to tell what a computer is going to do at step N once N is sufficiently large is to build a computer and run it for N steps.

Simulate the algorithm with pencil and paper, if all else fails. (Technically, you could consider that as using your brain as the computer and running the program, except you can interrupt it at any point and investigate the current state)

the coin tosses can be replaced by a person with free will calling out "head!" and "tail!" in whatever order he freely desires to do

I really don't get what point you're trying to make here. My position is that people do not have free will, only the illusion of free will. If it were possible to actually do this experiment, that would simply prove that my position is correct.

The point I'm trying to make with the coin/time-traveller example is that knowledge of the future - even perfect knowledge of the future - does not necessarily imply a perfectly deterministic universe.

See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. This is kind of like arguing over whether Shakespeare's plays were really written by Shakespeare, or by someone else who happened to have the same name. You've lost critical information here, namely, that there is a connection between GW-the-historical-person and GW-the-myth that goes far beyond that fact that they have the same name.

(Side note: I don't actually know GW-the-myth. It's a bit of cultural extelligence that I, as a non-American, haven't really been exposed to. I'm not certain whether it's important to this argument that I should)

Or take another example: Buzz Lighyear started out existing as as an idea in someone's head. At some later point in time, Buzz Lightyear began to exist also as a cartoon character. These are distinct because Buzz-as-cartoon-character has properties that Buzz-as-idea doesn't. For example, Buzz-as-cartoon-character has a voice. Buzz-as-idea doesn't.

Hmmm. An interesting point. A thing can certainly change category over time. An idea can become a character in a book can become a character in a film can become ten thousand separate, distinct ideas can become a thousand incompatible fanfics. At some point, the question of whether two things are the same must also become fuzzy, and non-binary.

Consider; I can create the idea of a character who is some strange mix of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker (perhaps, to mix in some Star Trek, they were merged in a transporter accident). It would not be true to say that this is the same character as Luke, but it would also not be true to say that it's entirely not the same character as Luke. Similarly with Han. But it would be true to say that Han is not the same character as Luke.

So whether two things are the same or not is, at the very least, a continuum.

the word "free" has an established meaning in English which is fundamentally incompatible with determinism.

I don't think that's at all clear, and the fact that a clear majority of philosophers are compatibilists indicates that a bunch of people who spend their lives thinking about this sort of thing also don't think it's impossible for "free" to mean something compatible with determinism.

Let's take a look at that definition of yours, and see what it says if my decisions are determined by the laws of physics. "Not under the control or in the power of another"? That's OK; the laws of physics, whatever they are, are not another agent. "Able to act or be done as one wishes"? That's OK too; of course in this scenario what I wish is also determined by the laws of physics, but the definition doesn't say anything about that.

(I wouldn't want to claim that the definition you selected is a perfect one, of course.)

And you think chess-playing machines do [sc. have processes going on in them that at all resemble human deliberation]?

Yup. Much much simpler, of course. Much more limited, much more abstract. But yes, a tree-search with an evaluation at the leaves does indeed resemble human deliberation somewhat. (Do I need to keep repeating in each comment that all I claim is that arguably chess-playing programs have a very little bit of free will?)

if your standard for free will is "having processing that resembles human deliberation"

Nope. But not having such processing seems like a good indication of not having free will, because whatever free will is it has to be something to do with making decisions, and nothing a pachinko machine or the weather does seems at all decision-like, and I think the absence of any process that looks at all like deliberation seems to me to be a large part of why. (Though I would be happy to reconsider in the face of something that behaves in ways that seem sufficiently similar to, e.g., apparently-free humans despite having very different internals.)

if I am reliably predictable then it is impossible for me to do anything other than what a hypothetical reliable predictor predicts

I have pointed out more than once that in this universe there is never prediction that reliable, and anything less reliable makes the word "impossible" inappropriate. For whatever reason, you've never seen fit even to acknowledge my having done so.

But let's set that aside. I shall restate your claim in a form I think better. "If you are reliably predictable, then it is impossible for your choice and the predictor's prediction not to match." Consider a different situation, where instead of being predicted your action is being remembered. If it's reliably rememberable, then it is impossible for your action and the remember's memory not to match -- but I take it you wouldn't dream of suggesting that that involves any constraint on your freedom.

