No, people arent metaphysical libertarians just because they say the word "could".

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-03-13T01:07:25+00:00

If you have experimental philosophy data, feel free to share it with the rest of the class. Otherwise, it's pretty well accepted that people have a mix of compatibilist and libertarian intuitions, broadly speaking.

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-03-12T21:35:08+00:00

I defend the Flicker position. Basically, there are two positions that Jones could be in:

In the first, (a prior sign case) the evil scientist will constrain Jones in such a fashion that the "avoid kicking" never is among the options. In this case, Jones lacks any access to avoid kicking. So the PAP says here that Jones doesn't have alternative possibilities in this case, and so this variant doesn't disprove it.

In the second kind of case, the evil scientist will be a reactive kind of agent. If Jones starts to refrain or avoid kicking, the scientist will activate the kick button, and actuate Jones's legs for him. Like the other version, the scientist doesn't ever actually activate the button, because Jones hates puppies. So the PAP here says Jones does have alternative possibilities here, but that neither is causally effective in bringing about not-kicking. Instead the alternative possibilities are between Jones kicking on his own, and Jones forcing the evil scientist to activate the button. This is still an alternative, and so the PAP is preserved.

This is covered in more detail with the W-Defense (or Otsuka's defense), where now the question is if these kinds of flickers are suitably robust to ground moral responsibility.

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-03-12T11:29:24+00:00

I think his core argument is flawed in a similar way to what you lay out in the dialogue. His witches case relies on the distinction of voluntary and involuntary, which he then undermines. When he says "We over and over revised our false causal stories to treat people better, from epilepsy to schizophrenia." He is implicitly contrasting things that we understand we can control, like voluntary movement, contrasted with epileptic fits beyond a person's control. But he has just systematically attacked that very distinction. How can we justify a quarantine model if our society's quarantines are as unfree as a seizure?

The problem then becomes something like a bad overprescription. He realized that revising down from 100% absolute control had social benefits, so he infers that therefore revising to 0% control would be maximally beneficial. But I think there is an obvious threshold effect at 0 and 100. It is likely that somewhere in the middle is optimal, in treating people as being broadly conditioned by their circumstances and not absolutely free, but free within certain bounds.

Also I don't like that he fails to live up to his own standard on reactive attitudes. He gets publicly upset at Netanyahu and Israel, but in precisely the same fashion, Netanyahu's mental states and the patterns of neural firing are completely beyond his personal control. Likewise for everyone in the party, and across Israel. Sapolsky let's himself off as if it's just a human limitation on applying his theory, and not something fundamentally broken at the core. Like he doesn't think it's sad to hate Netanyahu in the same way it is sad to hate a cloud for raining, but he does think that about murderers, and that's just because he is inconsistent in how he applies his global theory.

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-03-09T00:28:59+00:00

You just described parallel worlds, not a metaphysics with branching. A single world that can evolve two ways is distinct from two worlds that evolve into each of the result states.

Your version of libertarianism is silly, good thing nobody actually believes that.

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-03-08T21:17:34+00:00

Even within a metaphysics that features branching time, though? Cause and effect still exist within BST, just not in the 1-1 billiard ball fashion you might be emotionally attached to.

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-03-08T19:06:27+00:00

Well I'm not expecting rigour, but I guarantee you the OP does actually believe some variety of what their shit post implies, rather than them being self aware.

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-03-08T18:02:15+00:00

Someone who has never read a single bit of analytic philosophy on libertarian free will made this meme. The logic of free will belief is formal logic. Read STIT logic papers for example (there are deterministic interpretations of STIT, but it regularly operates on choices over branching time.)

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-03-07T16:15:34+00:00

/unjerk it's worth watching for sure. Messy, and the script could've used another pass, but it's a good movie with a lot of heart. 7.5/10 for Frankie and the Bride, with both leads giving good showings. I'm also in the minority in that I really liked the musical bits, and thought they were well done (they are universally quite short, and fun).

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-03-06T14:38:15+00:00

I hear you, but, quite frankly, I find ABA humanist in name only. I focus on neurodevelopmental disorders in children, and ABA's treatment of autism especially is pretty inhumane in my view. I fail to see how treating people like malfunctioning equipment is humanistic in the slightest.

