I'm going to break it down for you. Right or wrong, this is my reasoning:

1. A causally closed system either evolves towards the future deterministically, or it is in some part random. So that's the difference between determinism and indeterminism - indeterminism has some randomness.

2. Thus any time someone expresses an idea that's supposedly "incompatible with determinism", that's the same thing as saying "this idea requires randomness"

3. When libertarians say free will is incompatible with determinism, I hear "free will requires randomness"

4. I do not believe any coherent concept of free will requires randomness (and that's independent of whether or not I think randomness actually exists), and that's for one simple reason: if something is random, it's uncontrolled. If random stuff is happening in your brain or in your mind or in your agency, you don't control that any more than you control a fully determined brain / mind / agency (and it could be argued that the randomness gives you explicitly less control)

5. Therefore I believe that the libertarian concept of free will is incorrect (and again, that's independent of whether or not I think randomness actually exists). At this point I can either reframe free will to be more coherent according to my understand, or reject it altogether

6. I DID reject it altogether for many years. Perhaps you think that's a more coherent position, and perhaps it is.

7. Some years ago, something flipped, I don't recall what or why, but I came to accept the idea of a compatibilist emergent decision making process. Such a process doesn't rely on randomness (again, regardless of whether randomness actually exists). Through much abstract contemplation, most of which I can't put into words, that ended up with me thinking that some flavour of compatibilism is the right way to think about free will.

It's different conversations. — Patterner

Yeah free will conversations are mostly like that it seems. One of the primary factors that creates the conditions for talking past each other is disagreement on the determined / random dichotomy. People who believe that's a valid dichotomy having conversations with people who don't usually results in talking in circles. Most people don't even realise that's a major point of difference between their intuitions about these ideas.

I don't know what you're confused about. I never said you're a compatibilist. Pull yourself together man.

my idea of free will is not incompatible with the possibility that the universe is fully deterministic and they everything is causally inevitable. I do not believe I've wavered on that for a moment at any time in this conversation.

then don't discuss it

that's right, it's determinism and free will. Those are the two compatible things.

5 points for the first person who can explain why "x is compatible with y" is not synonymous with "x requires y"

you still haven't figured out what compatible means

patterners example was about determinism. If you're just asking about determinism, I think you know my answer. If you don't, can you reword your question to just explicitly be about determinism or indeterminism?

I'm agnostic about determinism. I lean slightly towards "our universe is deterministic, but in a way that's indistinguishable from indeterminism from the inside"

And I've tried to make clear that my position on free will is compatibilist in that it doesn't require determinism or indeterminism.

so you know I'm a compatibilist. I haven't changed my mind on that. So, knowing I'm a compatibilist, and knowing thus that my idea of free will does not require indeterminism, and does not require that it be ontologically true that, given the exact same conditions, something different could happen, does that answer your question?

My concern in just answering directly is that I'm not confident I understand what you mean. If you played ball with the rewind test, I would perhaps have been able to figure out what you mean, but without that I feel like I'm just guessing at what you mean.

I'm not talking about omniscience at all, just a being with a rewind button for our universe. If a brain in a vat dragon has the rewind button, then he's the god in question.

The difference between indeterminism and determinism is, given the exact same conditions, with determinism you get the exact same result every time. With indeterminism you don't. That's what this rewind test is all about. It's an easy to visualise way of setting up the same exact conditions.

So when you say "could in fact choose", I'm trying to figure out if you mean like in an indeterministic way, or if you mean some other way.

Because some people think you "could in fact choose" even if you get the same result every time from the same condition.

What does it mean to "in reality have a choice between the two" though? If you're the god of some universe, and you want to check if someone "in reality has a choice between the two", how would you check that if not doing the rewind test?

I say god because we can't check that sort of thing from inside the universe. It's gotta be tested from outside.

You mean under the exact same conditions, right? You said it has nothing to do with the rewind test, but... that's it for me. That's what I imagine as the "rewind test". A god pressing rewind on the VCR that is our universe, then pressing play and seeing what happens.

So this god sees me do one thing, presses rewind, so all relevant causal facts are the same, presses play and then he sees me do something different, right? That's what you mean by "allows me to have chosen differently", right? It means there's a non-zero probability that I actually do something different, despite being perfectly the same, the second time around. Yeah?

I think the biggest part of it is that my conscious experience doesn't seem to be epiphenomenal. I can make a concsious choice and my body can enact it. A lot of detreminists (maybe not most, idk) can be elimitavists about the mind and about choice and reasoning and decision making. I'm not an eliminativist. I'm a non-eliminativist reductionist - I think minds are real, I think consciousness really happens, I think conscious choice really happens, I think we really deliberate and consider "alterantive possibilities" (regardless of if those possibilities are ontologically real possibilities), and I guess in some sense I call all that crap free will.

do you believe that you could have chosen otherwise at an past juncture of choice-making — javra

If we do some rewind experiment, and it does end up with me making a different choice despite being under exactly the same conditions, that difference in choice isn't due to my will, it's due to randomness. I'm not saying, and haven't said, that free will is contingent on the possibility that i could rewind time and make a different choice.

