This is a key point.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Jul 24, 2021 1:58 pm Determinism has to hold that the will is strictly a product of prior forces. A belief in free will allows that its not.
The question is, does free will require the ability to choose the state of one’s mind at the instant that one is doing the choosing? If it does, then that is certainly impossible if determinism is true… but it is also certainly impossible if determinism is NOT true, so determinism is irrelevant to the question! This is because it is simply logically impossible for what is being chosen to be also at the same moment what is doing the choosing. No variable can have a multiplicity of values and only one value at the same moment.
On the other hand, if a mental state is neither instantaneously self-determined nor a product of prior physical/mental states, it cannot have the character of a will. It may be the result of divine intention, pure randomness, or whatever you like. Such imports from outside the causally-connected world are a form of "freedom", certainly, but such forms of "freedom" are not accessible to the self to whom the mental state belongs. (William James made a famous argument along these lines).
The will supposedly being determined by some non-physical mind doesn’t alter the problem, but merely shifts it back. Does that non-physical mind choose its own state? No, because that is still logically impossible. It may be determined by earlier physical or non-physical states, or by something external, or by nothing at all, or some combination, but not by itself, since that would still be choosing while being chosen. And again, the external and undetermined options are freedoms inaccessible to the will.
The nearest thing to metaphysical self-determination that is logically possible is psychological self-determination, that is to say that how one is at one moment is in important ways influenced by choices made at earlier moments. This may be the origin of the faulty notion that metaphysical self-determination is a valid concept, which requires some special ingredient to enable it. (I am defending free will as a capability, not as an ingredient of reality).
Now if it is not logically possible to meet the criterion of metaphysical self-determination, this has big implications. It entails that a definition based on this criterion cannot mean anything. It has no connotation: it does not pick out any conceivable world in which the criterion could be met. And if that definition doesn’t mean anything, then proposing a meaningful definition is not “changing the meaning” since there is no meaning to change.
Alternatively, if free will is defined explicitly as the negation of determinism, then it is certainly changing the meaning of will, to mean something unconnected to the self, and has no further significance. [PS: Perhaps what is meant is that determinism of the material world denies freedom to anything outside the material world. This is true: it follows from the general physical principle that a causally closed system denies freedom to anything outside that system. So the combination of determinism, dualism and free will is indeed a contradiction -though I don't know anyone who believes in that combination! But determinism and monist free will are perfectly happy logical bedfellows, because a monist mind isn't outside the material world.]
So we have to forget about how the state of mind, at the moment the choice is presented, is arrived at, and ask instead whether the resulting will, whatever it is, can be implemented. If for example the will is to change the past, then there is no such freedom.
The experience of free will starts from the consciousness of there being more than one option that would be possible if chosen, and uses the resources in the mind available to consciousness at that moment in arriving at a decision. This means that in general a decision that is anything more than a snap decision starts with a special kind of search in the mind for relevant material (see my recent post on Attention). The lack of perfect predictability of searches then explains the formal unpredictability of conscious decisions.