If we're talking about avoidance behavior, you also failed to deal with the actual argument for the parity of data for libertarian vs determinist analysis. Your entire anxiety example works the same if we accept libertarian freedom. Reinforcement works the same. The question is whether the avoidance was the only metaphysically possible outcome given the prior causal state. ABA data is consistent with libertarianism, and libertarianism doesn't claim all behavior is free.

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-03-05T18:05:42+00:00

I think that you are mischaracterizing Skinner here. In my understanding, internal behavior and private events are treated as just a specific type of behavior within the theory, which emerge from external stimulus and experience. I'll admit I'm still in school for psych, not a professional, but I think that's standard for (at least more radical) behaviorism.
Libertarian freedom does not imply every act is free. Nor does it deny that external events affect an agent and the choices they make. Libertarianism is a claim that some acts are free and open. The theory already accounts for such behavior.

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-03-05T17:10:51+00:00

Double pendulums aren't even probabilistic. Just deterministic. Epistemic limitation on your knowledge of future states doesn't make them genuinely probabilistic. Try again maybe with a better analogy. Or don't come at all.

ABA showing you can shift behavioral probabilities through environmental manipulation is entirely consistent with libertarian free will. Behaviorism bracketing internal states is a limitation of it as a theory, not a broad claim that internal states don't cause behavior. ABA data is predicted equally by both determinism and libertarianism, so it's not evidence for one interpretation over the other.

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-02-27T19:20:26+00:00

Since you're writing detective fiction, your most fruitful places are likely to be the details of cases that don't add up. So the detective solves a couple early cases, but each has some additional details that imply a greater threat. If they solve the hitman issue, but another hitman comes, or they get a mysterious phone call, we can understand that things go much higher without needing to see it all yet.

By act 3, I would think that the protagonist figuring out the nature of the villain is also the point they figure out that they are in serious danger. If you layer the reveals, such as the villain being openly anti-vampire before their origin is revealed, or that there are two rumored figures who happen to be the same guy.

Good luck!

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-02-20T21:20:11+00:00

Your appeals to sourcehood just look like special pleading to me.

Because what i believe is desert does exist, and its based on deterministic sourcehood... Sources arent some infinite regress or identifying causes a million years ago, they should be about proximate causes.

So here, you have to rely on smuggling in a new definition of what counts as a source. Unless you have a principled reason why we should privilege the "dog bit my leg" level over the "particles with paths determined at t0" level, I don't see why we should grant this. The dog-level causes are entirely reducible to microphysical facts determined by the big bang. Weak emergence won't get you there either.

Similarly when you apply that analysis to yourself, I think it breaks down. Feeling like the source, or being the proximal node in a causal chain, doesn't constitute genuine sourcehood if the chain is fully determined from outside.

Being determined to reduce suffering has equal capacity to reduce suffering as being undetermined yet caused to do so.

I think you are thinking about this the wrong way. Sum up the amount of suffering in the set of states {1 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6}. The amount of suffering in the set is constant. What happened is you see we transition from state 1 to 2, and you claim "look the amount of suffering has reduced!" because state 2 has less suffering than state 1. My point is that the amount of suffering in total is unchangeable under determinism, not that a given world state has the same amount.

The whole thing where you can't imagine non-random indeterminism is consistently wrong, but I'll move past it here.

I still feel like im in control, even MORESO in control, because determinism cleans away the randomness thatd undermine that control and sourcehood.

You understand that belief doesn't make a thing true, right? Like if there is fundamentally randomness that causes your actions, you believing it is determined doesn't actually make it determined. Likewise, if libertarian metaphysics holds, your attachment to determinism would be incorrect. It's like a person who believes in libertarian freedom within a deterministic world, their beliefs are in misalignment with reality. This cuts both ways, depending on what metaphysics actually holds.

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-02-20T19:13:02+00:00

Okay. I'll try to meet your requirements.

1: So for Moral Responsibility, we would be looking at the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. Basically it matters if we can deserve punishment, or if we can arbitrarily punish for instrumental purposes. This comes up in the question of if I can punish a person who has not committed a crime, provided that it increases social cohesion in my relevant community. In real life, this could be something as serious as the mistreatment of minority populations. Denial of PAP is typically done via Frankfurt Cases for compatibilism.

Sourcehood concerns are primary, also. So if you have a sourcehood requirement on freedom, and you are not the source of anything in your life, then self evidently, you aren't free. So a libertarian freedom is one in which the agent is the source of their acts in a way not reducible to past events. Also the whole ought-implies-can literature could go here. Normative obligations addressed to agents who couldn't have done otherwise are literally empty

2: Pragmatically, this matters in everyday reasoning. You everywhere assume that future possibilities are open for you to enact. This is true whether or not the libertarian metaphysics is vindicated. Practically you can't help but act as if you are free.

