This paper — Benkei

Thanks. It indeed appears to be a good place to start with Kane's theory of ultimate responsibility and SFAs ("self forming actions"), in order to learn how he's dealing with the problem from luck.

To base free will on the mere fact that not all processes are predictable is even a worse case of not understanding what we're talking about in my view. — Benkei

Sure, but who does that?

My first red flag with Robert Kane is therefore his equivocation of indeterminism and chance. That means he appears to be firmly in the territory of epistemological indeterminism which simply isn't interesting for the reason above. I'll read his full paper later but that's just a first few remarks to clarify my position based on his first two pages. — Benkei

Tell me what paper you're reading first. I'm not an advocate of Kane's libertarian conception of free will, myself, but as I've suggested, there are some good point that he is making while he is addressing the problem from luck. So, I'd be interested to hear your objections to his take. They may even coincide with mine.

My argument is distinct from the luck argument I guess or Robert Kane misrepresents it in his paper. — Benkei

What paper? Kane has written dozens of papers and, maybe, half a dozen books on this topic.

Newton's first law says that an item will remain in its state of motion (which is interpreted to mean its velocity does not change) unless acted upon by a (net) external force. So the ball in a perfect, stationary position at the top will remain in its state of motion, which is stationary. It will not roll down. Hence the solution is non-Newtonian and must be rejected. It satisfies the second but not the first law. — andrewk

I think your construal of the first law might be too strong, or too literal, and may make it inconsistent with the second law. This first law often is seen as a special case of the second, where the net force is zero. Thus construed, the force being applied to a mass at T only is relevant to its state of motion at T. Thus, the fact that the net force being applied to the mass at T is zero ought not to entail that the state of motion will remain unchanged at a later time but only that the rate of change of its velocity is zero at T. This is quite obvious when the mass moves within a variable field of force. Granted, it is less obvious in the case where a mass is instantaneously at rest in a variable field of force at a point where the force vanishes. This is the sort of case that allows for bifurcations in phase space. But if an overly strict construal of Newton's first law might dictate that a particle would remain stuck at such a point of vanishing force when it arrives there with a null velocity (so as to conveniently remove the bifurcation in phase space) then this construal of Newton's first law would also have the very unfortunate consequence that it makes it inconsistent with the second law in other cases. How would you account, consistently with such a strict construal of the first law, for the fact that the point mass does not remain at rest, in the case where the field of force varies at that point as a function of time and hence is null only for an instant?

I suppose if we send it sliding up with exactly the correct initial velocity, and no touching it after we release it, all higher derivatives of displacement will be zero once it is on its way up. It follows that it will stop at the top rather than continuing down the other side, because it will have zero velocity and zero horizontal force on it at that time. — andrewk

Yes, I wasn't picturing the ball to keep on going to the other side. Rather, it reaches a bifurcation point in phase space. It is equally physically possible (with undefined probabilities) that it will stay at rest, or immediately start moving towards an arbitrary direction.

The higher derivatives would have to be nonzero for the ball to pass the cime and go down the other side. If it stops there, there are no discontinuities because Jounce and Jerk were already zero on the way up.

The jounce wasn't zero on the way up. It was constant and equal to 1/6. It will drop to zero only if the ball thereafter remains at rest at the apex (which is only one physical possibility among others).

Comments suggest to me that the cause of the sudden spontaneous motion is a concealed fourth derivative jounce. So it is like the ball is set down on the apex in the middle of just being about to snap. — apokrisis

Well, what is 'concealed' (or worth paying attention to) is the discontinuity in the jounce. But I am usure that this discontinuity can be construed as the cause of the spontaneous motion of the ball after the time interval where it has been at rest and was subject to no net force. What may be instructive, and maybe dispel some of the weirdness of the case, is to consider the limiting case of the effect of a small horizontal momentum P being transferred to the ball bearing (such as the impact from a single molecule of air) where this initial momentum transfer P tends towards zero. The integrated time that it takes for the sphere to thereafter fall along the surface in the radial direction where it has initially been pushed will tend towards a finite time T as P tends towards zero. This is why, in a sense, we may say that the symmetry breaking event requires no initial perturbation at all.

