A great deal would be disentangled if one starts from a couple of select points; namely:

(1) Free will is a thoroughly theological problem, and did not exist as a 'problem' prior to Christian theologians who invented it to solve the problem of evil.

(2) Freedom can and ought to be decoupled from the mystifying notion of 'will', which is no less theological and also had to be invented by a bunch of hysteric Christians grappling with the problem of the biblical devil ("beginning in the third century, the Fathers and apologists use it [will] as a technical term to express the mastery of the will over actions in a particularly delicate sphere: that of the origin of evil and responsibility for sin. In this sense it is found for the first time in Lactantius (Divine Institutes 2.9.49), referring significantly to the devil", Giorgio Agamben, Karman).

(3) The connection between freedom and choice also ought to be completely abolished insofar as freedom to create the very conditions of choice, to establish new possibilities, and not simply 'choose' between pre-existing ready-mades is the only manner in which freedom has any significance whatsoever.

(4) The idea that freedom is some pseudo-psychological 'inner' concept needs to be abolished once and for all in favour of an understanding of freedom as at once biological, social and political: a centrifugal rather than centripetal understanding of freedom, one that finds its roots in places far beyond our bodies rather than in some indefinable, inexplicable vanishing point in some mysterious locus in the brain. Freedom must be understood ecologically or not at all.

Every time someone talks about freedom in terms of 'free will' and 'free choice', they are in no way talking about freedom, but theology. A heuristic: if you cannot talk about freedom without talking about choice and will at the same time, you're not talking about freedom. As if science needs 'free will'. Christianity completely fucked our intuitions regarding freedom, and science would do well to be rid of the theological trash that is 'free will' to all the better understand what freedom consists in.

did not exist as a 'problem' — StreetlightX

As what did it exist?

A basic internet search leads to the aptly named wiki article 'Free will in antiquity'. According to the first sentences...

Free will in antiquity was not discussed in the same terms as used in the modern free will debates, but historians of the problem have speculated who exactly was first to take positions as determinist, libertarian, and compatibilist in antiquity.[1] There is wide agreement that these views were essentially fully formed over 2000 years ago.

These are the sources...
Susanne Bobzien, Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy
Timothy O'Keefe, Epicurus on Freedom
R. W. Sharples, Alexander of Aphrodisias On Fate
David Furley, Two Studies in the Greek Atomists
Richard Sorabji, Necessity, Cause, and Blame

Later in the article, someone can read the following, attributed to Epicurus

...some things happen of necessity (ἀνάγκη), others by chance (τύχη), others through our own agency (παρ’ ἡμᾶς).

...necessity destroys responsibility and chance is inconstant; whereas our own actions are autonomous, and it is to them that praise and blame naturally attach.[

and this, attributed to Lucretius...

Again, if all motion is always one long chain, and new motion arises out of the old in order invariable, and if the first-beginnings do not make by swerving a beginning of motion such as to break the decrees of fate, that cause may not follow cause from infinity, whence comes this freedom (libera) in living creatures all over the earth, whence I say is this will (voluntas) wrested from the fates by which we proceed whither pleasure leads each, swerving also our motions not at fixed times and fixed places, but just where our mind has taken us? For undoubtedly it is his own will in each that begins these things, and from the will movements go rippling through the limbs.

and...

Alexander of Aphrodisias (c. 150–210), the most famous ancient commentator on Aristotle, wrote in the age of Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics. He defended a view of moral responsibility we would call libertarianism today. Greek philosophy had no precise term for "free will" as did Latin (liberum arbitrium or libera voluntas). The discussion was in terms of responsibility, what "depends on us" (in Greek ἐφ ἡμῖν).

It seems that the christians were not the original 'hysterics' or 'theologians'. One wonders how Agamben and his readers managed to miss all that. Probably too mainstream to bother!

Given that the book I cited is largely a genealogy of the will in which all the primary sources of your 2 second wiki search are quoted from and engaged with, the pertinent question is just how delicious the irony is about 'missing reading'. I quote selectively and without commentary:

"One of the few questions on which historians of ancient thought seem to be in perfect agreement is in fact the lack of a notion corresponding to that of the will in classical culture ([Eric] Dodds, p. 6; cf. [Albrecht] Dihle, p. 20). ... Precisely because the will “is not a datum of human nature,” but “a complex construction whose history appears to be as difficult, multiple, and incomplete as that of the self, of which it is to a great extent an integral part” (ibid., p. 50) [citation from Jean-Pierre Vernant], it is necessary to keep up our guard against anachronistically projecting onto ancient people our way of conceiving of the behaviors, free choices, and responsibilities of the subject.

