Picture 1 14-52-28

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1. I think, as Jerry has noted, these studies highlight how tricky all these questions are to investigate, we humans being messy machines to begin with. Some folks take Philosophers to task for mincing words and concentrating too much on minor details or semantics, but then it turns out just these issues arise when you are trying to do good science on the issue: you have to notice how
   semantics and tiny alterations in how a question is asked, alters the concepts involved and get people talking about different things.

   It’s not surprising that tests will show people have a fairly incoherent mishmash of
   ideas about tricky subjects like determinism and freedom. It’s due to this that the whole problem arises in the first place. The problem of free will starts at least as the intuition that two other of our intuitions seem to clash: The intuition we use in understanding the rest of the world: 1. everything outcome has a cause, which determine that outcome and 2. It also feels to us like we have the choice to “do otherwise.” And these two intuitions “intuitively” clash *when we try to fit them together: IF everything has a cause that determine the outcome, and if we are part of this “everything” and caused as well, how is it we could actually have chosen otherwise like we normally think we can? (And from that…how is it we are the authors of our choices, and how can we be responsible for our actions, morally or otherwise…)?

   Most people, when they try to fit those two things together don’t do a good, coherent job of it. Those experiments, showing how people can seem to contradict themselves, seem to me to manifest just the type of thinking one might expect, in that regard.

   This is why I feel we have to make sure we do not conflate “explanations” with “that which is being explained.”
   The problem is that the concept of “free will” tends to comprise a fairly wide scope of issues: including the raw experience people have, and their attitudes and assumptions, during the moment of choice-making, as well as later philosophical reflections in trying to fit these into a larger “big picture” of the universe and human nature. So anyone trying to study “what people think free will is” is going to have a tough time untangling and clarifying
   these problems. It seems, unfortunately, that one has to do a lot of conceptual clarification *before* getting to the experimental stage.

   (And I don’t think this issue of “what people think about free will” is an obvious
   answer for either side, compatibilist or incompatibilist. It may work out ultimately in favor of one side’s explanation, but it’s not a clean and easy path either way).

   Vaal

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