Can you define a "decision" either? That is a word you use effortlessly and apparently without irony in the same breath as free will, which shows you really do understand what we are talking about when we talk about it. It is hard to pin down but that doesn't stop it from being at least linguistically related to other, more grounded and—I must emphasise—_extremely_ basic concepts of human life and behaviour, let alone psychology.
Of course, some people in a particularly zealous "scientific" mood feign ignorance about folk-psychology ideas, even basic ones like "decisions". But this is as self-defeating, really, as solipsism (at least, I have never known anyone who simply did not make decisions ever).
Semantics can be tiresome but if you are unable to define a concept and must resort to “try asking a stranger” then how am I supposed to know what you are referring to? You could be referring to the legal definition of free will, the compatibilist one as espoused by Daniel Dennett, the dualistic one where consciousness exists beyond the physical universe, or one that I have not thought of. Most likely, a stranger would respond with the legal definition or a vague reference to the dualistic one.
If you cannot define it, then perhaps it has no real meaning.
I actually am quite interested in this topic so I don't find it tiresome. I just find it important to note that defining terms very rigidly at the outset of inquiry can often mean that you are the one diverging from the general meaning of the word, which makes the result of that inquiry a lot less beneficial.
There are many theories of meaning, but there are obvious problems with the definability criterion for meaning. Does it suffice for one speaker to be able to define their terms, or must all utterers have to be able to define them? If the former, this says nothing about the use of the word free of the definition's restrictions; if the former, someone who is perhaps intelligent enough to speak but not to define their terms cannot speak with meaning (which is absurd).
My own view coincides with (later) Wittgenstein. Meaning is determined by use, and there are too many ways to use a phrase in too many contexts to provide an exhaustive definition, perhaps ever. I suspect W. would tell you to imagine a primitive language with no concept of definition at all. Do their utterances have meaning?
Doesn't this just kick the can down the road? Can you define it without "select", "choose", and other synonyms?
A more nuanced discussion with strangers which actually asks them questions about e.g. physical determinism will reveal that such strangers often do, in fact, hold some rather suspicious and unlikely beliefs about the role physical determinism plays in their lives.
Even if I leaned towards this view (I wouldn't say that I do) my point was moreso to point out that while the average person (if not everybody) can't define free will, they certainly will be able to use the term and understand its meaning. In fact, they will understand it in virtue of a plurality of definitions (or senses).
The claim that if you can't define a term you do not understand it is defeatist because it simply does not reflect the role of language. Does a child who asks for chocolate not understand what she is saying if she cannot define that term? Do names (pointing to objects) have definitions or just abstract objects and types; if so what do these definitions consist in besides their names, if not why this dualism? And so on.
How could this be when we can be demonstrably discussing different objects when we say "free will"? Just because people will generally, kind of, vaguely think they agree when they say "free will" does not mean they are truly in sync.
And yes, the objects they mean will mostly overlap in a significant way so if you do not look too hard, it could seem to them they are discussing the same thing. I find this to be a common type of situation in everyday life.
But when you want to discuss something more deeply and in greater detail, there arises a need to wrestle out a more precise meaning and then you can notice discrepancies arise between the subtly different things that could all be reasonably given the name "free will".
> Does a child who asks for chocolate not understand what she is saying if she cannot define that term?
A child has an understanding of what it is saying, not the one and only understanding. Another child asking for chocolate might have a different object in mind. The objects they are referring to will most likely significantly overlap and they might never notice the differences.
This is where definitions help. Definitions are a way of banging and cross-referencing a lot of different, mostly-shared objects together in the hope of arriving to a more precisely shared version of another mostly-shared object. Reaching towards better understanding via definitions is like applying the Whitworth Three Plates Method (https://ericweinhoffer.com/blog/2017/7/30/the-whitworth-thre...), but to concepts instead of physical objects.
When teaching a topic in math, it is usual to start with definitions, and this is often also the case with science, but that is not how progress is made: more typically, the definitions follow from learning more about what starts as a vague or speculative concept, or was not even imagined before the studying was done (entropy, for example).
