DSMatticus wrote:
A lightswitch 'affects' a lightbulb, but this isn't meaningful and it's not what I meant by affect, because a lightswitch definitely doesn't have free will. Affect in this case means something more, and I admit it's hazy and handwavey but you're leading in this right direction towards something more rigorous with this choice thing coming up.
A lightswitch fails to have "free will" because it fails on the "will" part of "free will". It doesn't evaluate options, make choices or decide anything. Humans do that, which is people ask about what a person's will is and whether that will is "free" or not. If you have a more rigorous definition of "affect" you want to use, I'm willing to use it, conditional on that definition being not-retarded.
And here we are. And here's the problem: if choice is deterministic, in what sense is it choice?
A choice is any decision you make between two options that you "could" pick. Note that "could" is in scare quotes because the meaning of words like "could" and "should" and "would" are non-obvious in a deterministic world. Could, in this case, means something like "physically capable, but conditional upon a decision to do so". You are physically capable of eating a sandwich, but your actual eating of the sandwich is conditional on you deciding to do so. You're also physically capable of not eating the sandwich, iff you decide not to do so.
Choices are mental things, and only physically exist in terms of neurons firing in your brain. Since we only live each instant once, we only ever choose one of the possible options we could have chosen.
However, your brain does not model things that way. Instead, your brain models what "would" (note the scare quotes again!) happen for each option, compares the outcomes and then chooses the best outcome. Therein lies the "will" part of "free will", the thing that goes on in your head where it models counterfactual universes that don't exist, compares those possible universes to its preferences, determines which it wants best and then takes action based on the product of those preferences and expected outcomes.
Wanting to define "choice" as being able to make decisions that you didn't/don't/won't/wouldn't make is just retarded. That's the opposite of choice, that's like if you decided that you wanted to eat the sandwich but then your body refused to obey due to your will being usurped by the cock of the almighty calvanist sky-wizard. It goes against the physical reality of cognative science and is absolutely as wrong as a definition can be.
Why do I accept that? Because I'm not curled up in a sobbing ball of nihilism-induced depression? I get by. Super depressing as it is, have you considered that choice is an illusion caused by being a super-complicated yet deterministic decision machine, and that you have exactly as much choice as a lightswitch?
I said that you seem to except free will because you talk about people making decisions to do things. Perhaps "anticipate" free will would have been a better choice. Or maybe "expect" free will. You act as if other people make choices and do things that they decide, and NOT as if you thought something other than their choices were responsible for their behaviors.