I'd like to better understand how compatibilists conceive of free will.[1] LW is a known hotbed of compatibilism, so here's my question:
Suppose that determinism is true. When I face a binary choice,[2] there are two relevantly-different states of the world I could be in:[3]
State A: Past events HA have happened, current state of the world is A, I will choose CA, future FA will happen.
State B: Past events HB have happened, current state of the world is B, I will choose CB, future FB will happen.
When I make my choice (CA or CB), I'm choosing/revealing which of those two states of the world are (my) reality. They're package deals: CA follows from HA just as surely as it leads to FA, and the same holds for state B.
Which seems to give me just as much control[4] over the past as I have over the future. In whatever sense I 'exercise free will' to make CA real and bring about FA, I also make it the case that HA is the true history.
My question is: Does this bother you at all, and if not, why not?[5]
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Yes, I've done my own reading, though admittedly it's been a while. I never found a satisfying (to me) answer to this question, and to the best of my recollection I rarely saw it clearly addressed in a form I recognised. If you want to link me to a pre-existing answer, please do, but please be specific: less 'read Dennett' and more 'read this passage of this work'.
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Maybe no real choice is truly binary, but for the sake of simplicity let's say this one is. I don't think that changes anything important.
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For simplicity I'm taking the physical laws as a given. I don't think that matters unless free will involves in some sense choosing which set of physical laws holds in reality.
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Not necessarily in every sense in which you might want to use the word 'control'; you might define that word such that it only applies to causal influence forward in time. But yes in the sense that whatever I can do to make my world the one with FA in it, I can do to make my world the one with HA in it.
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If your answer involves the MWI or something like it, I would appreciate if you explained (the relevant bits of) how you conceive of personal identity and consciousness within that framework.
That's not been my impression. I would have summarized it more as "LW (a) agrees that LFW doesn't exist and (b) understands that debating compatibilism doesn't make sense because it's just a matter of definition"
Personally, I certainly don't consider myself a compatibilist (though this is really just a matter of preference since there are no factual disagreements). My brief answer to "does free will exist" is "no". The longer answer is the within-physics stick figure drawing.
Perhaps what's really going on to give me that impression is:
Which doesn't actually imply that a high proportion would identify themselves as compatibilists. (I thought there would be survey results to clear this up, but all I could find with a quick search was a very old one with only hard-to-decode raw data accessible.)