For many people, the idea of free will is bound up with the notion of “could have done otherwise”. By their lights, if only one future is possible for a person — that is, if the person cannot do otherwise — then free will is an illusion.
Philosopher Christian List — author of the recent book Why Free Will is Real — proposes an interesting species of free will based on the claim that while physics may be deterministic, behaviors at the agent level are not. Agents can do otherwise, according to List, and this is enough to ground free will even if physics is deterministic.
I think List is mistaken, but I’ll save my criticisms for the comment thread.
Readers can find List’s argument in this paper:
Free Will, Determinism, and the Possibility of Doing Otherwise
See you in the comment thread.
Do you see any difference between giving money away and lending money?
It would depend if one can freely can chose to have pure, unconditional love. If one can ,how one feels would depend on the reasoning behind the choice.
Otherwise they would feel compelled by emotion of pure ,unconditional love and their action would be more deterministic.
CharlieM,
My point is that his arguments are bad. If a sentence here and there within his windy oratory happens to be true, good for both of you.
Sure, why? Do you think that difference makes one a free act and the other compelled?
List takes his virtual book tour to an NBN interview
https://newbooksnetwork.com/christian-list-why-free-will-is-real-harvard-up-2019/
Unlike the Science Salon podcast, this one is more of a presentation than an interview. But it does stick closer to the philosophy in the book, avoiding the side trips taken by Shermer’s approach (which I am not saying is a bad thing).
If anyone did not get their Joni Mitchell fill from this thread, here is a nice video of her demoing “Coyote” to others in a 70s Dylan tour. It’s an excerpt from the Dylan documentary now on Netflix.
Her demo takes place in Gordon Lightfoot’s house in Canada, which, in a circumstance which may surprise many USAers, is not in fact an igloo.