Lack of Freewill doesn't mean lack of choice

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@Mijin

There is no reason that free will needs to be an infinite regress – that would just add one more problem to the concept.

No, it’s the only real problem there is—every other problem is spurious. The general charge is that the notion is incoherent (arguments about determinism, causality, chance, and so on, and in particular the consequence argument, really are beside the point). The idea is that free will would be both ‘determinate and non-determined’, as I think you put it—i.e. there’s nothing that determines it, but it’s still supposed to have some determinate content. But this can only be coherent if it must be something beside the will that determines it—the will self-determining would not preclude its freedom. If it’s causa sui, then my will and nothing beside my will determines my actions. So such self-determination must be impossible. But this it only is if the regress entailed by self-determination is impossible. If it’s not, then the will determines itself, and is thereby free.

@Mijin

We have no reason in the first place to posit the existence of this thing.

Our experience of our actions as free is the reason we posit the existence of free will. Any alternative then has the added explanatory burden of producing a reason for this illusory experience.

@Mijin

Please elaborate.

I have, at several points in this thread. For example:

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

But then, that’s of course not the real argument against free will. Ultimately, it’s claimed, the notion itself is incoherent from the start—which, if true, of course makes any appeal to science, to determinism or chance, facile. After all, it’s supposed to be both definite—there is one, and only one, choice made—and yet, undetermined—as otherwise, whatever determines it by proxy determines the choice’s outcome—without being arbitrary—as a choice made without cause isn’t a choice at all. So, the ‘free’ and the ‘will’ parts of ‘free will’ just seem to pull in opposite directions.

But this misses the option that the will determines itself. If the reason why we willed A over B is just the will, then there’s no external determination, and no arbitrariness. Of course, this immediately collapses into circularity—as Schopenhauer put it, ‘a man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills’. We can choose whatever we want, but can’t choose our wants. Otherwise, we face an infinite regress: if my will⁰ makes me choose cornflakes over peanut butter, then some will¹ must determine my will⁰ to be cornflake-wanting rather than peanut butter-wanting, and some will² determine my will¹, and so on, either to infinity and beyond, or until we meet a magical regression-breaker.

But then, what of it? Any account of how things happen ultimately faces the same problem. If things happen according to an unbroken causal chain, then either we have to continue this chain infinitely into the past, or we have to invoke some ‘first cause’ to begin it. If things happen as per the dictates of natural law, what dictates them, in turn? Randomness, similarly, hinges on ‘infinitary’ notions, although it’s not as obvious: mathematically, producing a truly (algorithmically) random string requires solving an undecidable problem (the halting problem), which can be done by a machine performing infinitely many steps of computation.

More explicitly, there’s actually the same infinitary issue at work at every instance where some A causes B to occur:

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

But then, the same infinity crops up at two (superficially) distinct places: first, either the chain of causality is infinite, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, it must have started somewhere—but then, that starting place can’t be causally determined (perhaps it’s some random initial condition—which leads us back to where we were). But more importantly, in any given instance of causation, we’re faced with the same regress: if matters of fact A made it so that matters of fact B obtain, what made it so that matters of fact A are matters-of-fact-B-causing?

(This thread-jumping is very awkward, by the way; so I’d propose that we keep matters regarding free will in this thread, leaving the other to Thomson’s lamp proper.)