Incompat notebook

I've been conducting some informal interviews for a research project. The topic is people's beliefs about free will. Are you interested in being a subject?

This interview is being conducted as part of a research study about free will. I, the researcher, am Kodi B. Arfer; you can find contact information for me at https://arfer.net/elsewhere . If you decide to participate, then you retain the right to change your mind and leave the study at any time without giving any reason, and without penalty.

If I distribute transcripts of or quotations from this interview, they will be deidentified, meaning that I'll exclude identifying information like your Prolific user ID. Do you consent to being in this study?

First question. Imagine some physical process playing out, like a billiard ball bouncing around a table. If we consider the entire past and present of the universe up to this point, and the laws of nature, do you think that those two, taken together, are enough to determine exactly what the billiard ball will do?

[If quantum stuff comes up:] Ultimately I think quantum stuff is a distraction from the kind of philosophical issues I want to examine in this interview, so for the sake of argument, let's assume that a hidden-variables theory of quantum mechanics is true, meaning that quantum events aren't random.

[Subjects may also confuse the issue of predictability with the issue of determinacy, as in the case of subject 4. You could say:] Keep in mind that I'm really asking about determinacy, not predictability. My question isn't whether one could, in practice, predict these things. My question is whether there's only one possible outcome once these other things (the past and present of the universe, the laws of nature) are held fixed.

Now let's consider a similar question but with an animal instead of a billiard ball. Do you think the past and present of the universe, and the laws of nature, would also be enough to determine the actions of an animal, like a goldfish? We could put the goldfish in a decision-making or maze-running task, for example.

["Bypassing", in the sense of Murray and Nahmias (2014), may also come up. This is when people interpret determinism to imply bypassing of mental states in causal chains.]

[Then, humans.]

Here I started off by asking about human decision-making. S said that to believe that human decisions are deterministic would be to believe in a higher power, which he doesn't. I decided that for future interviews, I'll start off with questions about a physical process and build up towards human decisions.

Putting quantum issues aside, S said that human decisions are deterministic.

Putting quantum issues aside, S said that human decisions are deterministic. He postulates a supernatural influence, which is the karma created by previous people's decisions, but argues that the result is still deterministic. This interview got a bit too mired in quantum issues, which are beside the point of this study, so for future interviews I'll have a standard response ready to try to get them out of the way if they come up.

I think S ultimately admitted that human decisions are deterministic, but there was confusion between predictability and determinism, which I should've addressed earlier in the interview. My research interest here is why people believe that human actions are genuinely indeterminate, not merely unpredictable in practice. Of course, per Murray and Nahmias (2014), perhaps most people don't really believe this.

S looks to be incompatibilist, but ultimately seemed to fail to articulate why she believed this or how it jibes with her idea that events are brought about by conditions. I probably could've asked better questions here, but I have little idea of what better questions would be.

S initially denied that physical processes were deterministic, but changed their mind and acknowledged that physical processes are deterministic once we got deeper into it. For animal and human action, S again started off saying no, but ultimately at least entertained the possibility that these two are deterministic, without outright saying they believe it.

S allowed that human decisions are deterministic. He referred to Sam Harris's book Free Will, so he may be more familiar with related concepts than the average person. Then again, Sam Harris is the kind of writer on philosophy who ignores, and largely won't discuss, mainstream philosophy.

Eventually S appeared to allow that human decisions are deterministic, but we didn't have time to get into questions about humans, since we ran long on the fish step of the interview. I think a primary difficulty here is that S was unwilling to play along with a conventional definition of the word "deterministic": I had to use a circumlocution to make progress.

S looks to be a committed non-physicalist, postulating a force of consciousness that is necessary for decision-making in humans as well as animals, which makes organismal behavior non-deterministic. Surprisingly, S is an atheist and doesn't consider this supernatural.

S asserted that human action is deterministic with the least hesitation I've seen so far. She is compatibilist, saying that "free will is about that lived experience of choosing and reasoning for myself".