#incompatibilism

[flimsy-roost]

Does free will exist?

Yes

No

Somewhat/Sometimes

Unsure

It's context-dependent

Vanilla Extract

Voting ended onFeb 13, 2023

[thehumanfront]

Alternate possibilities 

Pictured: Martin Luther: ‘I can do no other’.

Daniel Dennett: ‘You’re still free, bitch!’*

*Not a direct quote.

Some philosophers do not believe that free will is compatible with determinism. They say, if the thesis of determinism is true, all events, including our decisions, are fully determined by past events and we each only ever face one possibility. Free will, then, is just an illusory product of human consciousness and you’re not in control: the Universe is.

Other philosophers deny this claim and support the intuition that we are free. They say a variety of things.

Daniel Dennett argues that alternate possibilities aren’t required by the concept of free will.

That seems wild: I can’t control the outcome but I’m free?!

Agreeing with Harry Frankfurt, Dennett writes: ‘I could not have done otherwise—so what’. Mental states such as intentions give us everything we want in moral responsibility. We have character and form our own beliefs, don’t we?

Dennett uses many examples. But consider this one, a famous statement purportedly declared by Martin Luther (b. 1483):

‘Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me.’

Accused of heresy by the Catholic Church, Luther claimed it was impossible for him to recant. He called to be judged in the eyes of God, to whom his word was captive (i.e. he felt like he had no choice). Still, Dennett holds him to account. While the causal chains of events that occurred prior to Luther’s declaration were determined for him (e.g. in his mental process), we can judge Luther because the result mattered to him.

Many philosophers disagree, of course. Helen Steward argues that the concept of free will depends on genuinely open futures (i.e. alternate possibilities); thus Luther wasn’t free if God indeed compelled him. Robert Kane, meanwhile, identifies Luther as free but only because he is the ultimate source of reasons he provides for multiple potential outcomes.

What do you think?

[21stcenturydiogenes-blog]

Why Stark and Danvers are Incompatible

Before anyone comments about the shipping potential (or lack, thereof) of Carol Danvers and Tony Stark, odds are the title doesn’t mean what you think it means. Incompatibilism in philosophy refers to how we cannot have free will in a deterministic world. What is a deterministic world? Well, consider Newton’s Third Law of Physics. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This means that nothing can come from nothing. Why then can’t this be applied then to the rest of the universe? Namely, to our thoughts and actions. This would then mean that our every thought and action must come from some previous event - and leads into a specific future event. You can see now why free will can’t be possible in this kind of universe. If our every action and thought is dependent on a previous thought or action then how could we possibly have a self-forming action?

Of course, the question of free will is something that philosophers have been arguing for a while, and that is not the point of this post. Instead, I plan on focusing more on why it is that Tony Stark and Carol Danvers would not be able to reconcile their beliefs with each other regarding Ulysses. For those of you who are not up to date with the Marvel Comics (especially, Civil War 2), Ulysses is an Inhuman who has the ability to predict a future. How his powers work and to what extent they are successful is another hot topic in the comic that Tony Stark may have tapped into. According to Stark, Ulysses absorbs the information around him and experiences a possible future. Of course, the only way this works is if it would be possible to profile the future. That is, if Ulysses is actually predicting the future, then it can mean only one thing - that the characters in the Marvel Universe exist in a deterministic world, where their every action has already been predicted based on past actions. I specify past actions because I do acknowledge that this is only a story and like any story, it is somewhat deterministic in that the writer has already written more than you have read. But for the characters in the story, it is happening in real time - just like every thought and action you may have throughout your life.