It is significant from this perspective that the Greeks, to express what we designate with the single term “will,” would have had recourse to a plurality of words: boulēsis (and the corresponding verb boulomai), “desire, intention”; boulē, “decision, project, counsel”; thelēsis (and thelō), which means being ready or disposed to do something (also in a purely objective sense: thelei gignesthai, “it wants to happen,” as Tuscan peasants used to say: non vuol piovere, “it doesn’t want to rain”); orexis, which indicates appetite in general, the faculty of desiring. None of these terms correspond to our notion of will, understood as the foundation of free and responsible action.

[These terms] do not have a moral origin and therefore do not refer to subjective conditions that make agents the ethically responsible cause of their actions. Instead we are dealing with juridical categories, by means of which the Greek city sought to regulate the exercise of private vengeance by distinguishing, according to the passionate reactions that they aroused in the citizens, diverse levels of punishability. ...It is not a matter of founding responsibility in the subject’s will, but of ascertaining it objectively, according to the various levels of possibility of the subject’s actions. To the preeminence accorded by modern people to the will, there corresponds in the ancient world a primacy of potential: human beings are not responsible for their actions because they have willed them; they answer for them because they were able to carry them out."

"The term “free will” (liberum arbitrium) is used by Christian authors to translate the Greek expressions autexousion (literally “what has power over itself”) and to eph’ēmin (literally “what depends on us”), which in Neoplatonic treatises and Aristotle’s commentators designate the capacity to decide on one’s own actions. The modern translation of the term as “freedom,” which is frequently encountered, is equivocal, because the context in which it is used is not that of political freedom (which is called eleuthēria in Greek) but the moral and juridical one, which is by now familiar to us, of the imputability of actions. The origin of the term is, after all, juridical: arbitrium is the decision or faculty of judging of the arbiter, of the judge in a lawsuit (arbiter dicitur iudex, quod totius rei habet arbitrium et facultatum) and, by extension, the subject’s faculty of deciding.

...In the general convergence of late-ancient culture toward the same insistent problematic nuclei, the question of the autonomy of human actions was posed by philosophers in relation to fate. Exemplary from this point of view is the treatise Peri heimarmenē (On Fate) of Alexander of Aphrodisias, the “exegete” par excellence of Aristotle’s thought. Against the Stoics, who seemed to accord a preponderant part to fate, for him it was a question of “preserving what depends on us [ to eph’ēmin sozesthai ]” (Alexander, p. 38/60). ...

The strategy within which the free will of the Fathers functions, while showing some obvious analogies with those of the philosophers, is essentially different. For Alexander, the problem is in fact still the Aristotelian one of the ambiguity of human potential, and the eph’ēmin consists essentially in “being able to do opposites” (dynasthai ta antikeimena, ibid. p. 24/58; dynasthai hairesthai to antikeimenon, p. 25/58); for Christian theologians it is instead a matter of singling out in the will the principle of imputability of human actions, and to this end, they must first of all translate the problem of potential into that of will (de libera voluntate quaestio est, “it is a question of free will”; Augustine, On Free Will, 2.19.51)."

"Ancient human beings were people who “can,” who conceive their thought and their action in the dimension of potential; Christian human beings are beings that will."

I omit the specific engagements with Lucretius and the Stoics for the sake of space. There is of course, the rest of the book which continues much in this vein as well. In the meantime, I wish you well on your future Wikipedia research and citations of works you have not read.

In fact, since your 'research' cites Bobzien, whose book on the Sotics is a widely acknowledged masterpiece of historical philosophy, let's see what she has to say:

"None of the Peripatetic and Middle-Platonist authors is concerned with free-will, with that which depends on us, or with moral responsibility, when they discuss contingency, or two-sided possibility. True, that which depends on us is included in the contingent, but so are other things. Accordingly, neither in Plutarch nor in Boethius nor in Alexander does that which depends on us enter the discussion..." "...There is no evidence at all that Chrysippus or any other early Stoic grappled with the problem of character determination and moral responsibility, let alone the problem of character determination and free will."

"...The Stoics did not require a concept of freedom to do otherwise, since they did not connect moral responsibility with such freedom. As a consequence, they had no reason to concern themselves with any free-will problem. Theirs is the problem of the compatibility of autonomous agency and causal determinism. On the Peripatetic side, Alexander [of Aphrodisias] faced no free-will problem either. ...A problem of determinism and freedom to do otherwise thus arises only in the confrontation of the two philosophical systems, when later Stoic causal determinism meets late Peripatetic freedom to do otherwise—with such freedom understood as a necessary condition for moral responsibility". (Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy).

