psychotick wrote:
Doing the same thing over and over again - Is it compatibalist? Yes. Is it determinist? Yes. Is it Libertarian Free Willian? Yes.

psychotick wrote:
Consider someone learning to drive. He starts off on the track dodging paper cut outs of people, and braking and not braking, because sometimes at the start its fun to just run over a paper cut out or two. But over time he gets rewarded for braking early, told off for breaking late. The rewards and punishments become greater over time as he's threatened with not getting his provisional licence or offered the chance. So as the time goes on he learns to brake early. Then he goes on the road and the rewards and punishments become even greater, jail versus remaining a free driver.

Come the day of the choice, he's spent twenty years learning to make that one decision, brake early. A woman and child walk out on to the road in front of him and he has to choose, brake early or risk it all and hope that woman and child get out of the way fast enough. If he's been a good student, he brakes early. Every time the choice is put before him, he brakes early - unless he's drinking which is a-whole-nother issue.

So his behaviour looks determinist, he always does the same thing. It looks compatibilist, he always wants to brake early and so does. But its also libertarian free willian. If we assume that many or most of his choices as to whether to brake early or late up until then were free, then the fact that when the choice becomes serious in terms of consequences, a memorable decision in terms of the OP, his choice is more or less fixed, does not mean he oes not have libertarian free will. It means he has learned when to make a completely free choice and when not to.

psychotick wrote:
Chances are you put that same driver back on the track with paper cut outs and no consequences, he may well have a blast simply sprinting round it not braking and hitting every cut out he can find.

psychotick wrote:
Yes he's behaving in a determinist fashion, but that does not mean he does not have free will. Libertarian free will allows a person the choice of behaving in a determinist fashion. Determinism on the other hand does not allow for capricious - by which I assume you mean with free will rather then whimsical, behaviour.

psychotick wrote:
We learn as we grow and experience life and make choices, when we can make completely capricious decisions and when we shouldn't. If we didn't learn these sorts of life choice lessons we'd probably not survive. Having said that some people do fail to learn these lessons, and we often see them on the news, drunk in charge for the fifth time and dead or in jail for years, speeding as always and finally getting either jailed or killed in a car crash, failing to look before crossing the road and getting hit by a bus. Our survival as individuals and a race depends on us being able to learn these lessons.

psychotick wrote:
Here's an example you can try at home (carefully!). Put a blindfold on, spin around a few times on the spot so that you've lost your sense of direction, then try to walk around the house - with your hands always by your side. Hard isn't it? Your instincts cry out for you to raise your hands to act as feelers, instincts born of a lifetime's worth of bumping into things in the dark and getting hurt. But you still can do it, if you force yourself. Heaven alone knows why you would, but you can. Libertarian free will says that you can do this, but it also says instead that you can listen to your instincts and fears and nine times out of ten at least you're going to do the latter when there are consequences on the line that you can understand and respect.

psychotick wrote:
Determinism on the other hand says that you will given exactly the same circumstances, the clock wound back etc, always do exactly the same thing over and over again, and that includes the silly little whimsical choices, like putting on ABBA versus the Eagles, or tossing a dice in exactly the same way so that the same result always comes up as the dice always lands in eactly the same place at the same time.

psychotick wrote:
Agreed there is nothing inconsistent with determinism in any of this. But I think I've also shown that there is nothing inconsistent with Libertarian Free Will either in repeatedly making the same choice. Free will allows me the option of repeating my decisions. Learning motivates me to do so when its good choice.

hanuma wrote:
Well we use this idea of rewinding time in such a nonchalant fashion, as if you are free to conceptualise such an action as abstract in theory, but I think if it is going to hold any weight (and I think it's leniant to allow "time-travel" into the argument anyway), then we should at least theorise how such an event would work in "the real".

hanuma wrote:
I think that the action of reversing time is not necessarily part of any different stream of events, it is still fundamentally part of the same string, so anything that might happen differently on a re-running would have to factor in that it was not exactly the same event as the first time around and so doesn't escape from determinism at all.

hanuma wrote:
But determinism, for all its apparent logic, still relies on what it does not know or see yet, only what it conceptualises as the infinitely smaller and smaller events with an equal weighting of relative importance to one another, to the extent that things become rigidly unchangeable.

reincarnated wrote:

Using your own preferred concept of free will, consider one of the more important “free will” decisions that you have made at some point in your life, which you also consider to NOT be a capricious decision. In other words, it was an important decision which you made based on a rational and considered assessment of the various possibilities, but at the same time that you consider was a freely willed decision on your part.