Two Types of Free Will, part 1

I recently heard Daniel Dennett's explanation of his concept of deepity. It struck me that the concept of free will is exactly such a thing. It is a concept which is trivially true, but, in another sense, is logically ill-formed. The usual debate about free will is whether the concept of such is compatible with a deterministic (or truly random — that is, quantum) universe. Those who believe free will is compatible with a deterministic universe, and that therefore free will is "real" in some sense, are called compatibilists, while those who believe it is not, and that free will is an illusion, are called incompatibilists. The idea that the universe is not limited in this sense, but could in fact go some way other than the way it went is called libertarianism, but I more or less dismiss it out of hand as incoherent, for reasons I shall explain below.

Normally, free will is somehow taken to be a single, monolithic concept which is either true or false, and therefore is argued over. However, it struck me that there are two very different concepts of free will which no one bothers to distinguish (as far as I have seen). These I call phenomenological free will and metaphysical free will. Let us take them in turn.

Phenomenological free will is what we experience whenever we are awake and aware. It is the feeling of making choices, which is obvious and inescapable whenever we experience usual brain function, not under the influence of hypnosis, drugs or derangement of some sort. It is the conscious mind's narration of the things it sees us doing (we are consciously aware of our actions about 500 milliseconds after our brain initiates them). A large function of consciousness, it seems, is to inhibit actions it realizes aren't desirable, but it does not initiate them. Regardless, as far as one can tell (and in as far as there is a real "I" there to do the telling), we choose our actions and build our identities around those choices.

Metaphysical free will is what I call the idea of making "real" choices. That is, it is what explores the world of counterfactuals relative to what we did indeed choose, and decides that, had it wanted to, it could have selected one of those other choices. Alternately, it can be seen as that device which looks at the current state of the world, and picks what future actions would be most beneficial or desirable for the actor. It is, however, never forced to make any particular choice — it could make some wild, unmotivated flight of fancy at any moment (or at least, that must be a serious possibility in order for this style of free will to be worth considering). It is somehow independent of forces in this world, even if the actor himself isn't.

These two types of free will are very different to each other. One is a fact of experience and perception (hence, phenomenological), while the other makes a claim about the very nature of our minds, about what is true of the universe. I will contrast these two views in my next post, and show why one of these must be the case, while the other cannot be.