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comment by AdamM
AdamM  ·  2835 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Free Will ≈ Determinism, F.A.P.P.

Odder,

As the person responsible for the article, I hope I'm at least qualified to (very belated) enter this debate!

I'm not ignorant of compatibilism, but to me the version of "free will" accepted under it seems mostly meaningless. To me it seems that compatibilism is a project of academic philosophy that creates a whole new argument which, while supposedly about "free will", is in fact more about the definition of terms, turning the topic into a good example of a verbal dispute (see this helpful paper by David Chalmers for a good commentary on verbal vs. factual disputes).

What I'm saying in the post is that we don't need compatibilism. Compatiblism was invented in order to squeeze some kind of moral responsibility into a causally closed physical world (as the Stanford Encyclopedia entry makes fairly clear), in an era before most of what we now know about psychology and the measurable aspects of human nature. At this point, I think we can simply delete the idea of punishment and reward as a consequence of moral agency and -- guess what -- hardly anything (of practical relevance) changes!

So, the entire article was in a sense "respond[ing] to the idea of compatibilism" (by questioning the motivation behind it). As a blog post, rather than a paper, it didn't seem necessary to pepper it with academic jargon for the sole purpose of showing that I have read the right books, know the right words, and have tried on the right opinions to enter the debate!

That said, I admit that publishing anything under a header that includes the word "autodidact" could be taken as an invitation of suspicion regarding the author's competence.

Regarding the suggestion that I might be claiming to have "disproven" free will, see my response to the initial question by ThatFanficGuy (or, for that matter, the original blog post!).

On a side note, for a curious and different take on free will (as well as various things about QM and other interesting stuff), check out The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine by quantum computing bigwig Scott Aaronson.