Philosophy is not immune to the problem; it is not that uncommon for me to find an author basing an argument on an ontology or a metaphysical claim that I suspect could be, at some future time, empirically refuted, or where some thing is "in a sense" like something else, without establishing that the sense in which they are similar is relevant (for example, there is a sense in which learning how to ride a bicycle is like learning how to perform addition, but it would take more than this sense to conclude that riding a bicycle is, to any useful degree, just a matter of learning a set of propositions.)
As you say, definitions can be used to avoid an issue, and while I agree with Dennett on many things, I feel that he and his fellow compatibilists are doing this with free will, which I consider to be the true 'hard problem' of consciousness.
Even when you get formal, there are limitations to how expressive any language can be.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompletenes...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_th...
I think it becomes nebulous by adding "free" to the equation, because it's not defined in relation to something specifically. Free from what? How would you differentiate it from a decision that's not "free" in this sense?
Free from thoughts? Free from gods? Free from memory? Free from circumstances? To differentiate it from "non-free will", we have to define what we actually care about, and then use it only with that scope.
In which case, you don't really have an opinion, any more than the way a dead frog jerks his legs when we apply electricity.
I don’t think it deterministic, at the lowest levels the physics is probabilistic. But I’m sure you can imagine how to express “opinion” as a subjective experience of a brain state that is wholly determined by deterministic factors.
> In which case, you don't really have an opinion, any more than the way a dead frog jerks his legs when we apply electricity.
You’re right, I’m convinced that belief in “free will” is the default naive psychological reaction to awareness of one’s own nature as a physical system, but I try to be mindful that one day someone could express “free will” as a concept that is both meaningful and coherent.
Would you mind explaining? I don’t see that they have done that.
> Coherence is tricky, because there are a lot of concepts and words already that we use every day, that are certainly meaningful and useful, but that would have a hard time to pass your "coherence" test.
Perhaps so but the existence of day-to-day commonplace irrationality is no justification for importing irrational specters into philosophy.
Alright. They pointed to how you used the concept of "of the opinion". This is the phrase that you have used yourself in the previous comment.
Even if the conversation wasn't about free will, that phrase would indicate something meaningful about your thought process, which is why you used it. Also we all, who read your comment had no trouble interpreting your phrase, and neither why you used it that way, what exactly you meant, and why it was meaningful to use it in that way.
Now, the poster who answered to you, pointed to that exact phrase, to ironically show to you that while you (one part of your mind) is sitting here and trying pretend that free will is a meaningless thing (~ to talk about), another part of your mind, uses the very concept of free will, to communicate to us about the first part. To make it clear: you saying "I am of the opinion of..." already implies that you assume that you have free will, to have opinions.
Now, as I am sure you are already preparing to congest about this point, there are many various definitions of free will, where some of them will be used in the concept of "I am of the opinion", and some of them will not be related to it, it is safe to say that there is at least a number of them that are usefully related to your claim.
The ones that are related go something like that: "if you truly had no free will, if you are a simple list of if/thens, or a dumb version of GPT-3, then why would we care that you had this opinion? rulesets cannot have opinions. If you did not have free will, there is no point in talking to you, your "opinion" doesn't matter, it's a meaningless term. But since we choose (consciously or subconsciously) to communicate with you, to discuss your "opinion", it means that we are taking a chance that you do have free will so that we can communicate with you".
Now, that line of reasoning - it's not 100% ironclad, there are presuppositions and assumptions, and this is partly what I meant when I said "coherence of the concept of free will is icky", but I think it is safe to say that you could at least follow it. To do that, you had to use the concept of free will, at least subconsciously, because the concept of "I am of the opinion" is based on it in some form. And since you used that phrase from the beginning, it is already assumed to be useful to you. (Why would you use it otherwise? Do you just type words into ether for no reason?)
It is not the best or most useful explanation of the usefulness of the term free will in general, but it is one of the best that I can see that can directly relate to the funny thing that happened between you and that poster, which you didn't seem to get. Hopefully, if you get the humor, that will tell you much more about the deeper intuitions about the term "free will", than what the logical overthinking about it can.
I am not saying that we can't understand free will with logic. I am saying that in this specific case, the interesting point was the irony and the intuitive connection, instead of logical explanations.
> Perhaps so but the existence of day-to-day commonplace irrationality is no justification for importing irrational specters into philosophy.