It may be ontologically true that if time was rewound, quantum randomness allows for a different choice to be made. But I didn't call that "free will" at any point. That's just random. Random is random, random isn't human freedom.

Can you clarify what your here addressing — javra

The question you asked.

I do not believe I expressed anything about free will being contingent upon randomness.

I don't think so. Do you think so?

I think explicitly saying "it doesn't account for it" is exactly the opposite of me saying it's contingent on it. How could I say randomness doesn't account for it, but also think that it's contingent on randomness? I think you're interpreting these words in the exact wrong direction.

It doesn't Account for it. It's just there. It exists. Not everything that exists has to account for everything else that exists. I don't believe the chemical behaviour of Uranium accounts for the behaviour of birds in flight. They're just two things that happen to happen in the same universe.

IF there's quantum randomness, genuine randomness, then probably. If Many Worlds is the case, then at any point where quantum randomness might have produced different results for a particular choice, in Many Worlds there's some version of me that made each possible choice.

But I don't think that either of those things are required for free will.

that it's mostly irrelevant. It's an implementation detail that doesn't give us or deny us free will.

Ah sorry I didn't realize that's what you were asking for. A single event that's a hybrid.

Well, I'm a programmer, and as a programmer I can tell you, fundamentally if I wanted to develop a hybrid process, there's always a function call to the *random number generator* as one command, and the function that uses that random result as another one. So I don't necessarily think any *single event* is hybrid at that detailed level of description, no. Maybe it is, idk, I'm agnostic. I'm not sure it matters either way.

it works like this:

The Schrödinger equation evolves the wave function deterministically, and then at some moment it collapses the wave function randomly, with the probabilities of that random collapse determined by the shape of the wave function

I don't think it's paradoxical.

others disagree with this — javra

I'm not talking about what is the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics. I'm not making an ontological claim that this is true about the world. I'm talking about a concept - regardless of if that concept matches reality. Conceptually, this way of interpreting quantum mechanics is a hybrid.

I actually explicitly DON'T think that interpretation is likely to be correct. But I'm not worried about that, I'm just worried about giving you a suitable example to the question you asked. I think it is, regardless of the fact that I don't think the world actually works that way

Are you asking me for an example that I think really genuinely exists in real life? Because I don't think that was specified in the way you asked your question.

you should make a thread about what interpretation you think is correct

you asked for a hybrid. Its a hybrid. It is a process which is in part deterministic and in part random.

nobody is suggesting it's correct. It's an idea. The idea is an idea which matches the concept of a hybrid of determinism and randomness.

your explanation doesn't make it not an example though. It feels like you're trying to bait out some specific answer you have in mind. I don't know what that is so I'm not guessing the thing you want me to say.

I really don't understand why "quantum randomness" isn't a solid example of the question at the end of your post. That, to me, would be a hybrid.

i feel like what I said about quantum crap is a good example, no?

Because if I think incompatibilists understood free will incorrectly, because they understand it in such a way that it's incompatible with determinism, then it doesn't matter if I'm a determinist or not, it doesn't matter if the world is determinist or not. If they have the wrong concept of free will, then it's wrong, regardless of what I think about determinism or randomness separately.

Well, if you deny determinism then there is nothing to discuss when it comes to compatibilism. — MoK

I don't agree

how can free will be stated to be real if the act of deciding is of itself random — javra

Because the options aren't 100% determinism and 100% randomness. There's also the option of <some randomness>.

If quantum randomness is the case, then it's not like everything that happens in the world is completely random. Quantum events are governed by the Schrödinger equation, so even if the event isn't deterministic, the range of possibilities is deterministically decided, and it seems to be that the randomness that does exist in a quantum sense kind of averages out macroscopically.

So in such a view, it's not just a nonsense world where everything is random and nothing is causally connected to past states. There's still a sense of causality, with some random quantum wiggle room.

compatibilism is about the existence of free will in a deterministic world rather than a random world — MoK

Compatibilism is about conceiving of free will in such a way that it's compatible with determinism, which is distinct from an explicit claim that determinism is in fact the case.

I don't know, we don't have to focus on that, I said pretty much every compatibilist believes in free will, so it doesn't really matter that I can conceive of some weird edge case. We can just ignore that edge case. I'm happy to

Perhaps that just because I think free will is compatible with determinism doesn't mean I actually believe we do have free will.

As in, "there's a possible world where determinism is true and beings in that world have free will, this just doesn't happen to be one of them".

I'm certain the vast majority of compatibilists don't take a position like that though.

that's correct

I could probably be persuaded otherwise on some weird technicality but yeah, i think someone who calls themselves a compatibilist is almost certainly someone who believes humans have free will in this universe

your first question was how can the stance of compatibilism be compatible with randomness?

Why wouldn't it be? I don't know what's so unsatisfying about my answer to you, I feel like I'm answering pretty straight forward, but since that's not satisfying to you, let me know why you think a world with a little bit of randomness is necessarily contrary to a compatibilist idea of free will