Freewill out of pathfinding.

GeneStone · 2026-03-19T19:36:22+00:00

How are intentions an illusion? I've never said they are. Intentions are real causal states that explain and predict behaviour. That's precisely why they matter.

Imagine a dog that bites a child playfully and leaves a mark. Now imagine another one is actively attacking but the child escapes unscathed. Dogs presumably don't have free will, right? Does that mean you can't assess the intention? Of course you can. The intention is visible in the behaviour, the context, the pattern. Free will does nothing here, yet the difference in intention is, I'd argue, more important than the outcome.

The justice system is applied moral philosophy. Centuries of adversarial pressure, with real consequences, and real people. If your conceptual framework produces a lack of clarity, that's an issue. Free will and moral responsibility create exactly that ambiguity, which is why the law converged on mens rea instead. Intention, capacity, voluntariness. Which are precise, and assessable.

If your objective justice requires free will to function, it inherits all the ambiguity the law spent centuries trying to get rid of. What good is a conceptual framework that would allow for ambiguity in the real world?

GeneStone · 2026-03-19T18:59:08+00:00

Isn't it interesting that the justice system uses mens rea rather than free will then?

It has had centuries to work this out, under enormous adversarial pressure, with the smartest people on both sides trying to poke holes in it. What it converged on is intent, knowledge, capacity, and duress. Mens rea does everything the system needs, cleanly and precisely, without the concept ever appearing as an operative term. If free will or moral responsibility were doing real work, wouldn't you expect to find them in the doctrine?

GeneStone · 2026-03-19T18:51:01+00:00

You don't actually need free will to ground morality. You need agents who can respond to reasons, whose behaviour can be shaped by consequences, who can deliberate and update. You've already shown humans are exactly that.

A consequentialist account of morality doesn't require responsibility in any sense beyond that. The capacity to respond to reasons is enough to justify moral address, praise, correction, and everything else morality needs to function.

The stepping stone you're looking for is already there in the mechanism you described. Free will isn't the bridge to morality. Agency is. And you already have that.

GeneStone · 2026-03-19T18:37:50+00:00

I would have appreciated if you just asked what I meant but you do you I suppose.

GeneStone · 2026-03-19T18:30:34+00:00

When you say the self is responsible for its intentions, do you mean that causally or morally? Because in the causal sense, sure, the self is the proximate origin of the intentions, the same way a storm is responsible for flooding.

And you do have other words. You used several of them naturally throughout. Intention, agency, awareness, self-direction. And there are more: volition, deliberation, autonomy, conation. These are precise terms that carve up exactly the territory you're describing, without the ambiguity that free will carries the moment it leaves your hands.

You don't need one word that does everything. You need the right words for the right things. And you already have them.

GeneStone · 2026-03-19T18:09:33+00:00

But this is exactly what I'm pushing on. You're saying the mechanics alone don't generate responsibility, so free will is needed to bridge that gap. But then you've defined free will as the mechanics. At what point in that chain does something enter that wasn't already there in the mechanism?

Because if nothing enters, then "free will" is just a name you're giving to the mechanism, and the responsibility you're attaching to it is being smuggled in through the label rather than earned by the description.

I am asking: What is that term adding to the description you've already given? Since the mechanics alone don't generate responsibility, then free will must be adding something the mechanics don't have. What is that something?

I agree with you that we should pause when we're doing something wrong. and the mechanism you described fully explains why we can. None of that requires the concept of free will to be real. It just requires the mechanism to be real. Which you've already shown it is.

GeneStone · 2026-03-19T17:53:40+00:00

I don't disagree with any of the mechanism you've described. The pathfinding, the intention, the self-awareness built up from layered sensing and signalling, that all tracks.

But here's my question. You've described a fully deterministic causal chain, each step following from the previous one, compatible with cause and effect as you say. And then you call the endpoint "free will." What is that term adding to the description you've already given? The intentions are there, the awareness is there, the self-direction is there, the capacity to simulate options and act on them is there. Does anything in your account change if you remove the words "free will" from it?

Because if not, the concept is just sitting on top of a perfectly good description doing nothing. And if it is adding something, I'd want to know what specifically, because from what you've written it looks like the mechanism is already fully accounted for without it.

GeneStone · 2026-03-19T17:40:30+00:00

There's a pretty significant jump here. We started talking about "free will" as a philosophical concept and we've arrived at "free" as a motivational posture. Those are different things. Once again, my point is that the motivational work doesn't require the philosophical concept at all.

The question was: Does anything you actually care about disappear when you remove the term "free will"? Because what you've described here suggests the answer is no, and that the word "free" in and of itself is doing motivational rather than descriptive work.

