My sense, and this clearly can be wrong, is that the primary distinction between libertarian and compatibilist accounts of free will is in how one understands the concept of free will.

If this is correct, then it seems to me that the concepts that I'm applying are sufficient to support the libertarian view, and that compatibilists would have to come up with an alternate description of free will in order to construct their position.

I'll admit here that I don't know "where" the free will is in the compatibilist viewpoint under the definitions set forth. Specifically, I'm using the following as the definition of determinism:

"The future is fully determinable by the current physical state"

And libertarianism is the negation of this plus a clause to the effect that human choices are a cause of the indeterminism. The mechanism of human choice (which leads to indeterminism) is libertarian free will.

The compatibilist affirms determinism, and so must posit an alternate understanding of free will since the libertarian free will does not exist under determinism. So where is the free will? I don't know where the compatibilist puts it. But it certainly doesn't create indeterminism.

The meat of the position is the idea of how the future states are determined. You can imagine a function of the following type:

f(x) = 0 if x is an even integer
f(x) = 1 if x is otherwise

There is indeterminism in the output as there are multiple values that it could take. And so you cannot take this function and say that the outcome is determined until AFTER you receive an input.

As it happens, the person choosing to feed values to the function chooses only primes larger than 2. So even though the function is indeterminate (that is, the outcome is not determined), we happen to see the same output every single time by freely willed choices (the decision to only enter primes greater than 2).

As I said before, I am not disagreeing with your definition of determinism. Rather, I am pointing out that the definition you are using for free will as having the capacity to do otherwise is a compatibilist one. The grandmaster that always opens with E4 still has the capacity to open with D4. The determinist would say that his always choosing to open with E4 was determined, but also that if he chose D4 rather than E4, he was determined to choose D4 in that instance. But the fact that he was determined to do one or the other doesn't take away his capacity to do the other. Rather, he doesn't have the capacity to open with E5, let alone K4.

As an example, we could describe a forest fire as having the capacity to burn down particular section of a forest fire without implying that whether it does so is not determined. Having a capacity to do something doesn't imply that we aren't determined to not do it.

Now, of course this doesn't mean that determinism is true--you could accept this understanding of free will and still reject determinism. But the important point is that if you accept this definition, then the claim that humans are free doesn't imply that determinism is false. Thus, if this is how you understand free will, then you haven't given us a reason to reject determinism.

You also here define libertarian free will explicitly as the cause of indeterminism in the universe. While this definition does rule out determinism, it doesn't connect up to our intuitions about our ability to choose. I think the grandmaster has the ability to choose D4 or E4 (even if he always chooses E4), but I don't have an intuition that he has the ability to indeterministically choose D4 or E4.

Yeah, this is a slightly different issue from what I've been focusing on. You want to say, correctly in my view, that my knowing that you will choose x doesn't determine that you will choose x. However, this doesn't really address the problem. People are not claiming that it is god's foreknowledge that determines my choosing x. Rather, they are saying that god could only foreknow that I will choose x if my choosing x is determined.

Your rebuttal seems to be that it could be the case that I would just happen to always choose x, and somehow god knows this. I think there are two problems with this. First, even if this were true with regards to some choices, it seems extremely implausible that it is so with regards to all of my choices. Second, it still doesn't answer the question of how god would know this. If it just happens to be the case, on what basis does god know this? How is it something that is knowable?

Is there some non-physical state of the universe prior to an act of willing? If there is, what difference does it make that this state is non-physical rather than physical? If a choice is exactly determined by (is a necessary outcome of) a prior non-physical state of the universe, it isn't free.

How would an omniscient being know that any particular statement about the physical universe is true if it cannot derive or verify the statement?

Once God knows that it's heads, it cannot be tails in this universe. It could have been tails if God didn't know anything about it.

I don't think that the word "state" carries the appropriate content. There are non-physical entities. Whether these entities are defined/described by "states" is unclear. We describe/define the physical world by "states" because these are things that we quantify and measure, but we don't do that with non-physical entities.

The state of the universe is the physical state of the universe.

I agree with the implication, but I don't agree with the premise. Why would the choice be "exactly determined by a prior non-physical state"? A non-physical entity wills something. The will is the start of the causal chain. There is nothing that needs to precede it.

If it's a statement that's true, then the omniscient being knows it's true. It's worth noting that statements themselves are non-physical entities. There's nothing physical about these statements even though they refer to the physical universe. So I don't see why it's necessary that the truth value must be derived from a physical quantity. Statements can simply be true.

What you're describing is the open theist position. God knows it's heads once it's heads.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I just don't think it's necessary. God can know that it will be heads even though it might be tails. It just turns out not to be tails.

Maybe I don't see why this is problematic. It's clear that the definition of "will" is not consistent with compatibilism, but I'm not sure that "capacity to do otherwise" must be different to avoid a problem.

