I see often what in my view is a conflation of freedom and free will. Freedom can be associated with randomness, or enabled by it, in a way that is conducive to

I see often what in my view is a conflation of freedom and free will. Freedom can be associated with randomness, or enabled by it, in a way that is conducive to establishing a workable model. But when _will_ comes into play, it implies that a free choice does not only reflect a choice of action but also of result. Will is fundamentally not about the action but about its objective. Therefore, it is incompatible with randomness in the sense that if randomness permeates not only my actions but also their effects, then I am free to choose between randomness and randomness. So while freedom can be associated with unpredictability it does not really amount to much in that case. On the other hand if we focus on predictability and have that as condition of will then determinism permeates our choices, so will becomes just a projection of laws, their backpropagation on an arbitrary decision model. We can move to statistical interpretations of the kind that our will is not deterministic but a will of rational expectations etc. but my intuitive feeling is that the separation of intentionality from causality is like a middle ground between two wrongs. At the end of the day, I believe this paradox is the outcome of what I call “a sock’s theory of the foot”. Fundamentally, if free will requires both causality-determinism and free choice, I believe it’s only feasible in a model of timeless causality where we can move the dial on the determinism of decisions or intentions or results or all of them at the same “time”. We are deterministic illusions of freedom of timeless intentional agents. Edited:for clarity of timelessness argument