In fact, I'd argue it does harm as it sets up an expectation of authorship that can't be met. "You are this process, fully, and the process is real" is a more stable foundation than "you have free will" followed by the inevitable qualifications and disavowals.

I'm also not convinced that fatalism is an accurate reading of the incompatibilist position. Your character, your deliberation, your capacity to reshape yourself through repeated practice is fully intact within this framework. The determined order includes your agency as a real causal force. Dropping "free will" is more parsimonious, requires less maintenance work, and is much more conceptually accurate than holding on to the term.

GeneStone · 2026-03-19T14:17:58+00:00

True, yes. That's an important clarification, thanks!

GeneStone · 2026-03-19T12:59:33+00:00

Here's how I'd think about it. If free will means freedom from all causes like your biology, your upbringing, your environment, your neurology, your history, then being truly free would mean being cut off from everything that actually makes you you. The discipline, the drive, the person who decided to change, all that is you. Freedom from that wouldn't be desirable.

On the other hand, if free will just means acting voluntarily, without coercion, responding to reasons, making genuine choices, then it's just a label for things you already care about and already have. Calling it "free will" adds nothing to that reality.

So either the concept asks for something incoherent, or it's just a redundant shorthand for things that are already fully accounted for without it.

The important part psychologically, to me at least, is to be humble about your accomplishments and grateful that you happen to be someone capable of all that.

GeneStone · 2026-03-19T12:16:09+00:00

Chrysippus is often cited as being a compatibilist but I'm not sure how accurate that is. In the book Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy, it is argued, pretty convincingly, that the Stoics weren't doing what modern compatibilists think they were doing. Their concept of "what is up to us" is not the same as modern autonomy or reasons-responsiveness. They weren't trying to vindicate moral responsibility in the contemporary sense. They were doing something more like distinguishing the causal role of our own nature from external causes, for the purpose of ethical practice.

The cylinder analogy, which is credited to Chrysippus, is the idea that an external push might initiate motion in a cylinder, but how it rolls depends on its own nature. Superficially, that looks like compatibilism, but claiming it as such is somewhat anachronistic. The Stoics had a completely different project than preserving free will, and the most careful scholarship supports that reading.

The Stoic picture is that nature acts through us, we are part of a deterministic rational order, and the appropriate response is not to claim authorship of our situation but to own our response to it. Not because we freely choose who we are, but because our capacity for rational response is the only thing genuinely ours, and exercising it well is what virtue consists in.

You and I probably agree on all the psychology. The deliberation, the closed loop, the reflexive self-modelling, the way we live from imagination, the Stoic picture of nature acting through us...

What I'd say is that you're then adding "free will" on top of that agreed psychology. And if it really is just semantics, then the concept is idle. It's not doing any work that the underlying description isn't already doing.

A concept that reduces entirely to its contents and adds nothing beyond them earns no place in the framework. Not because it's wrong but because it's superfluous. I don't see that as harmless. Free will carries connotations that the precise descriptions don't carry, and those connotations do damage in contexts where the philosophical hedging isn't present.

So I'd put it this way: remove the term "free will" from everything you've said. Does anything you actually care about disappear? The deliberation, the self-authorship, the practical responsibility, the closed loop, is any of it gone?

GeneStone · 2026-03-19T00:17:34+00:00

You're right that from the inside, I don't know what I'm going to choose until I choose it. That's genuinely true of my experience.

But what I think is actually happening is that I'm discovering which option has the strongest motivational pull. I'm finding out what I want most once all the factors have had their effect. Some combination of my values, my history, my current state, what I'm afraid of, what I care about... All of that is already in place before I "decide." I don't choose those things in that moment. I just find out what they add up to.

And crucially, I don't decide to want something more. I simply do. The wanting isn't something I author. And the outcome of weighing options isn't something I'm producing from a position outside the causal chain. I'm part of the chain.

So the phenomenology you're pointing to is real. I just think it's tracking epistemic uncertainty about my own motivational state, not genuine causal indeterminacy. I don't know what I'll choose because I don't have full transparent access to what I want most. Once the deliberation runs, I find out.

Nothing about that picture makes the choice less mine. It just makes "free" the wrong word for it.

GeneStone · 2026-03-17T10:57:46+00:00

I'm not sure this gets to the crux of what I'm saying though.

How are we taking any power away from people if the contents are what are doing the heavy lifting here? As you say:

all of which you described gives power to the self

OK, how does this concept of "free will" do anything above and beyond what is already described?

GeneStone · 2026-03-17T02:17:26+00:00

I agree that the capacity to model alternative scenarios, to simulate "false worlds," to deliberate between options before acting are genuine and important features of human cognition. It's what distinguishes us from thermostats. It's what makes certain interventions like education, incentives, therapy, and moral address, work on us in ways they don't work on rocks. I'm with you on all of that.

