Control Room: the variety of free will I understand. I've read Daniel Dennett's _Freedom Evolves_, and been to his recent talk on the same ideas; I haven't read _Elbow Room_. What I took away from what I have heard and read was confusion: despite our probably sharing basic premises, I didn't feel I understood what he was saying about free will, and it felt like there was a big piece being quietly ignored. I know he talked about freedom evolving, and "evitability", and the ability to avoid flying bricks, and possible worlds... and none of it gelled into something which I felt directly addressed crime and punishment. So I have my own ideas, openly influenced by Gary Lucas's in-progress book, and perhaps influenced more than I realize by _Freedom Evolves_; someone can tell me. I wouldn't be surprised if mine are perfectly compatible with Dan's... but I understand my language. I see three big varieties of free will: a social, practical form, relevant to crime and punishment and such; subjective feeling; and metaphysical free will, relating to God. The bulk of this will be about the first form. The everyday sense of "free will", I would say, boils down to exactly this: the ability to override desire, temptation, and bad habit for the sake of long-term goals and beliefs. Someone good at this has a lot of "willpower"; someone who can't do it well lacks willpower or self-control; someone who can't do it at all is "like an animal". As animals, we have universal instincts (fear, desires) regarding danger, food, and sex, plus less acclaimed instincts regarding sleepiness and laziness (conservation of effort). As social animals, we have more instincts, regarding group-belonging, status-seeking (especially for males), submission to superior status, and perhaps capture bonding ("Stockholm Syndrome"). We also have associations and habits (classical and operant conditioning), and addictions. As human beings, we have the ability to imagine where following our instincts and habits will take us, to evaluate the result, and decide to try to avoid it. Dennett's evitability, but more specifically self-evitability. None of this requires spirituality; instinct, habit, and imagination in the sense of simulating the future are all quite easy for a computer programmer to envision programming, though dealing with any amount of real complexity is beyond our current skill. We punish criminals because we believe they could have used their rational powers to decide not to commit the crime, and that they either failed to do so or came to the wrong conclusion; the punishment serves to educate them and others. Or we may believe they failed to acquire law-abiding habits, which the conditioning of punishment should instill in them; the same logic holds. A madman, by contrast, may be unable to rationally envision the future, or unable to use that vision to control his impulses, in which case we give up on punishment and lock him up for mutual safety. In a crime of passion or temporary insanity, we conclude that the criminal's ordinary powers of self-control were overwhelmed by unusual causes, which might have swept away any of us, and which are unlikely to be repeated. Incarceration is not used as it would not help deter the next person similarly overwhelmed, nor is the criminal a future threat. A gray area might be the psychopath or sociopath, whose behavior can be affected by outright threats, or anticipation of them, even to the extent of long-term moral behavior deemed to serve his long-term self-interest, but who is immune to conscience. A moral educator might claim the sociopath lacked the free will to override his self-interest, but one might as well say he has too much free will, and cannot be forced to share the common beliefs and habits which putatively keep most people in line even when they can get away with something. None of this is in conflict with determinism, in fact it *depends* upon determinism to work. Having socially practical free will can be translated as being susceptible to the right kinds of determinants, namely rational foresight and social pressure. Especially social pressure. To exhort someone to use their free will is to try to get them to predictably override their immediate desires for their own or for the social good. Someone immune to social pressure may be strong-willed if their behavior is admirable, eccentric if rich and harmless, and a sociopath or criminally insane if violent. Someone whose behavior is random is simply unpredictable, to themself as well as others, and to be locked up if their set of random behaviors includes violence. Indeterminism frees one from social constraints, true, but it also frees one from one's internal constraints. As for the *feeling* of free will... even if all your decisions are determined, you don't get to find out what those decisions are until you make them. There's no access to God's History of the Universe to see what you'll decide -- and if there were, that access could change your actions, making the History obsolete. What point is there to your efforts, if everything is determined? Your actions are part of what does the determining! Sometimes a small part, as when an asteroid hits, but typically a rather large part of determining your future. I think part of what people fear is the feeling of imprisonment, that they're condemned to follow some pre-determined track, seeing what's coming and unable to avoid it. We may well be on pre-determined tracks, but we can't know what they are, except by going down the track. If someone tried to show us, that act would give us the impulse to veer away from it, if we felt rebelious. But none of this helps solve the problem of metaphysical free will, in fact if anything it exacerbates the problem. Society can work just fine in a determined world, deterministically using punishment and exhortation to try to determine the behavior of its members. But a benevolent God who is said to be temporally omniscient, standing outside of time and seeing -- and able to affect -- all causes, and who is thus able to have designed or driven the universe through any logically consistent history, and then casts some of the people into eternal Hellfire -- well, there's a problem. So people try to invoke a free will which is somehow metaphysically above determinism while not being randomness, and thus able to earn us Hell. There is no room for that in my social free will, but this is not a problem; as a non-believer, I am happy to say that the paradox really is a paradox, to be resolved only by undoing one of the assumptions, and that insisting on a different solution is simply confused. Could Hell be God's tool for inducing moral behavior via social free will? It could, though since no one sees it before death the simple threat of Hell would work as well. But go back to the beginning, where useful free will was the conflict between instinct and anticipation, desires and goals. For the evolutionist, those all come from the design process of natural selection. For the theist, those were designed by or could have been modified by God. If moral behavior contrary to our impulses is the goal, we could be deprived of the immoral impulses, just as we try to give our children good moral education -- habits of good behavior and self-control -- in lieu of a constant threat of punishment for them to be continuously reasoning about. Some theists will then say that would deprive us of the chance to exercise our free will, as people made in the image of God, but this leads us back to metaphysics -- the practical, computational, mechanistic free will is nothing which seems particularly sacred or in need of cultivation for the afterlife (for what purpose?) while a more 'divine' free will is impossible to envision, crushed between the pillars of useful determinism and dangerous randomness.