So I don't think this case does what it at first seems to do, which is to generate breaking symmetry out of nothing. The breaking symmetry is always there in the discontinuous Jounce, which we have simply assumed. The plausible physical solution is that which has smooth displacement and all derivatives are always zero - ie symmetry doesn't break. — andrewk

That's interesting. I hadn't thought about the implications of that. But I am unsure about the implications that it has for symmetry breaking understood as a nondeterministic bifurcation in phase space. Imagine the ball bearing being sent sliding up the slope of this surface with just the right velocity such that it ends up being at rest at the apex. Granted, there will occur a discontinuity in the jounce at the time when the ball comes to rest. How are this process, or its time reversal, not both plausible physical possibilities (in any arbitrary radial direction)? And if they all are plausible physical possibilities, then it would appear that there is a bifurcation in the phase space of this system. (Granted, in a 'real world' implementation, it's still vanishingly improbable that the ball would ever be placed precisely at the apex, and laid there completely at rest.)

OK. I don't find assigning causality a productive exercise, so I'll leave the field to those that do. — andrewk

That's strange. I would have thought assigning causality to relevant agents, events, or states of affairs, is quite productive (pragmatically) whenever something occurs, we don't know why it occurred, but we would be interested in seeing to it that such an event occurs again, or in preventing it from reoccurring, for instance.

So long as people can't wrap their head around the idea that saying "indeterminism is necessary for free will to exist", really means that everything they decide is totally random as a result, we'll continue to have these discussions. — Benkei

The idea that lack of causal determination of actions (by laws of nature and prior events and/or states of affair) entails mere randomness is generally acknowledged as the luck objection to libertarianism. The problem of luck is well known and acknowledged by contemporary incompatibilist libertarians. Robert Kane, for instance, has a fairly sophisticated response to it, which, albeit not being entirely successful, on my view, has some good positive features.

On the other hand, although compatibilist accounts of free will don't have to deal with the luck objection specifically, they have problems of their own. They must respond to the main arguments for incompatibilism such as Jaegwon Kim's causal exclusion argument or Peter van Inwagen's consequence argument. (On my view, dispositionalist accounts of compatibilist free will also suffer from a third problem which is that they tend to narrow the scope of freedom more narrowly than is required to account for our normal ascriptions of personal responsibility to mature human agents). So, it's not sufficient to acknowledge that some amount of causal determination is required for dealing with the problem of luck. In order to secure a satisfactory compatibilist account of free will, one also has to show how autonomous rational and moral agency isn't threatened by determinism just as much (although in different ways) as it would be by indeterminism.

Making the generic cause to be about the impossibility of placing a ball with arbitrary accuracy on an apex is both another way of saying the same thing, but not quite as strong a version as focusing on the impossibility of eliminating triggering fluctuations. — apokrisis

I rather like the idea of a generic cause of the symmetry breaking mechanism. The generic cause, in this case, is the (practically inobservable) fluctuation background that serves as the explanation of the emergence of the indeterministic law that governs the (practically) observable events of symmetry breaking. There being such a generic cause doesn't entail that there is a law on account of which a contrastive explanation can be given as to why the ball fell in one rather than another direction, or fell immediately rather than at a slightly later time. There may be no such law, and no such contrastive cause. (There may however be a emergent law specifying the half-life of a ball's staying poised before starting to fall).

That is my view. The ball fell because when it was released by whatever was holding it on the apex, its centre of mass was not exactly above the point of contact with the dome, so it started falling. — andrewk

Have you looked at the paper linked to in the OP, though? The case has been specially contrived such that even if the ball is placed exactly at the apex, and with no initial velocity at all, then, consistently with Newton's laws of motion, it could either remain stationary or start falling towards an arbitrary radial direction with a distance from the apex: r(t) = (1/144) (t – T)^4 (where T is the time when it would spontaneously start moving in the absence of any net force at that time).

