Talk:Compatibilism and incompatibilism

message: Ok, so first I would like to define Will (not free will yet) as the driving force behind our actions.  Free will is the theory that said driving force is not in turn driven by any force that would make it un-free.  I think those definitions are vague enough to be reconcilable with any theory compatibilist or not.  So you have in front of you, many paths that you could take depending on which path Will forces you to take.  However, why does Will choose a specific path over another?  Here the two schools of thought split.
Compatibilists: Under this view, Will indeed has driving forces behind it that determines how it will force you, those forces often qualify as forces that do not make will un-free.  But what of those forces? what determines them? more forces? what determines those then? 
Uncompatibilists: Since they reject determinism I assume that they take will to be probabilistic.  So to borrow a term from Quantum Mechanics, when the the "wave-function" of decision collapses, why does it collapse to a certain possibility and not another one? (QM says that observation causes a function to collapse, but what causes it to collapse a certain way?)  What "determines" for lack of a better word, where the function collapses?  Whatever detemines it, that determining factor must also be probabilistic if the wave function itself is to be truly probabilistic.  But then the determining factor, if probabilistic, also needs to collapse, what decides where it shall collapse?  You can see where this is going...
So it seems like trying to reconcile any definition of free will with determinism, or rejecting determinism, will lead to something very strange...someone explain to me wtf is going on here?    —Preceding unsigned comment added by 149.4.203.60 (talk) 21:08, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Infinite regession?

message: I'm really trying to understand compatibilism, but it just doesn't make sense to me. The core sentence from the article (I think):
"Whilst a compatibilist will not try to deny that whatever choice you make will have been predetermined since the beginning of time, they will argue that this choice that you make is an example of free will because no one is forcing you to make whatever choice you make."
This surely is a contradiction! I'm not being forced in my choice? If history X predetermines choice A, then choice A is <I>forced</I> by history X. Does belief in compatibilism require one to give up logic? Because, if so, I'd rather start praying to the flying spaghetti monster. 
::Compatibilists differentiate between something being causally necessitated by the laws of nature, and someone being compelled to do something by someone else. They believe you are free if you are not compelled, and that you are casually necessitated, and that  that is not compulsion, so you are still free.1Z 12:40, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you. Your wording is more clear than the article. It seems that compatibilists indeed stress a difference between necessitation and compulsion. I believe the distinction is ultimately imaginary though. this paper basically sums up how I would argue this matter. <signing this and previous comment with my newly created account> Astarica 11:49, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm still quite confused about this, if someone compels you to do something, you are not free, right?  But the person who decided to compel you to do that action was compelled(I'm sorry but I use terms rather loosely) to do so, either by natural forces(free) or someone else(not free), if the latter, that someone else was also compelled by something and so on.  Unless this continues indefinitely in the end it appears that everything is ultimately cause by a natural force and therefore, free.  The definition of what is free or not also seems to be very faulty.  I only glanced at your essay Astarica, but in an example there was a person who was forced to know eat because he was stranded in a desert and was not free correct?  Why then, are his actions not free? because it seems to me that his actions were necessitated by nature: the natural law here being that there was no food in the dessert and you cannot eat that which is not there.   It seems to me that Compatibilism can always find an argument to make any action "free" under their definition.  A even bigger problem with the definition is that it seems to me by any standards that the forces of nature would be more compelling than anything another human could do (this has been said many times I am sure buy i will repeat it: whatever a human does to compel you, you can always choose otherwise, you can choose to ignore the gunman and die), how can a human truly force another one besides by gabbing their limps and manipulating them(one could even argue that said limbs no longer perform the owners actions under said situation). 
Also:
"Further, according to Hume, free will should not be understood as an absolute ability to have chosen differently under exactly the same inner and outer circumstances. Rather, it is a hypothetical ability to have chosen differently if one had been differently psychologically disposed by some different beliefs or desires."
Does Hume, with his early 18th century knowledge, not realize that "some different beliefs or desires" would just as well be part of the collection of "exactly the same inner and outer circumstances" and likewise result from predetermined cause? Astarica 11:49, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Ill Logic

message: This article sucks. Determinism is true or false, it doesn't exist or fail to exist.  KSchutte 20:29, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: this comment sucks Thorsmitersaw  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.78.145.1 (talk) 14:31, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Just a note

message: There is too much emphasis on Hume. Kant probably needs separate treatment.1Z 19:24, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  TBD 

message: Regarding:
"One libertarian view point based upon indeterminism which has been proposed under the assumption of naturalism, a subset of physicalism."
I'd like to fix this, but I can't figure out what the author meant.
Nevertheless I'm loth to delete it.
Help!  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 211.30.9.229 (talk) 11:55, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  This wording needs fixing, but I don't see how 

message: It would be interesting if we could precisely identify the views of the Roman Catholic Church on this. I believe that the Church supports a compatibilist position, since it disagreed with the Calvinists on the issue and had its Jesuit theologians argue that a reasonable man can freely cooperate with divine grace when the time is right. ADM (talk) 16:14, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Roman Catholic Church

message: :One famous proponent of this view was Lucretius, who asserted that the free will arises out of the random, chaotic movements of atoms, called "clinamen". One major objection to this view is that science has gradually shown that more and more of the physical world obeys completely deterministic laws,
My understanding of QM is that while wave functions propagate in a deterministic way, nevertheless wavefunction collapse is probabilistic. Unless you take the many-worlds view.
Paul Murray (talk) 04:40, 8 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  QM, again 

message: The section called "Compatibilism in Theology" has some weak arguments, I think this section should either be made logical (seems impossible) or deleted. For example it begins it's argument by asserting that there could be a "free-willed G*d", well if there could be a "free-willed G*d" then there's no reason there could not be free-willed humans QED, it is pretending to be a philosophical and logical argument after all so it has to play by the rules of such argumentation. Firefight (talk) 03:21, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Illogical Section on Compatibilism in Theology 

message: There was easily enough information for these pages to warrant the same split present in some of the other wikipedia languages. Not only that, but these pages desperately needed editing for flow and to be concise. Finally, the Determinism page (even after some editing) has way too much info about these two views. For these reasons I have created the pages Incompatibilism and Compatibilism respectively. I have greatly edited the latter. For now Determinism links to those two pages, but I realize I have done a lot of editing without giving time for community input. 
I will wait to see your reactions before I move information out of Determinism into each of Incompatibilism and Compatibilism. 
Let me know what you guys think. -Tesseract2 (talk) 07:28, 28 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Splitting this article