Unfortunately arguments about free will frequently become thickly tangled webs of sloppy language use and poor word choice decisions. I'm more of the Wittgenste

Unfortunately arguments about free will frequently become thickly tangled webs of sloppy language use and poor word choice decisions. I'm more of the Wittgensteinian school (and that of Schopenhauer, for that matter) that simply examines the common language use cases of "free" and "free will." Thinking about this deeply, you may find that most people use "free" in cases in which they mean, "not restricted," as in, "free as a bird," "free to speak my mind," etc..., in which case we aren't speaking of "freedom to," but rather "freedom from." And here we can think of all sorts of instances in which society is actively trying to shed restrictions on freedom rather than thinking of new ways to create freedoms (and even then, creating freedom is typically loosening certain identified constraints, but only after those constraints are identified). If we examine the "freedom to" case, we get confused by running into an infinitely regressing causal nexus: "Sure, I can do what I will, but can I WILL what I will?" and so on. A blind alley that doesn't have an answer or practical purpose in answering. Hopefully it is plain as day that our actions aren't stochastically random and are ostensibly NOT anything like the results of a random number generator. At the same time the dichotomy in our everyday actions between determined and fully-undetermined also seems off the mark. At best we can say that we live in a world filled with complex relationships between what restricts us and what allows us to do what we desire, and that those desires themselves change based on a number of mutating social and natural factors. Now, if we turn to mathematics and accept its limitations and presumptions, then I challenge anybody to find a better logical or mathematical formulation for "proving" free will than the negative definition "not determined by prior events." It seems anyway that the negative definition "freedom from" jives better with our intuition than its baffling positive brother "freedom to."