Reddit reviews Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting

Discussions on free will always raise my ire. It seems that the majority of philosophers in the field are compatibilists but theists seem to always be ignorant of the last 300 years of philosophical thought in the area of free will. Appeals to quantum mechanics strike me just as absurd as libertarian free will. Random effects at the quantum level do not degrees of freedom in action make.


Unfortunately most people are stuck in the determinism vs libertarian mindset. Compatibilism offers an amazingly powerful argument to the contrary. Other good resources (besides the stanford philosophical dictionary I linked above) are the discussion on free will in Richard Carrier's Sense and Goodness Without God and Daniel Dennett's Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Having.

Thanks for the enormous compliment! Here's the one that strikes me as the strongest argument for compatibilism: we've all had the feeling of free choice at some time or another. If determinism is true, then that feeling was a feeling of something other than "breaking the laws of nature" or actually choosing otherwise. In fact, if determinism is true, then no one has ever had a genuine feeling of what a libertarian freedom is like. So what freedom actually is, in all the acts that we've felt it in, must be something compatible with determinism.

My favorite source that I've cited a couple of times in the thread is Harry Frankfurt's essays in The Importance of What We Care About. Or Daniel Dennett's Elbow Room: The Varieties of Freedom Worth Wanting.

If "free will" means "not caused by prior events", it is a very odd thing indeed. This would mean that my decision eat a chocolate bar couldn't be influenced by the prior event of a chocolate bar coming into my field of view without it being an unfree decision. That is extremely counterintuitive.

You should check out compatibilism, and if that piques your interest, Elbow Room.

Dan Dennett disagrees.

A more thorough argument in his books Freedom Evolves and Elbow Room.

On free will, I found Elbow Room, by Daniel Dennett to be valuable.

The subtitle is: "The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting."

He made an interesting analogy. Imagine an intricately programmed robot in a computer simulation. It looks at the (simulated) environment, identifies the best strategies, and uses random numbers to break ties. That feels a lot like free will. The robot is "doing what it wants".

But what if we restart the simulator a second time in exactly the same way, and even set the seed for the random number generator to the same value. The robot will do exactly the same thing it did before, even though it seemed to have "free will" the first time.

Dennett uses analogies like this to finely slice the line between determinism and free will. Understanding what free will even means is tricky. There are so many varieties. Which ones are worth wanting?

This seemed to be in the zone of things you are musing about in your paper.

Dennett's Elbow Room: The varieties of free will worth wanting is a good place to start.

TLDR; read "Elbow Room" and you'll see free will arguments in a new light.

"Elbow Room" by Daniel Dennet is a great read on this topic. He starts by deconstructing reasons people give for being afraid of not having free will -- his reasoning here is great in defusing the emotional aspect.

Dennet then walks through a number of definitions of free will and shows how they're incoherent, of only academic interest, or wrong-headed. He does a great job of cutting through a lot of nonsensical arguments that try to link free will and randomness.

Finally, he outlines a few limited definitions of free will that we might want and might be able to have -- one of them based on the idea of people as approximations of an ideal free acting planner. Once you think of yourself as maybe partially free willed, but able to perhaps move to freer on a spectrum, the topic actually becomes interesting. A great way to end a conversation on free will is by brainstorming on the question "what could I do to be a better approximation of an ideal free acting planner?"

I can't recommend the book enough.

Amazon link

Denett also wrote a book or two on the topic.

Try "Elbow Room" -'The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting' by Dan Dennett.

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You can't see the future, that uncertainty has many positive possibility's. You just need to know that, and it might change your perspective.

If you haven't read Elbow Room: the varieties of free will worth wanting by Dan Dennett, I highly recommend it. It's a wonderful explanation of what we actually mean by free will, how it reconciles with what appears to be a deterministic world, and makes a great case for us actually having it.

If one decides to perform an action in advance, and then performs that action, was it not a self-determined action? He was determined to slap the person in advance, but it was still a choice he made given many alternative options. Furthermore, is free will simply the freedom of action, or is it also the freedom of self-determination? I would argue that free will gives us the freedom to form ourselves into the people we wish to be, not just to perform the actions we wish to perform. He may have shaped himself into the type person that would slap an opponent instead of debating. Since this sub is about existentialist philosophy, you will probably find more people here agree with the idea of shaping ourselves into the people we wish to be.

>(or as Steven Pinker puts its a ghost inside your body pushing all the buttons)

Ah, another reference to a "pop intellectual" who isn't an expert in philosophy or free will. I've seen Sam Harris, Robert Salpolski, and now Steven Pinker as the defenders of hard determinism. It tends to be neuroscientists and psychologists in the popular science community. Why hasn't anyone mentioned a professional philosopher that shares their deterministic views; one who can provide a solid philosophical foundation for such beliefs? It may be because the majority of professional philosophers either believe free will is compatible with a deterministic universe, or that there is free will and it is incompatible with determinism.

>Free will: compatibilism 59.1%; libertarianism 13.7%; no free will 12.2%; other 14.9%.

If you're interested in learning more about the justifications and challenges for free will, I recommend reading Elbow Room by Daniel Dennet and Four Views on Free Will. I can guarantee you'll learn more about free will from those two books than you will by listening to Steven Pinker.

Here's some reading on the subject.