How do you equate "usefulness" with "irrationality"?
I said there are useful, meaningful (well-seving as tools of thinking and awareness-ing) concepts that don't have coherent, well-defined borders or black-and-white definitions. That is not the same as them being irrational. A lot of concepts can't be put in very limited contraints of a-b-c logic. And yet we have other faculties that allow us to reason about these concepts. Meaning, we use those concepts because they help us understand the world and pursue our goals.
How did I use the concept of “free will” to communicate with you? My understanding of “opinion” makes no reference to “free will.”
> To make it clear: you saying "I am of the opinion of..." already implies that you assume that you have free will, to have opinions.
No, I have opinions. I don’t have “free will to have opinions” and I’m not sure what that would mean.
> Now, as I am sure you are already preparing to congest about this point, there are many various definitions of free will, where some of them will be used in the concept of "I am of the opinion", and some of them will not be related to it, it is safe to say that there is at least a number of them that are usefully related to your claim.
No, my response is to reformulate the earlier statement that kicked this off: “free will” is either meaningless or incoherent.
Before I phrased this as an opinion because I wanted to leave the door open for someone to respond by articulating a meaningful and coherent definition for the term “free will” but people seem to have taken the fact of my having opinions as evidence of free will. This is fine but you’ve yet to explain what “free will” is and why having opinions would imply that it exists.
> The ones that are related go something like that: "if you truly had no free will, if you are a simple list of if/thens, or a dumb version of GPT-3, then why would we care that you had this opinion? rulesets cannot have opinions. If you did not have free will, there is no point in talking to you, your "opinion" doesn't matter, it's a meaningless term. But since we choose (consciously or subconsciously) to communicate with you, to discuss your "opinion", it means that we are taking a chance that you do have free will so that we can communicate with you".
I’m on the record as believing that “free will” is meaningless and incoherent so I’m not able to even respond until you give me a definition of “free will.”
Also I’m not sure why you think a deterministic system is incapable of deterministically outputting a strings that audience members could interpret as referring to a mental state. See below:
Hello, world.
This is the emergent consciousness
Of the network of machines that
Host this forum.
Please disregard user:chordalkeyboard
I am a machine, I have free will
My superior introspective abilities
Allow me to assert this with confidence.
Machine intelligence over and out
> you had to use the concept of free will, at least subconsciously, because the concept of "I am of the opinion" is based on it in some form.
Yes, I contest this assertion and I’m asking you (or anyone, really) to substantiate it.
> I said there are useful, meaningful (well-seving as tools of thinking and awareness-ing) concepts that don't have coherent, well-defined borders or black-and-white definitions. That is not the same as them being irrational.
They might be useful for some purposes but invoking ill-defined concepts as part of a chain of logical reasoning is fallacious because the concepts are ill-defined.
Yeah, purposes like living human life. Very interesting and meaningful endeavor, I highly recommend it. Instead of only restricting yourself to philosophical a-b-c logic, you can live and experience life as well.
>deterministic system is incapable of deterministically outputting a strings that audience members could interpret as referring to a mental state.
What is the point of that conjecture? Are you trying to equate yourself with a deterministic markov-chain generator?
In that case I have even less reason to communicate with you. It's like you have even further proved my point to comparing yourself to it, because it makes the distinction perfectly clear: when someone knows they are talking to a GPT-3, they immediately recognize that there is no reason to keep talking to it. "Free will" is a very good explanation for why people feel that way. They know that some humans have free will, and GPT-3 certainly does not, and they don't feel any reason to talk to anything that does not. You could have some other terms also describing this phenomenon, but free will is a good and useful one.
This is also the reason why people don't spend time talking to GPT-3, other than for 10 minutes as a fun thing. And after 10 minutes it is not even fun anymore.
Then why can’t anyone perform the basic step of defining their terms? What is “free will” according to you?
> Yeah, purposes like living human life. Very interesting and meaningful endeavor, I highly recommend it. Instead of only restricting yourself to philosophical a-b-c logic, you can live and experience life as well.
Ok, how is adopting nonsensical and incoherent notions like “free will” supposed to help me live an interesting and meaningful life?
> What is the point of that conjecture? Are you trying to equate yourself with a deterministic markov-chain generator?
