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There's four states. Randomness vs deterministic. And then within randomness the possibility to influence outcomes vs none. A purely deterministic mind is a mo

There's four states. Randomness vs deterministic. And then within randomness the possibility to influence outcomes vs none. A purely deterministic mind is a movie. You watch it. There's no way to influence the outcome or it wouldn't be deterministic. You're just a long for the ride. A non deterministic mind could be nothing more than randomness with no ability to influence outcomes still which makes it little different to a movie. Again you're just a long for the ride even if the ride has random events. But non deterministic and the ability to actually influence outcomes? That's the intuition I suspect most people have for free will right there.

layer8 2y ago
Influence implies causation, and hence the opposite of randomness. I see randomness vs. determinism similar to a parallelogram of forces. Every behavior can be divided into a deterministic component and a randomness component. But that’s the only two components there are. And free will doesn’t fare better with the randomness component than with the deterministic component. Randomness means you are subject to an arbitrary choice. Influence is a causation arrow from you to the thing you influence (like a choice you make). But it says nothing about the arrows pointing to you.