So why should it be different in this case? One reason would be if the predictor, unlike the rememberer, were causing your decision. But that's not so; the prediction and your decision are alike consequences of earlier states of the world. So I guess the reason is because the successful prediction indicates the fact that your decision is a consequence of earlier states of the world. But in that case none of what you're saying is an argument for incompatibilism; it is just a restatement of incompatibilism.

It's really not complicated.

Please consider the possibility that other people besides yourself have thought about this stuff, are reasonably intelligent, and may disagree with you for reasons other than being too stupid to see what is obvious to you.

again, this is what "reliable predictor" means

No. It means you will not choose B, which is not necessarily the same as that you cannot choose B. And (I expect I have said this at least once already in this discussion) words like "cannot" and "impossible" have a wide variety of meanings and I see no compelling reason why the only one to use when contemplating "free will" is the particular one you have in mind.

But the word "free" has an established meaning in English which is fundamentally incompatible with determinism.

The dictionary disagrees. Free has many different meanings.

If my actions are determined by physics or by God, I am not free.

What ontological category does physics have in your view of the world?

it's useful to be able to talk about whatever it is that we perceive ourselves to have even though we don't really have it.

I think it's more helpful to talk about whatever we have that we're trying to talk about, even if some of what we say about it isn't quite right, which is why I prefer notions of free will that don't become necessarily wrong if the universe is deterministic or there's an omnipotent god or whatever.

I agree that gravity makes a useful analogy. Gravity behaves in a sufficiently force-like way (at least in regions of weakish spacetime curvature, like everywhere any human being could possibly survive) that I think for most purposes it is much better to say "there is, more or less, a force of gravity, but note that in some situations we'll need to talk about it differently" than "there is no force of gravity". And I would say the same about "free will".

Do you think Pachinko machines have free will?

I don't know much about Pachinko machines, but I don't think they have any processes going on in them that at all resemble human deliberation, in which case I would not want to describe them as having free will even to the (very attenuated) extent that a chess program might have.

Does the atmosphere have free will?

Again, I don't think there are any sort of deliberative processes going on there, so no free will.

I mean this: [...] Decisions are made by my conscious self.

So there are two parts to this, and I'm not sure to what extent you actually intend them both. Part 1: decisions are made by conscious agents. Part 2: decisions are made, more specifically, by those agents' conscious "parts" (of course this terminology doesn't imply an actual physical division).

it must be actually possible for me to choose more than one alternative

Of course "actually possible" is pretty problematic language; what counts as possible? If I'm understanding you right, you'd cash it out roughly as follows: look at the probability distribution of possible outcomes in advance of the decision; then freedom = entropy of that probability distribution (or something of the kind).

So then freedom depends on what probability distribution you take, and you take the One True Measure of freedom to be what you get for an observer who knows everything about the universe immediately before the decision is made (more precisely, everything in the past light-cone of the decision); if the universe is deterministic then that's enough to determine the answer after the decision is made too, so no decisions are free.

One obvious problem with this is that our actual universe is not deterministic in the relevant sense. We can make a device based on radioactive decay or something for which knowledge of all that can be known in advance of its operation is not sufficient to tell you what it will output. For all we know, some or all of our decisions are actually affected enough by "amplified" quantum effects that they can't be reliably predicted even by an observer with access to everything in their past light-cone.

It might be worse. Perhaps some of our decisions are so affected and some not. If so, there's no reason (that I can see) to expect any connection between "degree of influence from quantum randomness" and any of the characteristics we generally think of as distinguishing free from not-so-free -- practical predictability by non-omniscient observers, the perception of freeness that you mentioned before, external constraints, etc.

It doesn't seem to me that predictability by a hypothetical "past-omniscient" observer has much connection with what in other contexts we call free will. Why make it part of the definition?

Here's a firsthand account of someone having the sort of spiritual experience I'm referring to in the main article.

Of course it's a useful notion.

You're arguing that no one has it and AIUI that nothing in the universe ever could have it. Doesn't seem that useful to me.