Do you buy his story? — apokrisis

Not really, because it assumes metaphysical realism: the idea that there might conceivably be an external God's eye view of the world that amounts to a complete description of it, including its laws and causal relations. I think Kant has shown this not to a be possible account of our (or of any conceivable) empirical world. But this case remains an instructive mathematical possibility. I'll say a bit more later on.

I'm not sure I understand your point. If the particle is perfectly balanced on top of the dome, then there it shall remain until some net force moves it. — LD Saunders

That's fairly intuitive, right? Yet, the mathematical analysis of the case contradicts this intuition. Look at the equation of motion of the ball bearing. At any time when it is at the apex, both the net force being applied on it, and its acceleration, are zero, as they should be, or else this equation would not be a solution to Newton's laws of motion. And yet, also, the ball bearing is radially being displaced away from the apex a finite distance after only a finite time. It needs not be the case that, as our intuition about causality seems to demand, that the cause (viz., the net force) begins operating before the effect (viz., the acceleration) starts being manifested. In this idealized Newtonian case, they both come into existence together (i.e. at any time t > T) without there being some other physical cause that accounts for the moment in time T when the ball starts moving away from the apex (with only an initial null acceleration at t=T, and at all t <= T).

All I can come up with is limited free will. We can't choose what we want but we can choose how we satisfy our wants. — TheMadFool

I don't quite see how one can consistently hold that view. If there is some generic end that you want to achieve, but that you can achieve in a variety of different ways, then you are going to do it in the way that you want to achieve it (after having pondered over the alternatives ways in which you can achieve it). But then, in that case, by your own premise, you will not be able to chose how (or in what way) to satisfy your generic want either.

But now if you time reverse the story, you still only can arrive infinitesimally close to the apex, not actually perched exactly on it. — apokrisis

No so. What you are saying would be true for any number of smooth convex domes, including spherical domes. But the particular shape being discussed in the paper that you linked to in the OP, referred to as "the dome" and defined radially as the surface with height h = -(2/3g) r^(3/2), where g is the vertical acceleration of gravity, is such that the equation of motion for a small spherical mass being perched at rest at the apex at t = 0 admits of two different sorts solutions. The first solution describes the mass remaining at rest at all times. The second class of solutions have the mass moving away from the apex with radial positon r(t) = (1/144) (t – T)^4, where T is an arbitrary time and t <= T; and r(t) = 0 at any time t before T.

So, in the time reversal scenario, when the ball is sent sliding up towards the apex with just the right speed, it doesn't slow down asymptotically as a function of time. It slows down to rest in a finite time and then (consistently with Newton's laws) remains at rest for an arbitrary amount of time at the apex before sliding back down in the same, or another arbitrary, radial direction.

If "the dome" didn't have this very specific shape, then, the equation of motion of the sphere instantaneously at rest at the apex, at a time, would (in most cases) be deterministic. It would necessarily remain at rest at all times. In the case of "the dome", indeterministic outcomes are consistent with Newton's laws of motion even in the idealized case where there is no initial disturbance at all away form an initial state of instantaneous rest! That's what makes "the dome" (Norton's) such an interesting shape.

How so? If the ball has mass, it has inertia. A push is required to set it moving. — apokrisis

Not so, as I've already explained to Bitter. The shape of the dome is such that, as the ball is getting infinitesimally close to the apex, the second derivatives of its horizontal motion tends towards zero; and hence, also, the horizontal component of the force.