And since you cited Epicurus so prominently, lets hear what she has to say about him too:

"There is no compelling textual evidence for the assumption that Epicurus was concerned with freedom of decision or choice or with a problem of free will. There is no evidence that he discussed, or even had a conception of, freedom of decision or freedom of choice. There is no evidence that he had a concept of moral responsibility that is grounded on freedom of choice, or on freedom of decision. There is not even any direct evidence that he thought freedom to do otherwise was jeopardized by atomistic determinism. There is further no compelling evidence that the swerve played a role in the formation of volitional acts of decision processes.

I hence suggest that the whole idea that Epicurus was concerned with the free will problem is anachronistic, and that - at least as long as no positive evidence comes to light - the view that Epicurus thought there was such a problem, and that he endeavoured to solve it, should be dropped". (Did Epicurus Discover the Free Will Problem?).

I would quote her on Lucretius too, but whipping the dead is mean. Guess things are pretty easy to miss when the depth of one's 'reading' goes as far - or rather as near - as a Wiki page.

If we were even half as advanced as the ancients were about freedom, we'd probably have dropped the stupid notion of free will and free choice a long time ago.

Here's the argument:
1. The ability to make choices is a necessary condition for the evaluation of evidence.
2. Evaluating evidence is a necessary condition for science.
3. Without free will there is no ability to make choices.
4. Without the ability to make choices, evaluation of evidence is impossible.
5. If evaluation of evidence is impossible, science is impossible.
6. There is no free will.
7. Therefore, science is impossible.

Premise one is wrong, therefore your conclusion does not follow

"No, because I don't think a sense of wonder is a necessary condition for doing science. The ability to weigh/evaluate evidence is."

RA, I think you may be overlooking the obvious. Would you not agree that raising the ' scientific question' in itself is a necessary part of the evaluation process?

And if so, is that not called human wonderment? But if not, then why choose to evaluate at all?

"Are there any scientific synthetic a priori propositions?"

Of course you are joking right (or maybe I misunderstood)? Here's an easy one for you: every event must have a cause.

Here's an easy one for you: every event must have a cause. — 3017amen

What about the Fundamental event?

What fundamental event?

Never mind....doesn’t matter. That any fundamental event has a fundamental cause is still a synthetic a priori proposition.

Nice editing. You forgot to quote her when she says that the concept of the will and therefore the problem of free will and of the compatibility of causal determinism and freedom to do otherwise can be found, besides Christians, in Platonists in the second century. Platonists who, according to her, were also trying to solve the problem of evil. Which denies Agamben's claim that all this was first introduced by the Christian Lactantius in the third century or Dihle's claim that Augustine came up with it.

You also forgot to quote her saying how influential Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus and Alexander were in subsequent thinkers and how the later formulated their doctrines based on the ideas of the former. Which denies Dihle's claim that Augustine, or the other Christians, had to find their sources of the concept of will in Old Testament. And deflates the importance of the notion that we have to search for the problem of free will within a specific thinker's system. Even today, no one besides libertarians or those who specifically argue against them, need to be troubled by free will within their own system; yet, they're still part of the same discussion, the way Alexander and subsequent Platonists or Christians were parts of the same discussion.

1. The ability to make choices is a necessary condition for the evaluation of evidence. — RogueAI

False.

How can you evaluate evidence if you can't freely determine whether it's good evidence or not? — RogueAI

That's a loaded question, the unwarranted assumption being that freedom is required.

If you're simply compelled into believing a particular piece of evidence supports a hypothesis, you don't know if it actually does support the hypothesis. You just have to hope that what you were compelled to believe is right, but how would you ever know? — RogueAI

That's a non sequitur, and makes no sense whether you make it about free will or determinism.

"If you simply freely will yourself into believing that a particular piece of evidence supports a hypothesis, you don't know if it actually does support the hypothesis. You just have to hope that what you freely willed yourself to believe is right, but how would you ever know?"

Bad arguments like yours are a good case against free will, at least from my perspective, because I cannot freely will myself to find them convincing enough to believe or accept over more convincing alternatives. If I cannot, then how is that free will? It isn't free, and it doesn't seem like a matter of will. It's a matter of what I find convincing based on my ability to asses the evidence.

Suppose someone tells you your house is on fire. Let's call that evidence (A). Now you have to update your belief in the hypothesis "my house isn't on fire". How can you do that if you can't even choose whether to believe the person is reliable or not? Is lying or not? Is in a position to know about your house or not? Those are all choices you have to make before you can even begin to assess (A)'s impact on the hypothesis. — RogueAI

That is nonsense. Why would you needlessly insert "choice" into that scenario, when it isn't necessary, and when it actually makes the explanation worse?

