Compatibilism

Compatibilism

Having your cake and eating it?

Many people affirm a deterministic Universe, based on a physicalist interpretation of science, but do not wish to give up the idea of free will. Especially their own.

This has led to a huge amount of dubious argument which attempts to say that we can possess freedom while being entirely made up of deterministic materials. Not surprisingly, these attempts do not stand up to scrutiny.

Compatibilism 

This is the de facto way by which most people view the Universe, ourselves and others but it relies on taking a blinkered view and is only possible because the deterministic character of the Universe is not apparent in everyday life.

In order to do this, some have redefined “freedom” to mean “not limited by external physical constraints“.  

This move avoids the problem of physical determinism by pretending that it does not exist and acting as if our intuition of having some freedom of choice is true.

Is this a legitimate way of allowing for consciousness and free will to emerge from deterministic material systems — or does it simply dodge the deeper question? Bernardo Kastrup described physicalism as being a psychological defence mechanism [Kastrup 2016].The philosopher Immanuel Kant criticised vague appeals to freedom within a causally determined world as a “wretched subterfuge” — a poor excuse that fails to resolve the conflict between natural determinism and human moral responsibility. Instead, he proposed a more radical solution: that we must understand ourselves as belonging to two realms — the natural, where causality rules, and the moral, where freedom is real. But can such a dual-aspect view still hold in a modern scientific worldview?

Compatibilism can only work because, just as we cannot know whether someone else has conscious experience, we cannot tell whether someone else has free will or is an automaton.

There are a number of other ways in which people attempt to argue that we can have both a belief in a deterministic physicalist world view and also some form of freedom of choice and the responsibility which goes along with it.

These include:

These, too, lead to a dead end with merely the illusion of freedom.

Back to “Whence Freedom?”