Chess is a mathematical abstraction that is the same for all observers.

I did consider substituting something like cricket or baseball for that reason. But I think the idea that free will is viewpoint-dependent depends heavily on what notion of free will you're working with. I'm still not sure what yours actually is, but mine doesn't have that property, out at any rate doesn't have it to do great an extent as yours seems to.

Does this mean that you concede that our desires are not freely chosen?

I think some of our desires are more freely chosen than others. I do not think an action chosen on account of a not-freely-chosen desire is necessarily best considered unfree for that reason.

[...] are not impossible [...]

That isn't quite what you said before, but I'm happy for you to amend what you wrote.

The reason they are extremely unlikely [...]

It seems to me that the argument you're now making has almost nothing to do with the argument in chapter 7 of Deutsch's book. That doesn't (of course) in any way make it a bad argument, but I'm now wondering why you said what you did about Deutsch's books.

Anyway. I think almost all the work in your argument (at least so far as it's relevant to what we're discussing here) is done by the following statement: "Explanatory power turns out to be the only known effective filter for theories with high predictive power." I think this is incorrect; simplicity plus past predictive success is a pretty decent filter too. (Theories with these properties have not infrequently turned out to be embeddable in theories with good explanatory power, of course, as when Mendeleev's empirically observed periodicity was explained in terms of electron shells, and the latter further explained in terms of quantum mechanics.)

It doesn't mean UIP, it simply requires UIP.

OK, but in that case either you owe us something nearer to necessary and sufficient conditions, or else you need to retract your claim that incompatibilism does better than compatibilism in the "is there a nice clear criterion?" test. Also, if you aren't claiming anything close to "free will = UIP" then I no longer know what you meant by saying that ialdabaoth got it more or less right.

to be "real" free will, there would have to be some circumstances where [...]

Sure. That would be why I said "with great confidence" rather than "with absolute certainty". I might, indeed, take the bribe after all, despite all those very strong reasons to expect me not to. But it's extremely unlikely. (So no, I don't agree that I've "chosen a bad example"; rather, I think you misunderstood the example I gave.)

let me propose a better one

If you say "you chose a bad example to make your point, so let me propose a better one" and then give an example that doesn't even vaguely gesture in the direction of making my point, I'm afraid I start to doubt that you are arguing in good faith.

Not so. In the first case you are being coerced by [...]

The things you describe me as being "coerced by" are (1) not agents and (2) not external to me. These are not irrelevant details, they are central to the intuitive meaning of "free will" that we're looking for philosophically respectable approximations to. (Perhaps you disagree with my framing of the issue. I take it that that's generally the right way to think about questions like "what is free will?".)

In particular, I think your claim about "the only difference" is flatly wrong.

what I require is a notion of free will that is the same for all observers, including a hypothetical one that can predict anything that can be predicted in principle.

That sounds sensible on first reading, but I think actually it's a bit like saying "what I require is a notion of right and wrong that is the same for all observers, including a hypothetical one that doesn't care about suffering" and inferring that our notions of right and wrong shouldn't have anything to do with suffering. Our words and concepts need to be useful to us, and if some such concept would be uninteresting to a hypothetical superbeing that can predict anything that's predictable in principle, that is not sufficient reason for us not to use it. Still more when your hypothetical superbeing needs capabilities that are probably not even in principle possible within our universe.

(I think, in fact, that even such a superbeing might have reason to talk about something like "free will", if it's talking about very-limited beings like us.)

any phenomenon that someone claims is objectively real.

I haven't, as it happens, been claiming that free will is "objectively real". All I claim is that it may be a useful notion. Perhaps it's only as "objectively real" as, say, chess; that is, it applies to us, and what it is is fundamentally dependent on our cognitive and other peculiarities, and a world of your hypothetical superbeings might be no more interested in it than they presumably would be in chess, but you can still ask "to what extent is X exercising free will?" in the same way as you could ask "is X a better move than Y, for a human player with a human opponent?".

I like your article, but have some naive questions: Where starts the original research part? That is how differs your article from existing interpretations of QM?

Will your interpretation of QM present any new testable predictions? Will it allow any new useful things?