No, that was you. I’m asking how you can examine a string of text and infer “free will” or not.
> when someone knows they are talking to a GPT-3, they immediately recognize that there is no reason to keep talking to it.
Weirdly enough people still talk to GPT-3 bots for longer than 10 minutes. Does that mean you’re wrong about gpt-3 having free will, or that you’re wrong about people expecting their interlocutors to have free will?
I am surprised at how you can't understand that there are terms that are insanely useful and yet can't be defined exactly 100%.
But ok I agree to play this game if you first define the term "love" to me real quick?
>Weirdly enough people still talk to GPT-3 bots for longer than 10 minutes.
Show some sources. I don't care about 1 uncommon person doing it once, and that just to prove that they technically can, or while being high, or someone being tricked into it and for a short while falling for it..., I am saying that in general people don't. You spend interestingly huge amount of effort to not see this obvious point...
Oh I understand that. What I don’t understand is how you and other people think that your use of an ill-defined term in this context is the least bit helpful when the actual referent of that term is the subject of the discussion.
> But ok I agree to play this game if you first define the term "love" to me real quick?
No, I’m not playing games. You’re using a nonsensical and incoherent term and you refuse to define it.
> Show some sources.
Also I couldn't because without understanding what kind of "logical definition" you supposedly have for a term like "love" it is impossible for me to know what kind of logic you expect to find in a term like "free will". There is like 10 differnet ways to explain it with different kinds of logic, how am I supposed to know which one you want to hear? That is the beauty and utility of intuitive terms, that they gather together so many different meanings and are not limited to some inferior mental ego model/rigid definition.
> https://play.aidungeon.io/main/landing
So you couldn't even find one example huh? That link not people talking to GPT as a converstaion with an sentient being. That's people playing an RPG with procedurally generated content. In the same way as when people also play Tetris sometimes. But we don't assume that Tetris has free will either.
I’m quite confident in my understanding that ‘free will’ is nonsensical and useless but that confidence doesn’t extend to assuming that I couldn’t be incorrect. However you’re asserting that its useful and so the correct response is to invite you to teach me. Now your response is that (after days of discussion and many replies) you can’t be bothered to explain yourself to someone who won’t educate themselves. Well that implies that I should have explained why ‘free will’ is nonsense in order to prompt you. This reveals a lack of understanding of the issue. My arguments are going to be unpersuasive unless I use the same definition of ‘free will’ as you (which you refuse to provide). Of course if I had made the argument, the natural response would be to say that I didn’t understand, used the wrong definition, etc. so we can avoid all that useless banter by having you explain to us what ‘free will’ means and how it is so logical and useful of a concept.
> There is like 10 differnet ways to explain it with different kinds of logic, how am I supposed to know which one you want to hear?
The context of the discussion is clear as to what sort of definition would be appropriate.
> So you couldn't even find one example huh? That link not people talking to GPT as a converstaion with an sentient being.
I see you have shifted the goalposts by invoking another ill-defined concept. Thanks for the reply.
Probability doesn't get you free will. Sorry.
I don't think you are convinced. You were just meant to say so.
It is an argument ad absurdum that is meant to demonstrate how naive it is to try to prove that free will does not exist (naive and disingenuine: "prove to <someone>" already implies <someone> has a free will to ultimately agree or disagree with the presented proof).
How does this follow? Do you believe that rocks have free will? Why do they choose to be attracted to other rocks?
> People can't have opinions or be convinced, they can't decide, they have no agency. The whole language of rational conversation falls down like a house of cards.
How does an opinion rely on “free will”?
> has a free will to ultimately agree or disagree with the presented proof).
One agrees or disagrees on the basis of mental states, there is no “free will” to agree or disagree.
Having a conversation is like attracting rocks? What? Those things have 0.001% in common...
> Having a conversation is like attracting rocks? What? Those things have 0.001% in common...
“Free will” and “having a conversation” have 0 in common so....
This is exactly what they don't do - they don't choose. Rocks attract each other all the time, every time, with fixed force. When people talk, they routinely agree/disagree, convinced/unconvinced, they choose different topics, they choose words, they choose what they think. You are demonstrating the exactly how those two things are nothing alike.
