Poll: Free Will vs Determinism

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I tried to keep the list short, but as encompassing as possible.

Incompatible - Physical Determinism (Includes Causal & Logical Determinism)
"Hard determinism is the claim that determinism is true, and that it is incompatible with free will, so free will does not exist... ....it can include all forms of determinism that necessitate the future in its entirety."
Famously articulated through Laplace's Demon

Incompatible - Theological Determinism (Includes Predestination)
"The idea that the future is already determined, either by a creator deity decreeing or knowing its outcome in advance. The problem of free will, in this context, is the problem of how our actions can be free if there is a being who has determined them for us in advance, or if they are already set in time."
Notable believers - John Calvin, Baruch Spinoza

Incompatible - Metaphysical Libertarianism
"Metaphysical libertarianism is one philosophical view point under that of incompatibilism. Libertarianism holds onto a concept of free will that requires that the agent be able to take more than one possible course of action under a given set of circumstances."
Notable believers - Robert Kane, Thomas Reid

Hard Incompatiblism
"While hard determinism clearly opposes the concept of free will, some have suggested that free will might also be incompatible with non-determinism (often on the basis of lack of control associated with pure randomness)... ...Under the assumption of naturalism and indeterminism, where there only exists the natural world and that the natural world is indeterministic — events are not predetermined (e.g., for quantum mechanical reasons) and any event has a probability assigned to it — no event can be determined by a physical organism's perceived free will, nor can any event be strictly determined by anything at all."
Notable believer - John Locke

Compatible - Lack of Restraint
"Most "classical compatibilists", such as Thomas Hobbes, claim that a person is acting on the person's own will only when it is the desire of that person to do the act, and also possible for the person to be able to do otherwise, if the person had decided to. Hobbes sometimes attributes such compatibilist freedom to each individual and not to some abstract notion of will, asserting, for example, that "no liberty can be inferred to the will, desire, or inclination, but the liberty of the man; which consisteth in this, that he finds no stop, in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination to doe [sic].""

Compatible - Psychological
"Thirteenth century philosopher Thomas Aquinas viewed humans as pre-programmed (by virtue of being human) to seek certain goals, but able to choose between routes to achieve these goals. In facing these choices, humans are governed by intellect, will, and passions. The will is "the primary mover of all the powers of the soul ... and it is also the efficient cause of motion in the body." Free-will is an "appetitive power", that is, not a cognitive power of intellect (the term "appetite" from Aquinas's definition "includes all forms of internal inclination".)

Compatible - Unpredictability
"Because of chaos and epistemic limits on the precision of our knowledge of the current state of the world, the future is ill-defined for all finite beings."
Notable believer - Dan Dennett

My sleeping pill was kicking in before I could give my own two cents on this.

I once read a description of how it would appear if you could see yourself in future. The author described seeing yourself as a cloud of potential, where every location within the cloud is a possible place for you to be at the given moment, and the thickness of the fog represents the probability that you'll be in each location. If you were to look a month into the future, it would most likely be a cloud surrounding your town with the thickest fog being at your home and other thick areas being places you visit often such as work or the grocery store. Looking years into the future would more likely have multiple clouds. Clouds to represent places you consider moving to. Thinner clouds to represent places you'd vacation to. The thought experiment is an illustration of compatibilism. Free will allows your future to appear as a cloud instead of as predetermined location or a path like in Donnie Darko, but determinism sets the boundaries of the cloud and the probabilities that dictate the thickness of each area within the fog.

Given today's physical knowledge, that's currently the model I believe makes the most sense. I would categorize it under compatibility due to free will as unpredictability. I think Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is evidence against the universe operating like Laplace's demon, but still allows probability to limit the possibilities even more so than the bounds of physics alone. And while Uncertainty operates at the level of particles, spontaneous mutation by way of tautomerism is an example of when the movement of a single proton can begin a chain reaction that effects an entire organism and its offspring. I'm not fully convinced we can truly choose between two or more distinct paths, but there's enough room for optimism.

Yes; free will and determinism are compatible.

I call it relative free will; as it is ridiculous to
suggest that humans have pure free will;
as we are all obviously ruled by the
laws of nature AKA GOD.

The way to develop relative free will
is to develop mindful awareness
through an active mind
and body gaining
balance.

Reading religious
text and watching
documentaries
on TV will
never ever
get one
to a place
of integration
in relative human
free will without
ACTIVE MIND
AND BODY
in balance
in
ACTION.

And true; some folks
have little relative
free will or even
control of their
thoughts and feelings
that is precisely
what relative
free will is;
mastery over
one's own thoughts
and feelings in ways
of language; regulating
emotions; integrating
senses; and increasing
focus and short term
working memory in
cognitive executive
functioning by an
active practice
of mind and body
balancing through
Arts like Yoga;
Martial Arts;
or any
other
ART OF
HUMAN ACTION
IN MIND AND BODY
BALANCE that addresses
the words, senses, and feelings
Integrated in much greater human
potential.

And no; this is nothing new; this is the way of TRUTH
in Eastern philosophies that look within for answers with
human innate instinct and intuition; as opposed to the
materialism of tools as truth, from written language,
to collective intelligence, to cultures, to Atomic
Bombs of destruction, of weaker
human extensions of tools;
lessening both human
potential and
humanity
as
whole.