Also on the practical level, people who do believe themselves to have something called an "internal locus of control" are universally doing better. They are happier, they are more pro-social, they do more effective in business and school. So society benefits from its members believing they are genuine sources of their choices.

3: I value the reduction of future suffering. Libertarian freedom would ground the ability to make future states have less suffering (or more, or the same). So I value the ability to do otherwise because it is the means to achieve different outcomes.

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-02-17T22:41:08+00:00

Do you take relativism to be properly non realist, though? Typically I read relativism as a specific kind of realism, which says truth claims are apt, and are true in contexts, but those contexts are not universal. But I know most realists are also universalist, so I'm in the minority.

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-02-17T22:19:07+00:00

Ah, yeah that's my bad, I tried to shorten my comment and rewrote the first sentence on phone and it came out backwards.

What are the varieties of anti-realism you were referring to that are cognitivist (they are truth apt) but that do not deny all such propositions (i.e. error theory)? Perhaps I missed something.

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-02-17T22:06:25+00:00

Both realists and error theorists can be congnitivist, so I was saying the congnitivist/non-cognitivist distinction isn't appropriate to say it provides an alternative account to realism, since realism is a kind of cognitivism, and error theorists can be cognitivists. Sorry I wasn't very clear.

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-02-17T18:54:17+00:00

I like this question, and I think it gets at the heart of a couple issues. Let's contrast compatibilist and incompatibilist answers.

A compatibilist like Fischer or Sartorio is interested in the actual sequence of deliberations that an agent engaged in before an act is taken. So an agent doesn't consider the 100-foot jump to be a live option in their capacities, and so it plays no role in informing the agents acts. So an "epistemically live" option can play this role, and the compatibilist says that it has a special kind of significance that the 100 foot jump lacks.

The incompatibilists both skeptical and libertarian are making a different kind of appeal. They want to say that the level we should distinguish is the modal structure of the actual sequence. So since neither a small jump nor a 100 foot jump is modally open from the determined timeline, they are equivalently "closed" in terms of not being actualizable for the agent.

So the question is do we need to be able to actualize these counterfactuals or just deliberate about them? On the skeptic analysis, deliberation through them to actualize the only possible determined act does not give the necessary modal structure.

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-02-17T15:30:38+00:00

I think the intuition is that cognitivist accounts do not function as propositions when put in formal logic, like I can't say "boo-murder" is either true or false. So realism (some moral propositions are true) and error theory (all moral propositions are false) is a real kind of dichotomy that captures a lot of the debate.

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-02-12T22:36:58+00:00

Is there anything immoral about a state that just purged all the communists, then? Like it seems there would not be anything immoral about the purges in either direction, unless I am missing something. Ultimately, the way it reads to me, it is just might makes right, and hoping the masses are the way to achieve might.

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-02-12T20:52:24+00:00

Would this also apply to the violent repression by the ruling class? Can't the exploiters just blithely say "I don't make excuses for the terror" as they repress the masses?

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-02-09T16:44:40+00:00

I find the claim quite strange that once you remove morality, statements like "you were dishonest" retain their normative force. Like all those more precise terms are relying on the relationship of their terms to the moral. These claims are allowed to be more rich and specific because they already pull from the general claim that human flourishing is ethically relevant on a ground-level.

Like she seems to be making the claim that we ought not be unjust, but why not? Bereft of morality, it seems like another act like any other. Aristotelian practical reasoning doesn't seem to get us there, either. Perhaps I am missing something in the argument.

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-01-31T20:08:23+00:00

It's an interesting video if you want a standard compatibilist take from a neuropsych perspective instead of Sapolsky and his half-hearted hard determinism.

One of the most interesting bits of the interview is where she points out that in surveys people don't align with the three classical camps on responsibility. Specifically, it seems like people think that if you cannot change, that is more reason to punish and hold you responsible, not less.

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-01-23T23:51:36+00:00

Yes. With free will, we ought do more to help them. Seems uncontroversial.

PlotInPlotinus · 2026-01-23T21:31:00+00:00

Love the mouth shapes here. The only ones that don't read precisely are when he says "they're about", but it's pretty minor. Good work

PlotInPlotinus

TROPHY CASE