the more i've thought about this over the years, the less clearly i've been able to define what precisely 'free will' would mean in terms of a physical system or causality
First, we need the universe to not literally just be a function of the previous state and the current time.
Second, we need (and I'm quoting myself from above to illustrate what I meant): "some kind of metaphorical "door" for our soul, or our true selves, or whatever you might call it, to propagate through meaningfully into our consciousnesses".
Lacking the first means there's no way for the second to exist. Supposing the first exists, we then need it to provide some kind of way for the "us" that exists outside of physics or as an emergent phenomenon out of the nondeterministic parts of physics to meaningfully shape what our brain's electrical states make us do.
If we have all of that, we finally have the beginnings of a system in which we can start to try to philosophically assign moral designations to actions and people. Which is think is about 50% of the reason people want free will to exist: so we can punish others for their actions.
(And just to clarify, to anyone not familiar with how people usually debate philosophy. It's all about your presupposed axioms. Things you and your partner agree to be true. This kind of discussion is one that presupposes relatively little, so don't think I'm trying to make political claims about how crime shouldn't be punished or whatever. I'm simply saying that if we presuppose only that the universe is not deterministic, that alone doesn't bring us forward enough to start building a system of ethics.)
def isItTelepathy(anything):
return False
Or, more fairly, this is not the only definition but it's a very popular one.
Free will has a similar problem. The definition a lot of people want to use is a negative one. It can't involve any predictable process. It can't involve any seen process. And so on. Well, when you feed a definition like the above into logic, you get some pretty broken answers.
Some people do give definitions that can be turned into real answers, but you can detect someone operating on the completely-negative definition by the way they get upset, sometimes even in a moralistic way, at the idea that you might have said something meaningful and insist on pushing their total-negation definition at you again.
There's an interesting conversation to be had on the matter in potentia but it requires so much effort sidelining the people who become offended if you actually proffer a definition and hold to it and perform actual logic on it that it's hardly worth it. So we pretty much get nowhere because we are essentially not allowed by about 80% of the people trying to have the conversation to have a concrete definition at all, not even for a moment, not even "for the sake of argument".
Yes, but what does this have to do with free will as most people understand the term? They want to be responsible for their choices, but this is compatible with a deterministic universe.
This is a controversial claim. How can someone be responsible for something they have no control over? I'd agree that's possible, but I don't think that's how most people understand it.
The Frankfurt cases showed that control over alternate possibilities is not necessary for responsibility. If someone holds a gun to your head to make you do something that you were going to do anyway, that's not really compromising your free will is it?
Edit: it's also not really as controversial as you might think, experimental philosophy has demonstrated that most lay people's moral reasoning aligns with Compatibilism: https://philarchive.org/rec/ANDWCI-3
Lay people are incoherent and childishly naive. I don't really care what they think.
> The Frankfurt cases showed that control over alternate possibilities is not necessary for responsibility.
This is a controversial claim. There are many popular counterarguments.
I wouldn't consider 60% agreement to be that controversial frankly, especially when the next most popular contender at 18% is the incoherent mess that is libertarian free will.
> Lay people are incoherent and childishly naive. I don't really care what they think.
You should, because 1) many trying to dismiss free will use lay people's alleged incoherent definitions, but that's the wrong way to question lay people because they don't think in denotational terms, and if you question them properly they have nuanced and coherent approaches to moral reasoning, and 2) making sense of free will is all about how lay people talk and reason about these concepts, and the point of the philosophical debate over free will is whether there is a coherent definition that can make sense of these arguments.
Furthermore, the paper I linked is directly relevant to your post because you made the claim that it's not how most people understand the term, and that paper casts some serious doubt on that position.
> This is a controversial claim. There are many popular counterarguments.
"Popular" quantified how exactly? Frankly this is even less controversial than the acceptance of Compatibilism, so I won't lose any sleep over it.
Introducing randomness just eliminates that determanism, not the ability to choose.
Randomness in physics is a peephole through which the non physical world can interact with physics. Think of it like a game where you get control the RNG output for some rolls.
And in fact when you dig deep into discussions with some people, it becomes clear that defending and proselytizing the existence of a soul (or similar supernatural concept) is in fact their goal in discussing free will in the first place. They think it's a useful way to back into their preferred version of spirituality, or they think it's the logical resolution to the contradiction you've highlighted, or maybe both.
At the end of the day, im still going to act like me. From what I can imagine the most knowing the answer could ever accomplish is induce existential crisis in some people.