So, what is going on between these two characters? Tony Stark is a futurist. He believes that the future is how you make it. He thinks that Ulysses could not possibly predict the future since it hasn’t been written yet (also known as the growing block theory of time, which I will not go into in this post). Carol Danvers believes that Ulysses has a more practical role in that he exists to allow these heroes to prevent disasters before they happen. This means, oddly enough, that Carol is seeing the world with the view that it is possible to predict the future based on the past, treating Ulysses’ visions like law - yet, she still thinks that she can change these events based on his visions. This particular view is weird since she is taking predetermined events and changing them without Ulysses seeing these changes in his visions. While a more plausible alternative of his powers would be to have Ulysses see the heroes saving the day (or not, if the case may be) and have those events play out, he instead still sees the impending disaster and informs the nearest big league superhero about it. This is still explainable by simply positing the belief that Ulysses’ powers do not factor him into the equations, and points out the future that would exist if it were not for him.

Even Cable and Bishop, two mutants from the future, admit that the future is ever changing and that their own timelines no longer exist because they fixed the events that domino’d into their future. The problem with this perspective is that if their future does not exist, then in theory neither should they. But that is, once again, a topic for another post. The point of that argument is that maybe it is possible that Danvers is able to use Ulysses to predict the future then effectively go back in time from Ulysses’ vision to alter the past and create a second timeline.

So, why then would it be impossible for Carol and Tony to agree with each other, or even come to some middle ground? Carol is basically arguing for a universe that is completely against one of the very principles for what Tony believes. in order for Tony to agree with Carol, he would need to say that free will is simply not possible. That every action is predetermined and we have no control over our future. And for Carol to agree with Tony, she would have to admit that Ulysses is fallible - neither of which they want to accept since it is completely detrimental to what they stand for. Who you stand with on this, however, is completely up to you. Whether it is a case of Tony being right because we have complete control over our future, or Carol being right on the grounds that our actions have already been determined by outside forces that we have no control over.

[modestproposals]

Philosophy Website | Part 2 of 3 in a series on Free Will. Considers the differences between compatibilism and incompatibilism in about 500 words.

Free will is not an illusion according to some compatibilists because free will can be understood as a social construct, much like “money,” “home run,” “color,” etc. To say “free will is an illusion,” for this group, would mean that morality is a sham: that, in fact, people should not be held accountable for their choices. It is, after all, in the moral discourses that “free will” is essential. It would be similar to saying, “color is an illusion,” to which they respond, “Oh, and you are going to sue Sony for fraud for selling you that ‘color’ TV? And Sherwin Williams for advertising different ‘color’ paints?”

Article 2/3 in a series on free will.

[selfawarepatterns]

A dialogue on compatibilism

A dialogue on compatibilism

Click through for the full version.

see the rest at: A Dialogue on Compatibilism – Existential Comics.

This edition of Existential Comics manages to summarize most of the free will debate.  I especially like the discussion on libertarian free will on the second page.  As a compatibilist myself, I’ve often said that libertarian free will is incoherent, and this comic explains why.

If we have an…

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[camelswithhammers]

Why Would Being Controlled By A Brain Be Any Less Free Than Being Controlled By An Immaterial Soul?

Why Would Being Controlled By A Brain Be Any Less Free Than Being Controlled By An Immaterial Soul?

Existential Comics has nicely illustrated a common line of debate between hard determinists and soft determinists/compatibilists in comic strip form. The whole strip is worth reading. The “compatibilist” in the comic strip represents my own position nicely throughout and is especially effective in the panels excerpted below. The panels below reply to the claim that werewe to have immaterial souls…

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[selfawarepatterns]

The number of senses, free will, and productive reality

The number of senses, free will, and productive reality

Christian Jarrett has an interesting article at BBC Future on the number of senses that we have.

The principle of five basic human senses is often traced back to Aristotle’s De Anima (On the Soul), in which he devotes a separate chapter to vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste. Today, the five senses are considered such an elementary truth that it is sometimes used as a point of consensus…

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[leatherlibraryblog]

“There are but few important events in the affairs of men brought about by their own choice.” – An Adjudication of Free Will and Determinism

          This short paper will function as adjudication between two positions on the argument of free will and determinism. Kane’s paper on the existence of free will and the necessity of indeterminism will be compared and contrasted with Pereboom’s essay on the necessity and benefits of Hard Incompatibilism.A discussion regarding my personal position on which argument made the better case will…

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