I still don't see why it's problematic that the determinist has the same concept of "capacity to do otherwise." If you have more to add to help highlight the problem, it might help me to see what you're getting at. I'll think about it for a while and see if I get anywhere on my own.

I agree that I haven't given you a reason to reject determinism. I never tried and that wasn't the point. I'm explaining how certain definitions and concepts create a consistent understanding of what free will is, and that omniscience isn't incompatible with it.

Got it.

At this point, my goal was just to show that free choice may result in the same outcome. But I see now that this isn't the right issue.

The definition of omniscience I gave was that God affirms all true statements. I think we've been loosely throwing around the phrase "God knows" and that's just sloppy language. The definition of omniscience given doesn't actually say that God "knows" what will happen, but that he would affirm a true statement about the future.

I'm not sure why you find "entity" less troublesome than "state", but my idea of a "state" here is like a world in possible world semantics; a set of properties. It needn't be that these properties are physical.

You granted that "willing" takes "place in time". As there is clearly a time before a non-physical entity wills, I say that s is the set of all of the non-physical properties of the universe prior to the event of the non-physical entity willing. But if s is sufficient for willing x, then x isn't willed freely. If s is not sufficient for willing x, then there's no reason that x was willed, which doesn't sound like will at all.

I think you need to say something about how it knows it's true. As I understand it (this is to say crudely and hand-wavily), the reason you can have a "true and unprovable" statement about arithmetic is because the true part is 'meta-mathematical', you can't know it's true and unprovable within the formal system (correct me if I'm wrong please, I'm reaching). If there's a meta-mathematical justification for saying that some unprovable statement is true, wouldn't there be a meta-whatever justification of the omniscient being's knowledge of true but unverifiable statements about the physical universe?

I agree with that but how can you know that any statement is simply true?

Not sure how to move forward on this, I don't think you can have knowledge of an outcome that is genuinely random. To me, it's like saying God has knowledge that your indeterminate function will return 0. How would he know that? We haven't passed any value to the function yet.

Presumably there isn't a problem with showing that compatibilist free will is compatible with god's foreknowledge. Rather, the issue is whether incompatibilist free will is so compatible.

The problem I have with your comments so far is that the version of free will that you are defending doesn't seem to me clearly an incompatibilist version. As I've pointed out, the definition of free choice as having the capacity to do otherwise is a compatibilist definition. Defining free will as being the cause of indeterminism in the universe is not very helpful as it just makes it incompatible by fiat.

This is why I said: "libertarian free will is inconsistent with a god that knows what is for us the future." I'm more concerned with what free will says about foreknowledge. I think omniscience is implicated, but less clearly so.

But we still live inside of time. So before I was born it was determined that I will choose X over Y. If the future is already written (as in nothing can change from the way God "knows" it to be) then I am no more free to change my future as I am my past.

You could not be 100% sure. It could be that he has a brain aneurism or something and makes a completely absurd move.

As far as I understand it possible worlds "exist" based on the distinct ways that the world could be different (OrP feel free to step in if I botched this). So if the grandmaster is presented with the choice of checkmating you or move B then there exists a possible world in which he does each. If there does not exist a possible world in which he does not make the "checkmating move" then it would be necessary that he makes that move.

The fact that it is the best move does not mean that he will make that move, just that it is extremely likely. If you knew with 100% certainty that he was going to make that move, that means that it is impossible for him to make any other move, otherwise you could not be 100% certain.

I think that you have to look at what you said here. You used the word doesn't which implies that he already made the move. If we are looking towards the future he either can or cannot make a non-checkmating move. If he can then there exists a possibility that he will not and you must remain uncertain of the move that he makes, even though it is very likely.

The problem is that you are persisting in thinking that time has a universal sequencing function. But does it? Think of the Big Bang. What happened before the Big Bang? Actually that question has no meaning because time was created at the Big Bang so that "before" which is a term dependent on time, does not apply.

Your life could be similar. If you do not exist, then God could not know what you were going to do in any situation because there is no "you". Sort of like the last digit of pi. There is none, so even God cannot know it. In some sense when God created the spacetime that we exist in, He had to create you also. Your life then would exist for Him as a complete creation but the choices were created by you and your free will. You experience it sequencially, but the choices are yours. Free will is a property that you possess. It is not changed because of the properties of the observer. That was the point of my thought experiment concerning an observer who gains the ability to move through time. His gain does not remove free will from you.

I think omnipotence infinity and freewill need to be merged as the same term.

Assuming infinity is true, it is difficult to have a choice when everything inevitably occurs infinitely. Choice and randomness are not distinct on the grandest scale.

Omnipotence requires freewill in the first place.