So in other words; the answers to gaining
human relative free will; can exist
totally out of any human
book of collective
intelligence.

Human relative free will is a natural
state of affairs gifted by innate
all natural human
DNA.

Humans are among the weakest
animals to lose it through
all the vices of the tools
of culture as lie
of illusions.

I often wonder why so much is made of this subject.

It is very straight forward. Free will only exists in a relativist mind eye, in so far as the "self" is essentially the frontal lobe. We do make choices and can held to account, and responsible for them as part of society. However the reality is causal determinism, which is how our choices are subject to nature and chaos. Determinism is frequently confused with absolute per-determinism, when most things are relative, transient and subject to chaos. I suppose my answer is other, but it fits a logical scientific idea of determinism.

Also the odd one is theological determinism, becuase Christianity it practice requires both when convenient. That is one of the inconsistencies.

I'm going to suggest that it's something that at first appears composite but is fundamentally deterministic.

What I mean by that is I'm broaching this from a panentheistic world view. At the physics level there seem to be two world-views, Newtonian and QM, that work at different scales. At one hand time seems incredibly linear, you can't know or unknow what you know or don't know at a given minute, your chemical potentials seem like they are exactly what they should be, so you're - if not absolutely limited - pretty dang close with respect to choice. I used to believe that if you replayed a three minute sequence of a person's life over ten times, 100 times, 60 trillion times, it would be an exact carbon-copy each time because there's nothing else to interfere with the physical plane of things aside from what's there.

When people started actually telling me decisively, that probabilities were a 'real' thing rather than simply a plug technique for the sloppiness of human data collecting (ie. inability to collect absolute data) I was forced to handle what I felt like was an absurdity but, the more I think about it, the implications of that seem to be that there are lines of causality that weave in, out, and through what we consider linear time, and much like we'd handle linear time as 2 dimensional it's as if those things slicing through are on a three-dimensional structure.

Ultimately though I'm still drawn to the same conclusion as before; it's really deterministic, just that it's probably a lot more intricate and complex with far more moving parts than the Occam's razor side of our thinking tends to like. If we want to consider in the mix things like collective unconscious, four planes of life over ten spheres (Kabbalistic/Qabalistically speaking), and consider all kinds of dimensions with different kinds of physical and non-physical beings inhabiting them I think that's really where stuck contemplating that the complexity doesn't equal liberty - it just equals complexity.

All of that of course is what it 'feels' like it should be. Does something like libertarian free will spring up between cracks in that complexity? If it does I don't get it, I can't rule out what I don't understand or don't know but then again I don't think there's anything in this universe that can hold you accountable for anything more than doing the best with what you can reconcile in your mind with your best efforts.

I think to the extent that people throw their personal accountability out there way past themselves they can just about chew their nails past the quick. I had a point in my life where I wondered - if I simply was at the right place at the right time would I be married to the girl of my dreams? Is it my fault for not being at that exact place at that exact time? Or, similarly, would it be my fault if I tripped over a stroller because someone bumped me and when I fell backward a baby was behind me? On one hand you can get into hopelessness and nihilism if you don't understand that your motivational core is built around at least entertaining the sense that you can make your life better but, if you're living a hard life and already knocking yourself out and not getting what you really want you can literally drive yourself mad with what you hold over yourself. It's a fine line and one central to maintaining good mental health.

Personally, every time someone says, "don't hate the player, hate the game," I think this subject is relevant.

I imagine that free will was probably the first of these ideas that humans believed. It seems the natural choice to a conscious mind. The idea of an omniscient god brought about the idea that omniscience meant it should be able to predict with 100% accuracy how every person would react to every situation given their experiences up to that point. It's not that the god necessarily planned every action, but that it's impossible for them not to know. Theological determinism seeks to answer the question, "Could God create an individual so willful and free that even he couldn't predict the individual's choices?" with a no. Thomas Aquinas on the other hand said yes, and it appears that his influence has had a lasting impact. Predestination hasn't been without its adherents though. Calvinism had its time in the sun, as well as its critics (See James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner) Theological determinism may seem a dated idea, but I think it's worth including in the poll.

I wouldn't relegate the self to just the frontal lobe. The prefrontal cortex may be the primary decision-making region of the brain, but it relies on assistance from the amygdala, and sometimes even allows the amygdala to hijack control in extreme situations (great for battlefields, terrible for civilized society). Amygdala hijacks are themselves a threat to personal responsibility for actions. The right temporal-parietal junction allows us to understand that other people have separate experiences from ourselves. Its importance in decision making can be seen by comparing answers to moral questions by children under 11 who haven't fully developed that region, against those of people over 11.

That is relevant to society, and morality itself is a function of society. Proto-morality is a function of group behaviour in animals. I have a specific theory on empathy which is for another discussion, however there is personal morality, influenced by personality and meme. The overlapping of these ideas within cultures forms the broader morality.

Although chaos, has an influence on our being. The context of that phase is a relative one, it not a get out of gaol card. I don't see the philosophical argument as changing that.

Nature doesn't moralise, it doesn't think.