Compatibilism is supported by deep intuitions about responsibility and control. It can also feel "obviously" wrong and absurd. Slavoj Žižek's commentary can help us navigate the intuitive standoff.
I’d like to understand more about where you believe the idea of free will came from. To frame it one way: is the idea of moral responsibility a consequence of the felt experience of free will, or is free will derivative of the idea of moral responsibility? I enjoyed the piece, and realize you can only do so much in a single post, but I think this discussion benefits from broadening the horizon (especially time-wise, in the history of philosophy)
One puzzle about the anti-compatibilist intuition is that it is just as strong if we take base reality to be random/stochastic. If we take the reality of Quantum Mechanics to be the stochastic observables rather than the deterministic wave function, it doesn’t seem to help. If my actions are because of some random quantum effects in my brain, how would this make me any freer than if they were already implicit in the initial conditions of the universe?
If that is right, the real resistance is to the idea that we are systems with components that don’t have human-like qualities such as free will. The only way to get over that is to become comfortable with the idea that systems can have non-mysterious emergent properties. There may be political-ideological issues there, even if most analytic philosophers are both liberals and consequentialists.
Extremely interesting read, thanks for duh post
I’d like to understand more about where you believe the idea of free will came from. To frame it one way: is the idea of moral responsibility a consequence of the felt experience of free will, or is free will derivative of the idea of moral responsibility? I enjoyed the piece, and realize you can only do so much in a single post, but I think this discussion benefits from broadening the horizon (especially time-wise, in the history of philosophy)
One puzzle about the anti-compatibilist intuition is that it is just as strong if we take base reality to be random/stochastic. If we take the reality of Quantum Mechanics to be the stochastic observables rather than the deterministic wave function, it doesn’t seem to help. If my actions are because of some random quantum effects in my brain, how would this make me any freer than if they were already implicit in the initial conditions of the universe?
If that is right, the real resistance is to the idea that we are systems with components that don’t have human-like qualities such as free will. The only way to get over that is to become comfortable with the idea that systems can have non-mysterious emergent properties. There may be political-ideological issues there, even if most analytic philosophers are both liberals and consequentialists.