But what you are saying is- can humans have freewill? Humans are a part of freewill, there are individual free wills and then there would be the net freewill = omnipotence

For all this to work there also needs to be a reality of conciousness, or some sort of universal cognition- which is easily evident in us.

to answer the OP, no.
omnipotence is not only incompatible with independent potent free will, it is impossible.

all things are the will of god.
we can either perceive this truth, or delude ourselves in believing otherwise.
the delusion that we are in complete control of our lives can only result in confusion.
most of us are confused which can only be necessary.
this confusion isn't a passing phase, it is a constant.
it will always be there, stymieing any effort in understanding the true nature of our existence.
the idea that we are in control is the single most important thread our egos cling to in order to continue to cloud us to our true purpose.
how else would one discover what they are and why? the most efficient means of achieving this realization is by exploring the depths of that which we are not..but I digress a bit..

when one realizes that 'god is in control', in the very literal sense of the breaths we take and the words we speak, the confusion in one's sphere of experience ceases.

the "kingdom of god" cannot be given to those who seek to exercise their true power to their own ends.
not because it would be perceived as "dangerous", but because it is impossible.
the 'power' and 'riches' of the kingdom can only be granted to those who understand with their entire being, that this universe, and therefore one's own self, exist solely for the "pleasure" and "happiness" of god.

from hard determinism to libertarianism, it seems we are forced onto a spectrum of absolute “potent” freewill on one hand, and a completely scripted fate on the other.
most of us find ourselves sliding up and down the spectrum as the situation dictates.

we cannot possess “potent” free will, and our lives are also not scripted.
while this may seem enigmatic, it is only because of the many false perceptions about where we are, what we are and how this place works.
we do not have the power to move a finger, it is moved for us.
we mistakenly believe that our thoughts, desires, wants and emotions originate from us but we seldom recognize that they are given to us.
we only "feel" free to make choices.
it only “feels” to us like freedom of choice. life is not scripted either, it is merely customized around educational purposes. if it serves that greater educational purpose, then our finger is moved for us. we may think we are in charge of actually manifesting the power but we are simply observers here.
our hands may be on the joystick, but the joystick is not connected.
it only “appears” connected.
we have the “appearance” of free will, but it is mental only.
power in this universe is manifest for us by proxy, not as a direct function of our will.

when one begins searching for the source of our motivations and emotions, we often find it does not originate from within us.
it is given to each, to teach us a lesson.
unfortunately it is a lesson that most have not learned.
there has never been such a thing called luck, chance, accident, probability or chaos.
ALL things happen for a perfectly logical reason.
when one realizes this Truth, then one can know those reasons.

what is fascinating to me, is that most people willingly place themselves at the mercy of the fallacy labeled "lady luck".
one of my favorite men in history, Albert Einstein, made two critical observations..
he said that the most important question facing man is:
“Is this universe a friendly place?”
his answer came in the form of another famous quote:
“He [God] does not play dice with the universe."

i believe we are made to do what we damn well please, but in accordance with a specific set of individually tailored objectives.

omnipotence is indeed omnipotence, always, now and forever.

True omnipotence is not at all contrary to free will. The law of the greatest good of all does cut off suboptimal branches of choices, but leaves infinitely many branches intact.

To say that God is not powerful enough to let me choose between eating a chocolate or a muffin, because one of the two will produce less in light of the greatest good of all is blasphemy.

I believe there are infinitely many real choices human beings can make that are in alignment with the greatest good of all. One certainly can't choose to inflict infinite suffering on another human being or even create any kind of injustice in the universe. But still, there is plenty of free will that the universe can accomodate. To say the opposite would be blasphemy.

Still, I don't think we have free will just now. For the time being we are largely controlled by forces that are outside of our control. I do believe there will come a point (perhaps after our physical death) that we inherit some kind of free will.

all choices are all available.

any 'control' over my reality that I appear to have is purely illusory to begin with..
as my "me" consciousness is not the origin of the power that moves creation. letting what will be, be, gives me the opportunity to be grateful for every moment rather than falsely believing there was ever really a choice when i grabbed the chocolate over the muffin.

my free will is but a prop on this grand stage of rediscovery.
i can't truly make anything happen or not-happen.
it is divinely ordained as is our very beings.

as far as suffering..
why are these "terrible" things 'allowed'?
because All is allowed by infinite love, and none is judged.

if i wanted to ride that 'brutal' funhouse ride this lifetime, then it would be allowed.
sure, the blood, guts and gore seem so real..but as you know, nothing temporal has reality unto itself.
satanic child abuse is allowed because there was an agreement in place to ride those rides of perpetrator and victim.
since these roles were agreed to, then there really IS no harm done, as All experience serves 'god's' purpose of experiencing every possibility.
in the gesture of taking responsibility for choosing to ride this ride, 'evil' is revealed to be a figment of the dream.

ALL 'choices' are in alignment wih the greatest good of all.