I don't understand that response. Why did the agent just do that? Because he was being agent-ish? Is that the non-causal Ginet line?

Well, the agent is causal. To ask 'why' the agent did something free is asking the wrong sort of question. At a point there will be a shoulder shrug and something like "well, they were being a free agent."

Because of magical gravity-ness of course.

You are admitting that you have less than this?

I have a formula that describes gravity:

Fg = G (m1*m2)/(d^2)

Name your formula. Feel free to write a book to describe freedom from prior or present outside cause.

Describe freedom without randomness.

Read Schoppenhauer. Willfull does not equal free-willfull.

(ignore senilia, he did kind of lose a grip)

Actually, I think that 'willful' qua free-willful is the only meaningful sense. I consider Frankfurt's secondary preferences to be an incoherent concept.

Frankfurt notwithstanding, I mean, specifically Schoppenhaur's rantings on will. I find them convincing, yet incomplete (and definitaly overemphasising biological differences between people), but the kernal of truth still exists.

We are driven by will, and our will is not free from the past, to badly paraphrase and nutshell a nuanced argument that Schoppenhauer made.

Nice play though. I will re-read Frankfurt's alternative possibilities. I thank you for this. I like reading.

I don't know if it was taken out of one book by Frankfurt, but in the Pereboom anthology I have from class there are two Frankfurt articles, the first is the rejection of the principle of alternate possibilities and the second one is the second-order stuff and the concept of a person. Of course you can read both. If you lean compatibilist it's pretty good reading, if you don't you will recoil.

The secondary preferences isn't in the alternative possibilities paper. Is it in the 'al dente' paper? Either way, to a decision theoriest, "secondary" preferences makes no sense. Furthermore, the fact that one's preferences 'luckily' happen to 'match up' with what one is forced to do is a VERY odd conception of responsibility IMO.

I have "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility" and "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person" for Frankfurt, the second has the second order volition discussion, al dente is Pereboom "Determinism Al Dente" (al dente as in hard determinism).

Stochastic is just the Greek word for random. Random events must follow the laws of randomness, to paraphrase you, is a silly statement to make.

Undeterminable is not the same as indeterminate.

I believe I have made this claim often enough. Durka, there are arguments against my view (undeterminable vs. indeterminate) that I am aware of, but I do not particularly enjoy enjoy arguing with myself. I inevitably win these arguments with myself, so I need a counterpoint that is outside of me, so I can potentially learn or change my mind (or at the very least take a more nuanced view of the problem).

"Not completely caused" requires some mechanism in which cause is completely suspended on some level, I think.

First, you're totally misrepresenting what it means to call something stochastic. It doesn't just mean 'random.' It means probabilistic in a certain sense.

But, why do you keep asking me to explain the mechanism? I've already said that I can't do that...but so what?

Physicists can't explain the mechanism of all sorts of things that people regularly believe is the case. (Ie, explain the apparent 'action at a distance' of split particles)

Stochastic = elemental probabilism = randomness. The "certain sense" of probabilistic means elementarily random within certain constraints, and nothing more. This is opposed to random as undetermined, which is not randomness at all.

Mostly, because it irritates you. I have a younger brother. I was going to go with "I'm not touching you."

Also, because it takes you to a dead end. Without a mechanism or even a possible mechanism, your arguments tend to go poof.

Have you even read this thread?

I've said the entire time that I can't prove that libertarianism is true (but nor can the determinist). My arguments are really only about the incoherence of compatibilism. Other than that I'm only offering concepts and motivations of the libertarian.

How the HELL did this thread reach this many pages?

It's one of the biggest topics in the history of philosophy and thought...why are you surprised?

Of course I have.

Then the original poster finally has his answer:

Durka believes in free will because he likes believing in free will.

FWIW, there is a difference between lack of proof and lack of reasonable suspicious evidence.

Lack of epistemological proof exists for everything. Try to prove that gravity, as a thing-in-itself exists. I mean exists, as opposed to "apples fall to earth because they are of the earth" AND every other possible explanation of stuff falling toward other stuff. You can't PROVE it, but you can show some evidence for your side of the argument.

You can lay out the reasons for your reasonable suspicion. I believe that philosophers often do this. Come to think of it, I think that all of the great, and most of the middling ones do this. At least the ones who pass the test of time.*

There is not really any point to a philosopher not pushing at least one boundary of truthiness, junior college professors notwithstanding.

*From time to time, a philosopher says "nuh uh" without making a counter positive claim, and has their 15 minutes of fame.

I've already explained why there's no 'evidence' for this issue in either direction: it's not an empirical question.

You do realize that this is a non-answer and is, at best, not even related to my post, right?

its gotta be up there for longest (LC) thread ever lol.

Probably because your posts are often incomprehensible at best and gibberish at worst.

What the hell are you even trying to say?

Oh, I know. I didn't think some folks here had it in them to duke it out for so long. Most people would have given up by the time this thread got past 25 pages.

Depending on where my turns threw you out of the pickup truck:

1. You, Durka, are possibly correct that there is no direct evidence of free will. However, you have decided to believe in free will. I do not believe you made this choice lightly, or without some reason for the decision. Stating the reasons for your choice is different than offering a proof. Failure to provide the reasons for your choice seems silly to me. You have stated elsewhere that atheists are silly for picking sides in an undeterminable question, yet you pick a side here?!? I would enjoy knowing where the difference lies.

2. "Stochastic" means random!!! An aside: Stochastic processes (or whatever other study you are hoping to bring up) are processes involving systems of random variables that interact on some level.
There are two ways of thinking about random variables:
a) They are truly random. In other words, they are both undetermined by cause (and obviously would also be undeterminable by people)
b) They seem random because they have not been determined by people (and maybe can't be), but are determined through cause.
I am positing that there must be a truly random event for your free will to exist.
Feel free to add a c) to my list to prove me wrong. I would enjoy learning about c), and I am sure that others would as well.

I've done this. I think that we are responsible for what we do. My intuition is that we have a libertarian sense of freedom. I don't know how...but that's what it is. If someone were to prove that determinism is true then I'm a hard determinist and there's no responsibility, value, choice, etc.. I think that the compatibilist/soft determinists positions are incoherent. Since I can't prove the former, I work on the latter.

Totally beside the point. I can grant your definition for the sake of argument and still assert that there's a difference between indeterminate and 'random.'

Paraphrasing you: "I prefer to think that total and pure responsibility exists on some level for people. Therefore, I choose to believe in free will." You also believe that compatibalism is internally inconsistent.

Not at all. It is the point. If something is uncaused, there must exist some random element. The question is where do you place the random/uncaused element...

Why do you think that uncaused = random?

That's not what random means. Random doesn't mean "uncaused." There are all sorts of random events which we think are causal. Whether a Uranium atom decays at any given time is random but there's an underlying physical cause. This is a basic conceptual error. This is why we distinguish a class of events that are "stochastic" which implies causal vs merely random which may not.

This is why your definition is simply wrong. You were trying to define stochastic = random but the problem is your understanding of randomness is wrong.