What is the nature of observer in it?

(I see you've been downvoted. Not by me.)

If we don't have the freedom to choose our desires, then on what basis is it reasonable to call decision that take those non-freely-chosen desires into account "free will"?

If Jewishness is inherited from one's mother, and a person's great^200000-grandmother [EDITED to fix an off-by-1000x error, oops] was more like a chimpanzee than a modern human and had neither ethnicity nor religion as we now understand them, then on what basis is it reasonable to call that person Jewish?

If sentences are made up of letters and letters have no meaning, then on what basis is it reasonable to say that sentences have meaning?

It is not always best to make every definition recurse as far back as it possibly can.

David Deutsch's book [...] also [...]

I have read both books. I do not think chapter 7 of TFoR shows that theories with high predictive power but low explanatory power are impossible, but it is some time since I read the book and I have just now only glanced at it rather than rereading it in depth. If you reckon Deutsch says that predictive power guarantees explanatory power, could you remind me where in the chapter he does it? Or, if you have an argument that starts from what Deutsch does in that chapter and concludes that predictive power guarantees explanatory power, could you sketch it? (I do not guarantee to agree with everything Deutsch says.)

Do you distinguish between "will" and "desire"?

I seldom use the word "will" other than in special contexts like "free will". Why do you ask?

What are they [sc. necessary conditions for free will that a compatibilist might state]?

One such might be: "For an action to be freely willed, the causes leading up to it must go via a process of conscious decision by the agent."

[...] not free at all. It is exactly as free as the first case.

Meh, OK. So let me remind you that the question we were (I thought) discussing at this point was: are there clearer-cut satisfactory criteria for "free will" available to incompatibilists than to compatibilists? Now, of course if you say that by definition nothing counts as an instance of free will then that's a nice clear-cut criterion, but it also has (so far as it goes) nothing at all to do with freedom or will or anything else.

I think you're saying something a bit less content-free than that; let me paraphrase and you can correct me if I'm getting it wrong. "Free will means unpredictability-in-principle. Everything is in fact predictable in principle, and therefore nothing is actually an instance of free will." That's less content-free because we can then ask: OK, what if you're wrong about everything being predictable in principle; or what if you're right but we ask about a hypothetical different world where some things aren't predictable in principle?

Let's ask that. Imagine a world in which some sort of objective-collapse quantum mechanics is correct, and many things ultimately happen entirely at random. And let's suppose that whether or not the brain uses quantum effects in any "interesting" way, it is at least affected by them in a chaos-theory sort of way: that is, sometimes microscale randomness arising from quantum mechanics ends up having macroscale effects on what your brain does. And now let's situate my two hypothetical examples in this hypothetical world. In this world, of course, nothing is entirely predictable, but some things are much more predictable than others. In particular, the first version of me (deciding whether to take the bribe on the basis of my moral principles and preferences and so forth, which ends up being very predictable because the bribe is small and my principles and preferences strong) is much more predictable (both in principle and in practice) in this world than the second version (deciding, at gunpoint, on the basis of what I will now make a quantum random number generator rather than a coin flip). In this world, would you accordingly say that first-me is choosing much less freely than second-me?

The only difference between the two cases is your awareness [...]

I don't think that's correct. For instance, in the second case I am coerced by another agent, and in the first I'm not; in the first case my decision is a consequence of my preferences regarding the action in question, and in the second it isn't (though it is a consequence of my preference for living over dying; but I remark that your predictability criterion gives the exact same result if in the second case the random number generator is wired directly into my brain so as to control my actions with no conscious involvement on my part at all).

You may prefer notions of free will with a sort of transitive property, where if X is free and X is caused by Y1,...,Yn (and nothing else) then one of the Y must be free. (Or some more sophisticated variant taking into account the fact that freedom comes in degrees, that the notion of "cause" is kinda problematic, etc.) I see no reason why we have to define free will in such a way. We are happy to say that a brain is intelligent even though it is made of neurons which are not intelligent, that a statue resembles Albert Einstein even though it is made of atoms that do not resemble Einstein, that a woolly jumper is warm even though it is made of individual fibres that aren't, etc.