Arguments Wiki sample page: Free-will

It's the thing everybody's talking about. The solution to the "problem of evil". The thing that distinguishes us from "robots". Apparently the reason why literally anyone is morally accountable.

Yeah, the pages I'm writing on this wiki are basically turning into schizo rants at this point, but who cares? I need to dump my messy disorganised thoughts somewhere...

Questions

1. What the heck is metaphysical libertarianism?
2. How do you really know there's such a thing as anything other than determinism and randomness?
3. HOW do you know that we have free will and formal mechanical processors (e.g. non-organic processors) don't?
4. What are your thoughts on what it even means when we talk about it?

Metaphysical libertarianism

So, what the heck even is this?

The only thing I really understand about it is that it's ｓｏｍｅｈｏｗ something that's neither deterministic nor random. And maybe that it's based on presentism and a lack of many-worlds-based quantum collapse. And that it's our final frontier of special pleading for humanity before we start having to become like all those agnostic/atheistic philosophers and do a lot of unravelling so we can cope with the potential fact that reality is something out of our control, and all of our actions across the temporal continuum are predetermined.

Well look. Everything is either deterministic - occurring based on parameters from previous activity - or random: spontaneous; probabilistic; unpredictable. But no matter whether you think things are deterministic or random, both of them don't qualify as "free will" under metaphysical libertarianism. The definition of free will, somehow, tends to be "neither deterministic nor random". Well, I'm sorry to break it to you guys, but to the best of our ability we can tell, empirical existence is not paraconsistent, and it's part of the binaryfield where everything is either x or not x - nothing else. Sure, we could make a model of reality where certain things have fuzzy natures or get classified as though they were part of the trinaryfield, but existentially, everything fundamental is collapsible into binary states of being there or not there, and we don't live in a reality where binary is only an approximate theoretical model rather than an accurate representation of existence. There are no phenomena in existence that are neither there nor not there

Stuff I thought of today

Okay, it seems to me that "free will" is the capacity of someone's autonomy to be impervious to influence, meaning that it can act freely of influence. Of course, this is not completely true, since every influence has some effect on their mind, whether it's perceptibly negligible or not, but generally someone's will (whatever that is - it seems to be one of those kind of vague terms for me) is considered to be "free" if it has a possibility of acting in spite of external attempts to steer it. Anyway, for one thing, without any influence, it wouldn't really do anything at all, which is just one argument that free will must not exist, and only inexistent phenomena can involve it. Or it requires some sort of medium with paraconsistency. I dunno. Even if you put a will in a box and isolated it from everything around it, it would arguably be less "free" because it doesn't have anything to react to or shape it, meaning that if it was deterministic in some sense, well, it would act according to a pretty establishable framework. Or it would have to act randomly, but, it's still in a box. But I guess everything in the universe is still in a universal boundary. Man, I'm just doing schizo rants at this point! But I have to put all of my thoughts down, so, there you go. Anyway, I dunno! It doesn't really seem to be free to me if it can't influence anything, for some reason. It would seem more like it's contained and isolated, which is generally known as the opposite of "free".

Look, lemme try and put this in more straightforward terms. Free will is free. And what is it free from? Influence by external factors. Okay, so if you isolate it, it should be totally free, right? But if you do that, it's contained, which is the opposite of "free". So it doesn't really seem to be "free" either way. I know I've already come to this conclusion and am trying to use these insights to get back to it (not really in a leading/motivated way though), but I feel like I'm still jumping to the conclusions here, like I should dissert more into it, even though I don't really feel like I have anything more to add at the moment. Well, look. Either everything is deterministic, or it has some sort of a quantifiable probability distribution. Even if you couldn't predict precisely for certain what result a random event is going to end up with, you can still get a grasp of the overall tendencies of it. So, even being random, is that not, in a way, determined? Besides, you still can't control yourself if you're random. Indeed, it seems to me like you'd have less control than if you were deterministic! For an autonomous agent, it would be like being drunk and having impaired judgment, more often making mistakes in their actions. Determinism isn't free, because it's entirely governed by overarching physical laws, and randomness isn't free, because it's less able to do things purposefully and has less control. And I'm pretty sure those are the only way things are, unless you want to get into the transcendental nonexistence and relative nonsense of hypercosmology. So, it pretty much seems like a true dichotomy. There's no free will if you exist and you do literally anything

More stuff I thought of on probably the next day

Expanding even more on randomness: if agents do literally anything at all, they have a measurable probability distribution, and once that's established it's automatically revealed that they're tied to it. And even if it were to change, you can only have a finite number of layers of randomness. Beyond that, you can't really get anything to happen at all, because everything has some sort of structure, and only nothing has no structure at all.

Honestly, metaphysical libertarianism is such a nonsensical concept that I'm convinced everybody defending it is both motivated and an idiot. Especially the ones who aren't familiar with philosophy. And you can't give me any excuses about souls or spirits or anything, because those will have exactly the same problems as the empirical neurological models of the mind. Maybe different if the neurological model is more deterministic and the spiritual model is more random - but I already covered both of those, and the only things that are neither of them are hypercosmological (effectively nothing).

As a matter of fact, that gives me an idea! Let me address the notion that literally anything is "free" at all. (Nothing in Deltarune really comes close - sorry, sorry.)

Everything has to have constraints. Everything with constraints is not free; they are bounded by their constraints. Things without constraints are infinite, which probably means they fulfil their entire potential already, and that gives them no leeway to be or do anything further, which also makes them not free. And like I mentioned about structure, everything has a structure, which they are all stuck to. (Changing doesn't count, because that just means the changing structure you're referring to is really a cross-section of a larger structure, e.g. the temporal aspect of spatiotemporal phenomena.) Without a structure, things have no properties and simply don't exist. I might be repeating myself at this point but yeah, I was probably doing that before anyway.

Compatibilism

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