A Sense of Free Will: the consciousness quagmire (Introduction)

by romansh , Tuesday, September 15, 2015, 14:03 (3139 days ago) @ dhw

dhw … If you are unable to defend your definition of free will, unable to defend your position on awareness, and unable to cope with the two concepts I have already outlined in direct response to your arguments concerning cause and effect (one eliminating free will, and the other making it possible), then I fear I shall not be accompanying you along your winding road.
>> “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
>>> “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
>> “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master - - that's all.”
But more seriously. There seem to be three general schools of thought when it comes to free will. Lower case libertarians who think determinism is false or at least not applicable to human interactions and perhaps some other entities. Then there are the so called hard determinists (I am one) who see cause and effect everywhere and humans cannot escape its clutches. And finally there are the compatibilists and or soft determinists who redefine free will in some so that it does actually exist. This seems to the accepted case eg in Daniel Dennett's book Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Having. Wikipedia also recognizes the issue
> In contrast, compatibilists hold that free will is compatible with determinism. Some compatibilists even hold that determinism is necessary for free will, arguing that choice involves preference for one course of action over another, requiring a sense of how choices will turn out Compatibilists thus consider the debate between libertarians and hard determinists over free will vs determinism a false dilemma. Different compatibilists offer very different definitions of what "free will" even means, and consequently find different types of constraints to be relevant to the issue. Classical compatiblists considered free will nothing more than freedom of action, considering one free of will simply if, had one counterfactually wanted to do otherwise, one could have done otherwise without physical impediment. Contemporary compatibilists instead identify free will as a psychological capacity, such as to direct one's behavior in a way responsive to reason. And there are still further different conceptions of free will, each with their own concerns, sharing only the common feature of not finding the possibility of determinism a threat to the possibility of free will]
This led James to describe compatibilism as a wretched subterfuge and described it as soft determinism; he meant it as a slight on compatibilists. Kant described it as a quagmire of evasion.-Now I don't know whether I have defended my ‘hard' deterministic definition sufficiently for you or not. Note I simply use determinism in the sense of cause and effect, no more no less.-So what are the consequences of every atom, fundamental particle or energy responding in either a mechanical or probabilistic way with respect to free will?