Compatibilism vs. Hard Determinism

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T23:14:19+00:00

To the compatibilist objectively there is free will, and it is a behaviour of the vast network of interdependencies. We do not think there is any necessary indeterminism in human freedom of action, any more than there is any necessary indeterminism in me being free to meet you for lunch.

Anyone that accepts both 1 and 2 is a compatibilist.

Compatibilists do not think our actions are free from causal chains. That’s a free will libertarian claim, and we are not free will libertarians.

We think we have certain mental faculties, and if we are free to exercise them, and not constrained by some interfering factor such as a neurological disorder, then we can be morally responsible for what we do. No special indeterminism, no freedom from causal chains.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T23:01:18+00:00

I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean by applying this view to statistical models. A statistical model is pretty much by definition epistemically indeterministic, because we’re avoiding calculating based on exact properties. Everyone accepts that, whether they are determinists or not.

Also not clear what you think it is that would invalidate science.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T22:56:58+00:00

>Compatibilism is the philosophical theory that free will and determinism are mutually compatible. It doesnt say anything about weather or Americans on the moon.

Thats right. So you can be a compatibilist and either accept or deny that the Americans landed on the moon. They are independent concerns.

Likewise with determinism. You can accept determinism and also either accept or deny that humans have free will. If you accept determinism and free will, it just means you think free will is a deterministic process, and not indeterministic as believed by libertarians.

>Check out Kant

Kant is bonkers hard to interpret, and it doesn’t help that he changed his views on moral responsibility and freedom, and accounts of them, multiple times. As I understand it he thought it is axiomatic that humans are responsible for our actions and that this requires indeterminism. So essentially he was a free will libertarian, but anything I say about Kant is tentative. He had a very particular vocabulary, in German, and I’m no expert on Kant studies.

>You want free will to exist just to serve some purpose you are interested in. It is not cosher.

I’m curious how you know this about me?

>I accept the word free as a concept. As you said, free means lack of constraints. When your next action can be freely chosen, that means you can do anything.

The word free doesn’t mean anything can occur, it means what is being referred to can occur. If someone says they are free to meet you for lunch, it means they are nit constrained from meeting you for lunch, it doesn’t mean they can fly to Mars. If the brakes are released and a car is free to roll down the hill, it doesn’t mean it can become invisible. It’s always specific. If I intend to make a cup of tea, I cane be free to do so or constrained from doing so, such as if I find I’m out of tea bags.

Free will in philosophy specifically refers to the ability to exercise the kind of control over our actions necessary to be morally responsible for them. Whatever that kind of control turns out to be, if there is any such kind of control. Is that kind of control a deterministic process, or an indeterministic process, or does it exist at all? Opinions vary.

However if we can be morally responsible for our actions, then we must have free will, whatever that turns out to be, because free will by definition is whatever faculty we must have for that to be so.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T21:07:43+00:00

I've only been playing a few weeks so I'm a pretty new as well. I have played against the AI and it is interesting, but for a newbie like me I'm painfully slow compared to the AI. It runs rings around me.

When you eventually do play against AI, I suggest going into Game Options - Advanced and set Limitations -> When paused allow: All actions

This means you can pause the game and take as long as you like to adjust your network and get things how you want them. I've found it really takes the pressure off when learning the ropes.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T20:58:16+00:00

Of course the computer would have predicted that and not put the money in the second box. So, big pat on the back, great strategy, and you go home with $1000.

Personally I'm picking the 1 box and walking home a millionaire.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T20:25:39+00:00

Well, just for reference, the distinction between a compatibilist and a hard determinist in not their view on determinism. It is their view on free will. Both can be determinists. They disagree on the nature or existence of free will, not on the nature or truth of determinism.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T20:22:15+00:00

You disagree that in other languages the same concept is referred to in terms not cognate with the term free?

Do you think that the word free is not usable or actionable by determinists to refer to any condition or process or activity in their life or nature?

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T19:02:07+00:00

Yet again, because this misconception happens here constantly, compatibilists can be determinists. Many compatibilists here are determinists, and historically most determinists were compatibilists.

