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2024-02-14 (slightly modified version of the original posted to the fediverse on 2024-02-14)
A couple days ago an opt-out Fedi-Bluesky bridge was announced as being ready to launch when Bluesky enables federation, which means that everyone on the Fediverse is talking about open networks & user agency again, and I'm on another philosophy lecture video kick, so ...
One way Daniel Dennett frames his compatibilist formulation of human free will is to describe us as having evolved to be 'excellent avoiders'.
As in, there's an untold number of situations we may face in life - falling boulder, hungry tiger, speeding car, shitty vibes, disagreement with someone we love - and part of determinism is our ability to avoid particular outcomes in those situations. This is not only quite often good for our survival as a species, but it's also central to the expression of our agency and free will. So central that for Dennett, my impression is that this is the exact same thing as saying, our ability to avoid is central to the expression of our values and humanity.
Ok. Fleshing this out a bit: yes, we live entirely in a material world governed by deteministic physical laws, and a key reason we've been so successful (evolutionarily speaking, at least) is that our brains and bodies, though themselves made of the same deterministic matter as everything else, and obeying all of those same laws of physics, can nonetheless take in information from the world around us, and, based on that, generate imagined possible futures, which we can then avoid (or not) based on our values - values which are in a very real sense encoded in our physical neuronal connections.
The avoiding could be a relatively basic and limbic "avoid the object flying toward your head because you don't want to be in the possible future where you get hurt or die", or a more abstract and longer-term oriented "avoid saying this particular thing that's likely to make this person feel their concerns are being minimized, because they've told you that it's hurtful, and you don't want to be in the possible future where you have hurt them".
How this all equates to free will, just by the way, is deceptively simple: our belief that we have free will is itself part of the deterministic forces of the physical universe. Phenomenologically, you can choose to believe in free will. Which will itself shape your behaviour, and the futures you avoid.
(Hold on, wait. That can't be it, right?)
But no, really: insofar as we literally *are* our 'encoded' values and understanding of the world, there ends up being no practical distinction between free will and determinism, in terms of how we will act. Unless, of course, we define free will as something that can't actually exist in the physical world.
Anyway the key point, again, is: the ability to avoid is central to the expression of our values and our humanity.
On the other hand, there's the philosophical-libertarian conception of free will. This is the so-called 'strong' version of free will, conceiving of its agents as top-down authorities of the self, a self-above-the-self: Cartesian-mind-theater viewing, rational/logical deciders, who somehow have the power to magically interrupt the billiard-ball cause-and-effect determinism of the universe via the intervention of their thoughts and ideas. (Thoughts and ideas which themselves are apparently... self-generated, or something? From where, some place outside of the physical world? Hmmm...)
Anyway, putting metaphysical disagreements aside, I'm pretty certain Dennett would agree that this 'strong' version of free will is what constitutes the philosophical underpinning of a pretty common tech bro "just build" mentality, and often leads to actions that express the opposite of what is expressed by the avoider: namely, actions that express an attitude of contingency (eg the "this is technically possible, and that is a good in itself" doctrine of someone like Marc Andreessen), which makes those actions therefore pretty much values-free, and so are therefore, at best, weak expressions of our free will and humanity.
Funny, then, that they'll complain it's 'self-defeating' to say "yeah, no thanks" to whatever the latest thing is that someone built just because they could, despite us having determined that it's something we would prefer to avoid. Saying "no thanks" is quite likely one of the most self-affirming, freedom-affirming, and humanity-affirming things we can do as human beings.