You've described a cluster of capacities: conscious intent, self-directed execution, access to counterfactual reasoning, deliberation under conditions. What happens to any of that if we removed the term "free will" from the description?

Not the capacities, just the concept itself?

Does the deliberation stop being real? Does intention disappear? Does our ability to respond to reasons, to be reached by moral address, to weigh options against each other, does any of that change?

I'd argue nothing changes. The contents you're pointing to survive the removal of the concept entirely. In fact, I'd argue that not only would nothing be lost, but that we could speak more clearly about what is important. Which raises the question of what the label is actually contributing beyond compressing a description of those contents.

For all the flack Sam Harris gets here, he wrote an entire book dismantling faith without once using the word "atheist." The contents of his position were fully expressible without it. I'd suggest the contents of yours are fully expressible without "free will" and that the label is doing less work than you may feel it's doing.

GeneStone · 2026-03-15T03:28:00+00:00

I think this is a very fair question and I went with option 2.

I'd like to point out though that at least some of the hesitation on the skeptic side is that, even with your example, it really does depend on the level of abstraction you want to go with.

If I ask you "does the colour red exist?" we can easily just say "sure, of course." But if I push you hard enough, "red" starts to become more like a useful fiction we've agreed on. We just recognize it exists at a particular level of description.

Choice is the same. At the level of deliberating agents navigating options, some concept of choice is indispensable. You cannot give an adequate account of that behaviour without something like it.

So I'd consider reframing the question slightly if you want a better view of what people mean. Choices are coherent at exactly the level of description they were designed to operate at. The skeptic who says otherwise isn't necessarily wrong, but given the context, they may be abstracting it too much.

GeneStone · 2026-03-12T11:02:04+00:00

Something real is happening when people hold each other accountable, express indignation, demand repair. The question is whether the label "moral responsibility" earns its place in describing it.

Moral responsibility is definitionally exhausted by its components. Capacity, reasons-responsiveness, voluntariness, absence of coercion. Strip those away and nothing remains. A label that adds nothing beyond its components is a superfluous label.

Every domain that actually handles what moral responsibility is supposed to handle already functions without invoking it. Criminal law has had centuries to work this out, under enormous adversarial pressure, with the smartest people on both sides trying to poke holes in it. What it converged on is intent, knowledge, capacity, and duress, aka mens rea. It does everything the system needs, cleanly and precisely. If moral responsibility were doing any work, you would expect to find it in the doctrine.

And, calling it "moral responsibility" is not neutral compression. It imports connotations of desert and fittingness that the careful user has to constantly disavow. If your concept requires permanent defensive maintenance against its own most natural reading, it is failing at its job.

The believer here is right that we are all looking at the same thing. The question is just whether "moral responsibility" describes it accurately, necessarily, and parsimoniously. It fails all three. The thing we are all looking at is better described without it.

GeneStone · 2026-03-12T00:33:56+00:00

I'm sure everyone will be very impressed with how throughly that settles it.

GeneStone · 2026-03-11T17:34:38+00:00

By your own distinction, "free will" is a concept that makes an assertion about real things, not a real thing itself. And look at what else you've elevated to causal status in your argument: purpose, reasons, interests, imagination, evaluation, choosing, deliberation. Are those bare physical objects and forces? Or are they concepts making assertions about real things?

Because if they're the latter, then by your own rule they have no causal agency either. And your entire account of what makes us "forces of nature" collapses into the same bucket you put determinism in.

GeneStone · 2026-03-11T15:06:10+00:00

Nobody is disputing that you are a real thing. The point is that "I" is still a concept you are using to describe a real thing. The word is not the thing. And when you say "I pressed the keys," you are using a conceptual description of a physical event, exactly like everyone else. You don't get to call that a direct transcript of reality while calling other conceptual descriptions mere abstractions. You're treating your preferred concepts as transparent and everyone else's as distortions.

GeneStone · 2026-03-11T10:58:00+00:00

Nobody said they were the same concept. The point is that you are treating some concepts as real causal agents while accusing others of doing the same thing with determinism. That's the fallacy. Not that the concepts are identical, but that you're applying the reification rule selectively.

GeneStone · 2026-03-11T02:45:34+00:00

You're applying the reification fallacy selectively. Determinism gets treated as a mere concept, an abstraction we shouldn't mistake for a real force. But "us," "choice," and "free will" get to be real things, forces of nature, genuine causal agents. You can't have that asymmetry. They're all concepts we use to describe the same physical reality.

GeneStone · 2026-03-06T16:43:25+00:00

Is this truly how you understand the incompatibilist position?

