Is our intuitive understanding of free will (could-have-done-otherwise) in contradiction with our current scientific understanding of the world?

research and moral psychology seems to suggest that people’s intuitions about free will are complicated and possibly self-contradictory.

that's certainly true. however, just because people can't articulate something properly, without running into paradoxes, it doesn't mean they don't understand it.(You're a professional in the field, so I don't think you need an example for that). So all we have to do is to reflect back on our own first-person experience and try to crystallize the issue at hand. And my best linguistic approximation of my intuition regarding free will tells me that I could have done otherwise. So if yours or everybody else's free will intuition is the same as mine, then the proposed question is the one we should be concerned with. if not, then probably you should ask other questions.

/r/askphilosophy Thread Parent