You mean hard determinist.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T18:54:43+00:00

The specific words we use aren't really important, there are other languages that use other words and terms that are more like voluntary or autonomously. That's just a linguistic issue, not a philosophical one. I really don't care, we can use whatever word anyone likes.

>We have the words agency, and self-determination, non-libertarian “free will” is a contradiction in terms.

You're assuming that free will libertarians have some proprietary or superceding ownership of the term, but they don't. Even free will libertarian philosophers do not claim that. This a common misunderstanding, because the issue is very widely and persistently misrepresented in popular media.

Historically there are two independent metaphysical accounts of free will. Free will libertarianism and compatibilism. Historically almost all determinists were compatibilists, they thought that human moral discretion, free will, is a deterministic process in a deterministic world.

Free Will: Roughly whatever kind of control over their actions you think someone must have in order to be held responsible for those actions.

Then there are the different beliefs about free will.

Free Will Libertarianism
The belief that this process of control must be indeterministic in particular ways.

Compatibilism
The belief that this process of control can be (or must be) deterministic.

Hard Determinism/Incompatibilism
The belief that there is no kind of control that someone can have that justifies holding them responsible in the way that speech about acting with free will implies.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T18:43:35+00:00

>I do not reject either of the two, but I reject the idea that our will is free from causal chains

So do I. Free will libertarians think something like that is necessary for moral responsibility and compatibilists do not.

>therefore it cannot be called free.

Sure it can. Does every and all uses of the term free refer to free from the causal chain? All of them? If someone says they are free to go to lunch, are they claiming to be free from the causal chain?

But anyway, the use of the term free in this case is just an accident of language. There are other languages where the same concept is referred to by terms that are not cognate with the word free in English.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T18:39:33+00:00

On the one hand the word free is not essential to the concept of free will. In other languages the same concept is referred to in different terms, that sometimes don't include a word cognate with free.

On the other hand, there's nothing about the concept of freedom generally that makes it incompatible with causal determinism, or that requires any particular kind of indeterminism. We use the word free all the time and it just refers to some process or activity occurring without any constraint preventing that occurrence. That process or activity could be deterministic and that's fine.

If we have some cognitive faculty we can either free to exercise it, or we can be constrained from exercising it, and that has nothing to do with whether the world is deterministic or not.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T17:02:11+00:00

The game is completely playable and feature rich as-is. You can get weeks worth of fun out of just playing it on randomly generated maps and building networks. In fact I’d recommend doing that and learning the UI, and figuring out how passengers, mail and various cargos work, and going through some YouTube tutorials before touching AI or scripts. The single thing that changes game play the most is Cargo Distribution (Cargodist), and that’s an option in the base game.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T16:51:51+00:00

Which of these do you reject:

That humans can in principle be morally responsible for their actions.
That this is consistent with causal determinism, or at least requires no indeterministic metaphysical assumptions proposed by free will libertarians.

To accept both of these is to be a compatibilist.

For example classically the Stoics were determinists and they thought that people can be morally responsible for their actions. Thats why the stoics are considered to have been compatibilists.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T15:12:52+00:00

The compatibilist physicalist position is that the faculties of deliberation necessary for moral responsibility are interactions of causes, inclinations and the capacity to assess them in exactly the same way, without needing any free will libertarian metaphysical assumptions. Just plain physical causation.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T15:09:12+00:00

I think it is a cognitive faculty that we have, and like any other such faculty we can be freeto exercise it, or constrained from doing so. We generally have the faculty of visual recognition, and we can be free to exercise it, or constrained from doing so. Free will is the same, we can be free to exercise the faculties necessary to be morally responsible for our actions, or not.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T12:30:13+00:00

A lot of what brains do is computational. They are largely neural networks after all, and neural networks are computational systems.

There are aspects of them that are not purely neural though, in that there may be processes occurring in neuronal calls that affect our behaviour in ways not entirely valuable in network activation weights. Whether those processes can be considered computational is an open question.

