Melkarion wrote:
On the other hand, it's hard to see how quantum mechanics alone proves that I could have chosen to post this in a nondetermined way, as most people who argue that people do, in fact, make free choices aren't arguing for sheer randomness, which is ultimately what you get if my choices are in fact determined by quantum mechanical values. QM predicts randomness, philosophical nondeterminism usually implies some sort of guided cognition, at least on the human level if not on some higher level (a possibly omniscient God, for example).
This is one of my favorite arguments for compatiblism. Our notion of "free will" seems to require that a free agent could have done otherwise than he did, and that something about the agent (personality characteristics, deliberation process, etc) was the cause of his action. If we take "could have done otherwise" to require indeterminism, and yet take causation to require determinism (the cause determines the effect), then free will is impossible. Yet since we go around using the term "free" to refer to all sorts of actions, and come to learn what "free" means (that is, acquire the very concept of freedom) by seeing such applications of it, this dilemma seems to illustrate that we've got a faulty philosophical analysis of this concept of free will. We obviously do have free will; if we didn't, we'd have no concept of it. But free will can't be like described above, because that's logically impossible.
So we've either got to adopt some understanding of causation which does not require determinism, some understanding of "could have done otherwise" which does not require indeterminism, or both. If quantum theory is right and the universe really is indeterministic, and yet we still say that one event causes another, then we've already got some notion of non-deterministic causation. But I think the other thing is equally important: "could have done otherwise" doesn't mean "was not determined to do so".
Determinism entails that, for any proposition about a person's future action "P", that "Necessarily (P, if P)" - that is to say that it is logically necessary that (a person does what they do, if in fact that is what they're going to do) - and that there is some fact about what that person's going to do. But what would negate free will would be "(Necessarily P), if P", which is to say that whatever it is a person did, they did necessarily, and could not have done otherwise. While spoken aloud both of these read as "everybody necessarily does what they do", where you place those parentheses makes a big difference. [](P <- P) is a very different statement from ([]P) <- P.
In more simple English, this just means that if a person did something freely, it must have been logically possible to do other than they did, had some contingent facts been different. The relevant contingent facts, of course, are the person's choices. So, a person acted freely if he would have done otherwise HAD HE CHOSEN TO DO SO. This pushes free will back to a psychological, rather than a metaphysical, question. Free will is self-control, just as consciousness is self-awareness. Do you have control over yourself? By that I mean, do you just do whatever you feel like, whether or not you WANT to feel like that, or do you have the ability to effectively regulate what desires you have and, more importantly, what desires move you to act?
For a personal example, I have compulsion issues; I'm formally diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder. I'm not a compulsive hand-washer or anything, but certain things which I know are trivial bother me immensely and I cannot bring myself to ignore them, no matter how much I want to. That is, say, some object in my living room is out of place, and I feel a strong desire to put it back; however, as this obsessiveness annoys my girlfriend, and I don't want to annoy her, I want to not feel that drive, or at least, I want to not act on it. But when I try to not act on it, and suppress that drive, the best I can do is like trying to steer a train off it's tracks: I become a wreck and break down. I'm unable to effectively steer in another direction. All I can do (in such cases) is follow the tracks, or crash.
To that extent, I have limited free will. I have freedom of action, in that I am able to do what I want to do; but I do not have freedom of will, in that I cannot bring myself to will what I want myself to will. "Choice" as I understand it is what you want to will; so I choose not to fixate on misplaced objects in my living room and, despite that choice, I still do, and thus I am unable to do other than what I do even if I choose otherwise - I lack, in such cases, freedom of will. And all of this is completely irrelevant to determinism or indeterminism; this may seem like a deterministic issue, but it's epistemologically possible ("possible, for all we know") that the universe is indeterministic, e.g. if quantum theory is correct, and yet still here I am with these issues, indeterminism be damned. Free will has everything to do with psychology and nothing to do with metaphysics.