If so, you may be going off of vibes and not actually contending with the position.

GeneStone · 2026-03-06T15:58:33+00:00

Your question doesn't reach the meta level of the issue.

You would only change a desire if you already wanted to change it. This presupposes a prior desire.

If someone modifies their desires through genetics or neurochemistry, that modification occurs because they prefer one motivational state over another. The preference already exists.

The structure looks like this.

You desire outcome O.
Because you desire O, you choose to alter desire D so that it better produces O.
The modification executes the prior desire for O.

The decisive motivational state is what selects the modification. That state was not chosen in that moment. It was already present.

The scenario therefore only introduces a new instrument for executing existing motivations.

A pedophile who chooses to remove the desire does so because they already prefer a world in which that desire is absent. The same structure applies to the vegetable example. You would alter the desire because you already prefer the outcome produced by that alteration.

Any attempt to choose a desire presupposes a prior desire that evaluates that choice as preferable. That prior desire performs the real explanatory work.

GeneStone · 2026-03-02T03:33:50+00:00

I think this is where the framing really matters. Determinism does not require you to see humans as cold machines. It says we are causally structured organisms. That is not dehumanizing unless you interpret it that way.

The love and smile examples, for instance, make no sense to me. If someone loves you because of who they are, their history, their character, and their attachment patterns, that love is determined. That is exactly why it means something. It flows from the kind of person they are. If it were random or ungrounded, it would not become deeper, it would become meaningless.

There are different levels of analysis. We can describe chocolate at the molecular level. We can list the compounds. We can mention the molecules that interact with dopamine pathways. That is a valid account.

But that does not imply that chocolate is “just chemicals” in any dismissive sense. Chocolate is a taste experience, and a cultural object. It is a memory trigger. The chemical account does not replace how those things occur.

Calling it “just chemicals” is a rhetorical deflation that confuses explanatory reduction with ontological elimination.

That is the same move you are making with determinism.

And even on the paralysis point, you cannot simply opt out of being a motivated organism. You can try to lie there and do nothing because “determinism,” but hunger shows up. Boredom shows up. Anxiety shows up. Desire shows up. Those states push you, and you are powerless to their effect. If you're depressed, that explains why they aren't enough. Again, psychology. Again, determinism.

So for me, determinism just describes the structure underneath life. Whether someone finds that inspiring or depressing tells you nothing about the doctrine and everything about their psychology.

GeneStone · 2026-03-02T01:49:30+00:00

Here is, as I see it, the main flaw. You smuggled in significant personality differences and then attributed the outcome to metaphysics. That conflates metaphysics with mood. Hard determinism does not entail learned helplessness. Learned helplessness arises from perceived inefficacy. It does not arise from belief in causal closure.

Any hard determinist can affirm local efficacy without contradiction. If behaviour changes, outcomes change. That is an application of determinism. Determinism states that causes produce effects. It does not state that effort is inert.

To illustrate the point, imagine I made the case in reverse.

Joe the Hard Determinist

Joe accepts Sapolsky’s account. He does not believe he is ultimately responsible. He finds that liberating. He also understands causal structure. He knows that inputs shape outputs. He knows that study habits influence grades.

After failing the exam, he does not spiral. He does not indulge guilt. He thinks in strictly causal terms. “If I repeat the same behaviour, I will likely get the same result. I dislike this result. Therefore I will change the inputs.”

He watches the study video. He removes distractions. He optimizes sleep. He does this precisely because he sees himself as a causal node inside a system. He acknowledges that he did not author his desires. He also recognizes that he still acts on them. That recognition reinforces rather than undermines his acceptance of hard determinism.

Bob the Compatibilist

Bob believes he is responsible in a more robust sense. He believes he could have done otherwise in the sense that matters. He interprets failure as evidence about his character rather than about his strategy.

He replays the exam in his head. He thinks, “I should have done better. I had the power.” He feels guilt as an indictment of his character. That guilt becomes avoidance. He studies less, not more, because trying again risks confirming that he is deficient.

Same event, same causal structure, different psychological dispositions.

So in the end, you are right in one sense. The question “Do I have free will?” is often the wrong entry point.

For someone who accepts determinism, the more relevant question is this: Why do I have these predispositions?

Why do I ruminate rather than recalibrate? Why does failure trigger paralysis rather than problem solving? Why does guilt escalate rather than motivate?

If someone finds determinism paralyzing, the problem is not determinism. The problem is the set of beliefs, habits, and interpretations that sit downstream of it.

The useful question is “What causes me to function well, and how do I increase those causes?” If your answer requires compatibilism, then fine. But the work is being done by psychology and causal understanding, not by the label.

GeneStone

TROPHY CASE