They are conclusions that would need to be reached. And people do not "choose" to believe anything at all, because beliefs are not chosen, they are acquired.

Yet particular members of the human species have been engaged in what has been conventionally established as the doing of science from at least the early 1600’s. So either the human species hasn’t really been doing science at all, or your argument is junk because it’s conclusion is catastrophically false.

......Eenie meanie minee moe...... — Mww

It's supposed to turn out catastrophically false. It's a reductio ad absurdum. :roll:

It was supposed to?

Damn. I missed all the clues that would have informed me which of the author’s major or assorted minors were intentionally frivolous. All this time, I thought he was seriously claiming science can’t be done without free will. You know.....thread title and all....

Ah, so you don't have me on ignore then? :lol:

You had me lulled into believing that I could say whatever I liked to you, because you wouldn't see it anyway.

You had me lulled into believing...... — S

No one is exempt from the reach of my subliminal powers.

I don’t ignore anyone; you just happened to say something I found worth commenting on.

I generally agree with this, most of the objections you've got stem from an interpretation of the word 'choice' different from yours (you're obviously referring to free choices here, which a deterministic machine isn't able to make).

Yes. The ability to choose is impossible in a deterministic universe (see Inwagen's argument).

However as someone mentioned, if people's actions were predetermined then it was also predetermined that what we call science would evolve the way it does, so science "moving forward" does not imply free will, however in order to believe in the absence of free will we have to leave plenty of coincidences unexplained.

I briefly talked about this. It's likely we evolved to be the kind of beings who mostly come to rational conclusions (even in a deterministic world); the irrational ones were selected against long ago. That has some merit, and I don't have a good counter to it yet.

You forgot to quote her when she says that the concept of the will and therefore the problem of free will and of the compatibility of causal determinism and freedom to do otherwise can be found, besides Christians, in Platonists in the second century. — hairy belly

Sorry, I couldn't hear you over the sound of you totally abandoning the authors you initially quoted in favour of some last minute updates because you thought a Wiki article was in any way an adequate source of anything.

As for Bobzien's unnamed and uncited 2nd century Platonists, I'm more than happy to concede that, insofar we're still talking more than 100 years after the birth of Christ, with Lactantius himself writing in the 3rd century AD. And insofar as these unnamed and uncited Platonists were themselves wrangling with the problem of evil, that's precisely the context in which I originally said the so-called 'problem of free will' stems from anyway. Happy to amend: "Free will is a thoroughly theological problem, and did not exist as a 'problem' prior to Christian theologians and super late Platonists who invented it to solve the problem of evil". That free will is a late historical invention is by far the point I'm most interested in making. As for Bobzien herself, I quote from her aptly titled The Inadvertent Conception and Late Birth of the Free-Will Problem:

"It is then presumably only a slight overstatement when I conclude with saying: the problem of physical causal determinism and freedom of decision entered the scene in the 2nd century A.D., by a chance encounter of Stoic physics and the fruits of early Aristotle exegesis, with the contemporary focus on the culpability of mental events and the introduction of a power of decision making as catalysts - and it was not part of the philosophical repertoire for long."

The crypto-theologians in this thread can continue their Christian apologetics by pretending that free will is anything but a religious issue, and that those 'rich intuitions' that people think they have of free will are more than just historico-cultural memes ratiocinated onto ambigious feelings after the fact. In any case I'd wager that the preponderence of this obscure theological problematic in our time has alot more to do with the modern market economy than any apprarent 'perennial' metaphysical problem.

Good post.

" From what I can see the issue is foundational to everything and yet no one has a definitive answer."

I think because free will seems impossible in either a deterministic or indeterministic universe. Inwagen talks about this. But yet the intuition that we are freely making choices is one of the strongest we have. So there's tension between the idea that, in this type of universe, free will seems impossible and yet we all act like we have it.

I can see that choice is part of your argument and from what I've observed it's a key piece of the puzzle. Let's take a more general viewpoint and not just science. Are choices and the ability to make them really evidence of freewill.

I would say that freedom of choice is a necessary condition for free will, but not a sufficient one. If you can establish that we really are making free choices, it wouldn't establish free will, per se, but you would be very close to it.

That said one thing worth mentioning is awareness has a big role in freewill. We've all had the experience where we resist our urges which I take as weak evidence for freewill and a requirement for this ability is that we must be aware of the influences that compel us to act in a certain way. If for a moment we let our guards down we're back to behaving like an animal - instinct driven and machine-like.

Yes, the idea that we are biological robots run completely counter to the rich inner life we all have. That is the last thing you would expect a machine to have. The existence of consciousness is a huge problem for those who regard us as automatons. I think it's catastrophic.