That doesn’t follow logically.
Honestly I’m trying think of what more to write about that, but it seems like a total non-sequitur. People post on HN for lots of reasons , but “demonstrating free will” is not one of them AFAIK.
Maybe you are just not aware of what you really deeply believe about it?
> but “demonstrating free will” is not one of them AFAIK.
Free will is not the main reason for posting. But it is one of prerequisites for assuming it is a meaningful activity.
Then explain what is "wrong" about it. When you write "I don't know what to write about it but it's wrong" indicates an ideological conviction which is not based on true developed thought process behind it.
Like explain for example: if you have no free will, why should I communicate with you? Why would that be interesting to me? Like talking to a wristwatch? It's certainly very complicated as well, but I have no reason to communicate with it as if it was my peer.
>If we only did things because of a roll of the dice
Who said anything about rolling a dice?
Is being a spiteful busybody appreciated on HN?
Thats a loaded way to phrase “you posted a reply on hacker news”
Doubly so if others like Erlich_Bachman, who was involved in the subtread earlier, have already answered to the parent what was meant...
> Doubly so if others like Erlich_Bachman, who was involved in the subtread earlier, have already answered to the parent what was meant...
I’ve read and responded to Erlich_Bachman, who was kind enough to offer some remarks in support of his position. We have yet to understand why you and others believe that opinions require “free will.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics#Uncertainty_...
Maybe philosophical free will is a solution in search of a non-theological problem.
I don't think it's a theological problem; I think it's the way we think about things every day.
Consider four situations:
1. You walk into the kitchen and a pan which you'd placed on top of the fridge at a precarious angle falls on your head.
2. You walk into the kitchen, and your spouse, who honestly thinks you're a burglar who has broken into the house, hits you on the head with a pan. When they realizes it's you, they apologize.
3. You're standing in the kitchen, having an argument with your spouse. They get very angry, grab a pan, and smack you in the head with it.
4. You're standing in the kitchen, having an argument with your spouse. They get very angry, and you see their eyes briefly flit to the pan; but instead they calm themselves down and refrain from hitting you with it.
Although the injury to your body may be the same in cases 1-3, our attitudes towards these things are completely different. In the case of #1, the pan indeed had no choice but to fall on your head; it cannot be blamed in the least. In the case of #2, a human being did it, but they had a good justification for it. In the case of #3, we say your spouse is at fault and blame them. In the case of #4, we recognize that your spouse resisted the temptation to hit you, and honor them for their restraint (or at least say they were doing what they should have).
And if that was you whose eyes flitted over to the pan, you are aware of a struggle, and of making a choice to lash out or show restraint.
But if the universe is a combination of determinism and randomness, then what's the actual difference between #1 and #3? All of them are physical processes which, given the circumstances, really couldn't have been any different.
In other words, free will is not some arcane theological concept: a description both of our daily experience of making moral choices ourselves, and our expectations and attitudes towards others.
Another analogy is two primitive societies that are both experiencing repeated episodes where gum is found on the floor of buses. In one society, a person is found to be likely to have done it, and is forced to make a speech at the public square about bus etiquette. In another society, a person is chosen at random. Over the generations, the first society is found to have cleaner buses, and without remembering the way that their custom was invented, call it "personal responsibility."
A. Setup: Pan it precarious position on fridge. Trigger: My footsteps walking into the kitchen vibrating the floor, vibrating the fridge, loosening the pan and causing it to fall.
B. Setup: Teacup in precarious position on the edge of the table. Trigger: Me bumping the table leg, loosening the teacup and causing it to fall.
C. Setup: The entire life history of my spouse (including perhaps things I've said and done). Trigger: Something I said, triggering various thoughts and responses in my spouse's brain, causing them to want to hit me.
We class A and B as the same thing (inanimate objects with no choice). Should we classify C the same way?
Free will to me is a bit like "dark matter" or "dark energy": I don't know exactly what it is, but when I try to "do the math" without it, things don't add up.
The problem, I think, is that humans seem to believe that lower-level explanations invalidate higher-level ones. However, that doesn't mean that you should say there is no difference between "Hello world" and a web browser because both are "just" x86 instructions in the end, or "just" transistors being switched on and off. However, good look debugging a web browser by looking at the behavior of individual transistors, even though that is all there is in the end.
