litewave

Well, by acquiring knowledge our understanding and abilities expand and that may help us in living a more fulfilled life, in finding more effective wa...

I don't understand why Dostoyevsky's aversion to death penalty would need a non-neural or non-causal explanation. Isn't it obvious that it was caused ...

Human behavior can be very complex because it is influenced by many factors. The norms that are incorporated in our minds exert causal influence on ou...

But we are able to perform such an evaluation thanks to those causal factors. We cannot do it without them. And this knowledge is encoded in neural st...

I see no reason to postulate a different sort of causation. The causation between mental events happens in our heads but it boils down to electromagne...

"Without obstruction" is the negative part. "According to one's motives" is the positive part. Moral responsibility is the ability to behave compassio...

If evolution produces desire for sex and desire for sugar does that mean we can't distinguish between these two desires? Of course not. Evolution prod...

But norms are just another factor that causally influences us. They are simply values or habits that influence our mental and physical actions.

So what? Even when we don't know physical laws or the past state of the universe they still influence us and everything we do we do within their conte...

It would be an intention that stimulates an intention. For example, you have the intention to eat eggs. This intention, along with other factors, may ...

The Wikipedia article gave the essense of compatibilist free will: it is the freedom to act according to one's motives without obstruction. You can an...

Evolution promotes values that are beneficial to survival, health and reproduction. Not all of those values can be regarded as moral. Morality is base...

Any mental state is a decision, because the state is what it is rather than another state.

Evolution also allows random mutations - so we can have any values that can possibly happen to us. But natural selection will tend to remove those tha...

Why not? Physical laws and initial conditions of the universe have mathematical and logical features; they can be accurately described with the mathem...

This is from Wikipedia's entry on compatibilism: Intention is a mental state, a desire that stimulates and directs action. If the intention was not ca...

If by principles of rationality you mean logic and mathematics then principles of rationality are pretty much features of the universe - that's why sc...

I don't think compatibilists have a problem with distinguishing the constitutive part of free agency - they think that free agency consists in the abi...

I pointed out that humans have a higher level of consciousness than animals, with greater capacity for compassion and greater intelligence - and this ...

When we talk about coercion we typically mean external coercion but there can also be internal coercion such as addictions, diseases or handicaps that...

Intention is a desire that stimulates and directs action. I don't see what you find confusing.

In my understanding of compatibilism, a compatibilist admits that all our actions are ultimately determined by factors over which we have no control b...

Libertarian free will is a logically contradictory concept because it requires that a free action be intended and not intended. Intended because we ca...

Ultimately, we can't choose anything (because everything we do is ultimately determined by factors over which we have no control). If we have more tim...

The kind of moral responsibility you want is itself irrational and incoherent so there is no rational model that can justify it. But when you intend t...

According to the Information Philosopher's website, Strawson's argument says that a free action must be the function of the agent's mental state. I do...

Praise and blame are rationally justified as motivators and feedback signals. Moral responsibility is rationally justified as the capacity for compass...

The article is behind a paywall, but honestly I don't see how the so-called agent causation can save libertarian free will.

I agree that the fact that the agent has been repeatedly engaged in an action says something about her character (her relatively stable properties) bu...

It is basically absence of knowledge or awareness. We cannot know or be aware of everything. In order to survive, thrive or reproduce we must focus on...

I think the feeling of having ultimate control comes from our ignorance about all the factors that influence us and in totality completely determine u...

They can still be praised or blamed. Praise and blame are motivators and feedback signals about whether we have done something good or bad. The releva...

Yes, we understand it just as perfectly as we used to understand the idea that the sun moves around the earth (everybody can see that) or that the ear...

And the acquisition of the habit was completely determined by factors that the agent has not freely chosen, whether those factors were intentions or w...

If the intention is not freely chosen then all of the agent's actions are completely determined by factors that the agent has not freely chosen. This ...

Spacetime is a thing made up of space and time. The action happens in both space and time, so it happens in spacetime. The field interacts with a meas...

Sure, I distinguished between the soul and the physical (=material) body. The notion of action presupposes time, and also some kind of space in which ...

If you disagree with the word "body" then just use the word "object" or "thing". In new agey conceptions the soul acts, moves and evolves, so it exist...

Ok, here is my idea of a soul that I got from new agey books. A soul is a special kind of conscious body that exists and evolves in spacetime, and in ...

All possibilities are necessary :)

What do you mean by rational justification of feelings? How can we rationally justify compassion? It seems to be an evolved feeling that is useful in ...

But since there are stable regularities in nature that we can describe in terms of causation, we can also successfully predict effects from causes. Of...

But all of this can be explained by ordinary temporal causation. Factors like the feeling of hunger, food desires/preferences, belief about what ingre...

What do you mean by "phenomena" and what does it have to do with your denial that one must have control over one's freely willed action?

What do you mean by "will phenomena"?

Your stipulation is question-begging. Are you saying that slipping unintentionally on a banana peel is a freely willed action?

But if my intention does not influence the action then my being engaged in the action is not controlling the action. I wouldn't even say that the acti...

It's like asking why number two is number two and not number three. What would it even mean?

I don't even know what it would mean for one possible world to be "concrete" and another "abstract".

And this trying influences the movement. Even if there are other factors that influence the movement, your influence gives you at least partial contro...