I_Ryan
August 3, 2010, 10:33am
18
This is a trap (not a deliberate one; I think Neoclassical is caught in it as well). To say “free will doesn’t exist” is not even wrong. To say it does exist is also not even wrong. Free will is an incoherent concept (or a trivial one). An artifact of language, an artifact of the need to explain one’s experience to others to make sure they are on the same page. If you don’t believe me, see here. http://lesswrong.com/lw/oh/righting_a_wrong_question/1qxa?c=1
Most importantly, Mises’s conception does not rest on free will or actual choice, but merely on the subjective experience. Which subjective experience you ask? That one you might be inclined to label “free will” or “the feeling of the ability to make a choice” for explanatory purposes when talking to someone else.
No one can tell you what it would feel like not to have this feeling. Or when they do, they always mention something that is obviously not the case so that free will becomes trivially true (such as, “It would feel like I have no control over any of my actions.” Obviously most people don’t feel that way, so obviously you have this trivial type of free will). Hence free will is an incoherent or trivial concept, as is its opposite (“determinism” is sometimes its opposite, sometimes not - depending on how it’s defined).
This post might be interesting to you:
I don’t even have to click that link. It is nonsense to argue that “[d]eterminism is contradicted by evidence”. It is nonsense to question whether the world is “deterministic” or not. We can’t know whether it is or isn’t. Nothing observable lets us distinguish between these two situations, (1) just a shortcoming of us knowing what the causal connections between the two things are, and (2) in fact an absence of any causal connections whatever between those two things.
Tell me what you think about that point, and whether you think it has anything to do with why you think that the contrast between “free will” and “determinism” is nonsense.