In my experience "free will", like "consciousness" and "common sense", is not so much a concept with a universally agreed definition as it is a cognitive stop sign or an applause light, meaning different things to everyone who uses the term.
Do I have free will, or am I bounded by the laws of physics?
Even if you think my soul is completely independent of my body, there are theologians who argue that God being omniscient means that who goes to heaven and hell is predetermined before birth and therefore no action you take will ever change the afterlife you go to, and that to think God isn't omniscient would be blasphemy; do they think I have free will?
And then there's Thelma with "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", which can be understood in terms of (amongst other things) "Don't let peer pressure manipulate you into thinking you want other things than you really want", though this is of course a simplification much as the omniscient example above: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Will
Of all of the concepts like "consciousness" and "agency", "free will" is probably the least useful and poorly defined.
It's a hand-me-down from Western beliefs about morality and individuality - including Thelema and Christianity.
So there's a lot of starting from the concept and working back to assumed conclusions.
Generally humans do not have free will, do have very limited political, economic, and psychological agency, usually selected from a small number of competing rule sets, and are also far more easily influenced than they suspect.
Culture is more like a cellular automaton or diffusion system. Occasionally a transformation ripples out from an individual cell, often for fairly random reasons, but the big patterns are emergent, and every so often the soup shakes itself up and settles into a new arrangement.
IMO LLMs are the most recent proto-version of that, running on a different substrate.
> Do I have free will, or am I bounded by the laws of physics?
You have free will within the bounds of physics as long as it's not libertarian. Compatibilism simply means you're free to make choices absent external coercion. You're part of the casual chain, so it's silly to talk about the Big Bang or physics making choices for you, as if they were external entities puppeteering your brain.
> agency and misalignment are two sides of the same coin.
The free will coin?
In my experience "free will", like "consciousness" and "common sense", is not so much a concept with a universally agreed definition as it is a cognitive stop sign or an applause light, meaning different things to everyone who uses the term.
Do I have free will, or am I bounded by the laws of physics?
Even if you think my soul is completely independent of my body, there are theologians who argue that God being omniscient means that who goes to heaven and hell is predetermined before birth and therefore no action you take will ever change the afterlife you go to, and that to think God isn't omniscient would be blasphemy; do they think I have free will?
And then there's Thelma with "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", which can be understood in terms of (amongst other things) "Don't let peer pressure manipulate you into thinking you want other things than you really want", though this is of course a simplification much as the omniscient example above: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Will
Of all of the concepts like "consciousness" and "agency", "free will" is probably the least useful and poorly defined.
It's a hand-me-down from Western beliefs about morality and individuality - including Thelema and Christianity.
So there's a lot of starting from the concept and working back to assumed conclusions.
Generally humans do not have free will, do have very limited political, economic, and psychological agency, usually selected from a small number of competing rule sets, and are also far more easily influenced than they suspect.
Culture is more like a cellular automaton or diffusion system. Occasionally a transformation ripples out from an individual cell, often for fairly random reasons, but the big patterns are emergent, and every so often the soup shakes itself up and settles into a new arrangement.
IMO LLMs are the most recent proto-version of that, running on a different substrate.
> Do I have free will, or am I bounded by the laws of physics?
You have free will within the bounds of physics as long as it's not libertarian. Compatibilism simply means you're free to make choices absent external coercion. You're part of the casual chain, so it's silly to talk about the Big Bang or physics making choices for you, as if they were external entities puppeteering your brain.