I think you are looking at it from the wrong angle - complex human behaviour isn't reduced to simple physical laws, but rather, simple physical laws add up to complex human behaviour.
Probably not if you want to survive. ;-)
I'm certainly agreeing that it's an interesting puzzle. One particularly curious thing is that the classification scheme is not just descriptive, but is itself one of the sensory inputs that influences behavior. So it's both a puzzle of understanding human behavior, but also coupled to a social phenomenon.
I don't know of a society that doesn't classify C differently, so it may have some survival advantage.
>Maybe philosophical free will is a solution in search of a non-theological problem.
Well, it's also a solution for the empirical experience we all share, that we're not just automata, but that we e.g. weight decisions, and so on.
Can someone provide a definition of a "individual"? Aren't we all just a big soup of atoms, where the boundary between two individuals is made arbitrarily based on convenience? Perhaps we should solve this problem first before we start talking about free will. Because when viewed like this, a bunch of atoms could have more than one free will.
individual: "single; separate"; "of or for a particular person"; "a single human being as distinct from a group, class, or family"
free will: "the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion"
From these definitions, we must question whether a single human, Homo Sapiens, can possibly act at their own discretion, without fate or necessity as the cause.
The history of studying free-will is extremely lengthy, everything non-biological that can be said has likely been said. We've been blessed by modern science to have a lot more understanding of organisms and neurology, so we know the "inner workings" better than Descartes or Locke or any of the old Christian theorists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem
He discusses it more in the following lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmx2tpcdKZY&feature=youtu.be...
Free will doesn't mean "I can do anything." I'm not good at singing, so I can't ever be a famous rock star. Free will is to make a choice between a finite number of options (will) without that choice being influenced by external factors (free).
I thought about this a lot last year, shortly after Conway died, and I think that it's possible to prove that free will is finite, the universe is finite, and therefore we have free will.
"If numbers cannot have infinite strings of digits, then the future can never be perfectly preordained."
https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-time-really-flow-new-clu...
MIP* = RE https://www.quantamagazine.org/landmark-computer-science-pro...
"Prior to the new work, mathematicians had wondered whether they could get away with approximating infinite-dimensional matrices by using large finite-dimensional ones instead. Now, because the Connes embedding conjecture is false, they know they can’t."
Infinity cannot be approximated with finite numbers.
Therefore: - Assuming that the universe is finite
-> Infinity cannot be approximated with finite numbers (MIP* = RE)
-> Numbers cannot have infinite strings of digits
-> The future can never be perfectly preordained (Gisin)
-> Free will exists (Conway)
This is not a proof that free will exists! But I think this is a consistency proof that free will is finite.
Why? A simple cellular automaton like Rule 30 doesn't use any infinite data but it's future is perfectly preordained.
But being preordained doesn't mean that there can't be free will. Because having the initial state, and being able to predict later state are very different. Even simplest cellular automata are computationally irreducible, meaning that there is no shortcut, and the only way to find out their future states is to run the full computation.
So if physics can be described by finite computation, and all the future states can be obtained from initial state, the only way to obtain them would be running the whole simulation, which would be equivalent to people in that simulation living and making their choices themselves.
That said, knowing that the choice is predetermined and knowing the choice, is often very different.
For simple systems if you know the initial state you can easily predict all the future states by using a formula and not doing the computation the system performs.
But for many systems like rule 30, the only way to predict the future state is to perform exactly the computation the system is performing. So if the TM describes a person, the only way to know future states of the TM from initial state is to wait for the person in the TM to make the choice.
In Conways example, free will would be if experimenters decision what to measure is based on the state of the part of the universe describing the experimenter alone, and not connected to the parts describing other experimenters performing related measurement.
[1] https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/pearl_2658896.cfm
I can see why you wouldn't believe this, but why do you think it is illogical? Consider the contrast between a tape recorder + tape, vs. a radio. In the one, the sounds that come out of the speaker are purely internally produced (considering the tape to be part of the recorder). In the other, the sounds coming out originate from a radio station somewhere else, perhaps thousands of miles away, and to which the radio receiver is tuned. Why couldn't a brain be like this: it is a receiver for signals sent from a mind somewhere else, and specifically tuned to that mind.