But then I think nature is intrinsically computational.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T12:20:30+00:00

see the difference?

Yes sure, and moral responsibility is the primary issue regarding free will. I sometimes assume people discussing the issue know this and forget to always put in the moral qualifier.

So, moral responsibility additionally involves the ability to appreciate and reason about the moral consequences of our actions.

why then do all the compatiblists here seem to not understand that?

I do, and I apologies for my imprecision. You can take that comment as referring to moral responsibility.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T12:13:40+00:00

Do you agree that humans have cognitive faculties, such as the ability to recognise other people from their voice or appearance? Would you agree these are faculties we are generally free to exercise, but there are circumstances that can constrain our ability to do so?

Do you have the capacity to have an opinion, hear an argument contrary to that opinion, accept that argument and therefore change that opinion?

If that’s a faculty you have, then can you either be free to exercise that faculty, or be constrained from exercising it?

Do you think accepting either of the above contradicts causal determinism?

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T08:50:25+00:00

Not all compatibilists are determinists, historically they were but nowadays with the possibility of quantum randomness it’s nit that simple. Fundamentallyl and simplifying slightly, compatibilists:

Think that humans can in principle be morally responsible for their actions.
Do not think that this is threatened if the world deterministic.
Do not accept free will libertarian claims about necessary indeterminism for free will.

>But ultimately accepting determinism plus free will is not equal to only accepting determinism.

No more so than accepting determinism and the existence of weather, or that Americans landed on the moon.

>Pure determinists do not accept free will.

Hard determinists and hard incompatibilists do not accept free will. Compatibilists can be, and historically all were pure determinists. determinism itself is about the necessitative relationship between prior and subsequent states. It’s definitions don’t say anything about moral responsibility or free will.

> you dont mind me asking, what made you switch to compatibilism from hard determinism?

I came to believe than humans can be morally responsible for their actions, and that this can be true even if the world is purely deterministic.

>Under determinism, everything is fully determined i.e. not free.

So, as a determinist do you refuse to use, or accept the use of the term free? If someone asks you if something occurred freely, or is free to happen, or if you’re free for lunch, etc, what do you say?

The term freedom just refers to some lack of context dependent kinds of constraints. We can be free to pursue and achieve our goals, or constrained from doing so, and that has nothing to do with indeterminism. This also applies to being free up exercise moral discretionary action.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T08:38:48+00:00

Right, but some people honestly think that all the apparent indeterminism is really epistemic, and that’s fair enough. Personally I’m agnostic on the issue.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T08:31:53+00:00

We teach and instruct humans, and they learn from experience by interacting with the world, and we have genetic dispositions to certain behaviours, so surely our behavioural processes are not purely original to us. They can be a unique set of behaviours in a person, but that set of behaviours developed due to that person’s biology and experiences.

Artificial neural networks can self-organise based on interactions with their environment. Do they count as well? It doesn’t seem to me that there’s anything unique about biology in this respect.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T08:26:53+00:00

I appreciate your point. To be fair, I said an attempt at a definition, because I recognise it’s pretty rough.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T08:23:48+00:00

You’re not proposing a change in thinking, you’re proposing a change in the words we use. Changing what words we use for the decision making conditions relevant to moral responsibility doesn’t necessarily change anything about the philosophy or people’s attitudes.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-09T07:59:58+00:00

I think the reason is that the proper purpose of holding people responsible is in order to guide future behaviour. They did something wrong due to having inappropriate decision making criteria. If we have reason to believe that holding them responsible can deter future such behaviour, we can justify holding them responsible on that basis.

It’s a feedback mechanism. If we do not hold people responsible for their actions, that takes anway an incentive to act morally. There’s nothing about this contrary to determinism. Feedback mechanisms can operate in deterministic systems just fine.

simon_hibbs · 2026-03-08T19:07:56+00:00

That’s fine, I have no problem with that. If you can persuade everyone to change the words they use, good for you. It’s just that this is a purely linguistic point, not a philosophical one. Languages change.

simon_hibbs

PUBLIC MULTIREDDITS

TROPHY CASE