Sorry, I couldn't hear you over the sound of you totally abandoning the authors you initially quoted in favour of some last minute updates because you thought a Wiki article was in any way an adequate source of anything. — StreetlightX

You probably couldn't hear me because of your deafening retreat from the original thesis that it was Christians who invented it. Is the concept of free will concept a historical invention? Wow, who would have thought? Damn amazing, it must be the only one, the rest being platonic shit flowing somewhere out of history.

"Bobzien's unnamed and uncited 2nd century Platonists"? But you've read the fucking masterpiece (and her article), so you know it's there. Let me quote it for you though, not that it's needed, since you backed off from the initial claim.

If we want to find philosophers who are troubled by a free-will problem within their system, we need to turn to Platonists and Christian thinkers.

So, even in Bobzien's very restrictive sense, the free will thesis was clearly spelled out by non christians at the latest in the early second century. Long before Lactantius, far longer before Augustine. Also, funny how concepts originated in supposedly 'non-theological' discussions can give rise to 'theological' discussions, but the opposite can't happen for some reason.

Yet, per Bobzien, Alexander doesn't face a free will problem within his system simply because, against the Stoics, he rejects predetermination of human actions by divine providence. A totally non-theological issue. Otherwise, according to Bobzien again, 'he regards a concept of freedom to do otherwise as a prerequisite for moral responsibility'. And the Stoics, despite the fact that they had a doctrine of divine predestination, didn't face a free will problem within their system simply because, according to their doctrine and against Alexander, the freedom to do and choose otherwise is not a prerequisite of moral responsibility.

Lo and behold, all the necessary ingredients of the restrictive free will problem are here, just not all gathered unambiguously within one single system. It was a matter of time and historical circumstances for this to happen and the notion that it necessarily takes a hysteric christian theologian to make it happen is nothing but hysterical theology.

If neither Alexander nor the Stoics faced a free will problem 'within' their respective systems, where else were they meant to face it exactly? In a Christian theological system? Lo and behold, that's just where free will as a problem was invented.

"If Alexander wasn't Alexander, he would have invented free will! If the Stoics weren't Stoics they would have also invented free will!". Well done, A+ for creative thinking. You can go back to Wiki class now, don't forget your packed lunch.

That they didn't face it 'within' their respective systems is Bobzien's expression. Didn't you find it curious that she had to write that and what she might mean?

Not at all. It follows freely from her explicit arguments that those who read either as employing a notion of 'free will' are imposing anarchronisms foisted from without, that is, externally, no doubt due to a complete lack of either historical or philosophical sense. Probably because they source their information from Wikipedia articles.

Nope. Not at all, cause either way, she concludes that the free will notion (in the restrictive sense in which she's examining it) was formulated in antiquity, the problem is by whom exactly and these writers are legitimate contenders even if they weren't the ones who did this. That's why she had to write a fucking masterpiece and not an ignorant and arrogant post in a forum, like you. I already explained why she had to make the distinction. It's because

all the necessary ingredients of the restrictive free will problem are here, just not all gathered unambiguously within one single system.

So, it was not independently within these two systems that all the necessary parts of the doctrine were combined, but at their intersection. All the necessary doctrines were already part of the discussion and it just took someone else, the platonists of early second century, to rearrange them and make them all parts of the same system.

So no free will until the late Platonists and Christians, cool, gotchya, thanks for playing, come again, Wiki in hand.

Next time make sure not to cite Agamben and not to attribute it to 'hysteric' Christians.

You're right I need to attribute it to hysteric Christians and hysteric late (unnamed, uncited) Platonists, each about a 100 or so years apart from each other. Thank you for your trivial contribution.

From the Iron Age to our world, there was a shift from a world full of gods who motivated people (female divinities are generally responsible for bad motivations, male divinities prod people toward the good), to a world in which we claim ownership of our motives, and therefore responsibility for our actions.

Whereas ancient people attributed the invention of fire, paper, smelting, etc. to divinities, we believe we invented all those things. In short, we sucked all the divinity in the world into ourselves.

Christianity didn't spontaneously accomplish this, but its monotheism (early on modeled on the Neoplatonic trinity), contributed to it (or was a vehicle for it, depending on your POV).

Maybe it's just a pendulum and one day humans will lose ownership of themselves again and see themselves scattered across the stars and their emotions lighting up the sky during storms.

Either way, @StreetlightX, it's nothing to be angry about.

I think Mmm is right, me saying God caused the big bang would be synthetic a priori. Nevertheless, guess what....that's why we have natural sciences that objectively measures phenomena, along with those important assumptions no less ( synthetic propositions are required to do natural science) !!