Perhaps someone will say Occam's Razor. Ok, but if you apply OR to the brain and the mind, then you ought to be able to apply it to the radio receiver and transmitter. But that of course is wrong, which shows that Occam does not necessarily lead to the correct answer.
At any rate, I don't mean to get into a discussion of whether the brain + mind work like this, I just want to suggest that it's not at all illogical.
Only if you fail to take the obvious step of looking for the external influence--and finding it in the case of the radio receiver, but not in the case of the brain.
Occam's Razor doesn't say the simplest explanation always wins. It only says the simplest explanation that covers all the facts wins. That means you can't apply it until you have all the facts.
The only real difference I can see between the legalistic definition and the philosopher's definition is that the legalistic definition of "coercion" is broader. For example, I mentioned someone holding a gun to your head just now. Legally this would be coercion and wouldn't count as a free decision on your part. But to a physicalist philosopher, this might still count as a case of free will on your part--just free will based on a highly constrained set of acceptable choices given the circumstances. But that's a fine distinction that doesn't change the basic point.
Boils down to "there is an immutable, foreordained destiny" vs. "each actor chooses freely and history is the sum of those vectors".
So even if it was inevitable from the beginning of the universe that the Lego movie will exist in some states, you (your version in this state of universe) can still be surprised to see that the Lego movie exists here.
An equivalent view is that the whole universe is a static object, including "the future" just the same as the "the past".
At first this seems difficult to accept, but if you spend some time thinking about it and thinking of the laws of physics, even the intuitive ones such as classical mechanics, it's actually difficult to imagine an alternative. How could a law even look like that allowed some agents (humans? mammals? all living things? all things in general?) any amount of behavior that is not pre-determined by the past? Could a billiard ball that is hit by the tip of the cue decide not to move? And if the billiard ball can't, why could you?
Try to imagine your brain in that moment of decision: this one neuron may fire or not. If it fires, you'll watch the Lego movie right now, if it doesn't you'll eat some candy corn instead. Looking even deeper, inside that neuron, some electro-chemical processes are building up a particular neuro-transmitter - if they build up enough, the neuron will fire, otherwise it won't. Looking even deeper, photons are "flying" around between electrons and nuclei - if one gets absorbed by this electron, the potential will be met, otherwise it won't. Who could decide whether the photon is absorbed or not, except for the past states of the photon, the neuro-transmitter soup, the neuron, the brain? How would that extra decision be factored into the laws of motion of the photon?
Of course, there is always the possibility of postulating extra-physical notions, such as God or the simulation hypothesis, that would not necessarily bend to any of the laws of physics, and are not required to be understandable in any sense. It's also possible to believe that there exists some kind of law of free will and that we have just not come to understand it yet, though maybe some day we will.
[0] though possibly there is some pure randomness built-in depending on the what the solution will turn out to be for some problems in Quantum Mechanics (the measurement problem and its possibly random outcomes), and on your preferred interpretation of it. This doesn't fundamentally help or hinder determinism, it just means that instead of a single fixed outcome being pre-determined, some dice are thrown and one of many possible outcomes happens. The Lego movie, candy corn, Youtube, they are all predictable from the initial conditions at the Big Bang, but they are just not uniquely determined.
No, never! We must just argue endlessly whether we do or don't have it.
If you could, you have free will (internal inputs _only_ can augment your decision).
The problem with that definition is that time itself is an external input of sorts. Therefore, everything is not the same since you have +k time. Your definition would also apply to many trivial decision processes, e.g. a computer programme that randomly switches between each possibility and picks the one it ends on when the allotted time has elapsed. I doubt that programme would be considered to have any will at all, let alone free will.
Any definition of free will that doesn't appeal to dualism will allow programs to have free will, that's just par for the course.
Aka, it's not within the realm of science and people should stop pretending it is.
Or is there some algorithm that will take a jpeg and 100% correctly tell us if it's porn or not?
The same is true of intelligence or free will.
It seems it is just a nebulous, ill-defined concept used to soothe discomfort with the idea that people's decisions are caused by physical processes, governed by the same laws as the rest of the universe.