If the net force acting on the ball bearing was zero, why would the ball move? On the other hand, can a ball sit on another ball without moving? Or must it eventually move as a chance event? — Bitter Crank

That's because of a specific queer mathematical property of the shape of the dome and how the system interacts with the vertical force of gravity. At the initial time when the ball gets rolling, its speed is zero. But the first derivative of its speed (its acceleration) also is zero. Hence, the force, at the instant in time when it is initially at rest, also is zero. This is why no force at all is required to set it in motion.

Another way to view it is to imagine the time reversal of the process where the ball is being sent rolling up the dome with just enough speed so that it will end up at rest at the apex, after a finite time. Thereafter -- and this is unmysterious -- it may remain at rest for an arbitrary period of time. If this is a valid solution to Newton's equations, then, so is the time reversal of this process where it remains at rest for some time and then "spontaneously" starts rolling (with an initial instantaneous null acceleration).

What's interesting about the dome is that the ball's starting from rest, and, after a finite time, rolling in an arbitrary direction, is a valid solution to Newton's laws of motion. So, in that case, there would be no need for as much as an infinitesimal nudge in order to set the ball in motion. It could start moving (consistently with Newton's laws) in any direction at a moment in time when the net force being applied on it is was null. Newton's laws of motion also leave it open when it would start moving, after having been at rest for an arbitrary length of time.

I think quantum wave collapses are best viewed as events that lack a contrastive cause, just like this idealized Newtonian example exemplifies. But this idea of events that happen (in some sort of symmetry breaking way) without being caused to so happen also may be the best construal of events that are determined by microscopic (symmetry breaking) causes where those causes simply are irrelevant to the emergent macroscopic dynamics that we are interested in.

Latest news... — Proto

If there are credible claims by people who knew Ford and Kavanaugh that both of them lied under oath, they should both be held accountable for their lies. It would be unfair to deny Kavanaugh the opportunity to sit on the Supreme Court, and not penalize Dr Ford as well. She should also be denied the opportunity to sit on the Supreme Court.

I don't know what all they will investigate, but from the POV of the administration, the less of a fishing expedition the better. — Bitter Crank

Their move is certainly effective. In the wake of the news of the tight grip that the White House is determined to exert on the investigation, the shares for Kavanaugh's being confirmed, on the Predictit prediction market have jumped up 10 points (from about 61 cents to about 71 cents). The reason they still remain as low as 71 cents, I conjecture, is because there is an expectation that the ambivalent Senators (Flake, Collins and Murkowski) might still vote "no" if they will feel the FBI investigation to have been a sham despite Kavanaugh having been "cleared".

From reports I've been reading, the FBI investigation will be extremely half-assed. — Maw

'Half-assed' is an understatement. It will be hundredth-assed. The scope of the investigation is defined by the White House while "White House counsel Don McGhan, who is the administration's leading advocate for Kavanaugh's confirmation, is overseeing the probe for the President and working closely with Senate Republican leaders." -- CNN's Ariane de Vogue, Dana Bash, Evan Perez and Kevin Liptak.

They've already decided that Kavanaugh's drinking history isn't part of the probe at all. Senator Lindsey Graham expressed what he views the proper scope of the probe to be: "They're going to Mark Judge, did you ever see Brett Kavanaugh drug women or engage in gang rape. I think that's going to be the focus of it."

wouldn't Mark Judge who was watching, take the key in his pocket? Would he leave the key there, so that she could somehow escape? — Agustino

You are assuming that they locked the door to prevent her from escaping. They may have locked the door so that nobody would walk in on them unexpectedly. They were drunk and may have expected, or hoped, that she would go along with their game with just a minimum of duress. Taking the key out might have been an unnecessarily threatening gesture (assuming there was a key at all; it may have been an interior spring door lock that you merely twist or depress). According to Ford, they were laughing a lot. Not all rapes or attempted rapes are premeditated.

I don’t know if it’s something that every conservative would rule for. — Michael

That's interesting. But this article doesn't make clear if there is anything about Kavanaugh that could lead us to expect that he would decide such as case differently than any other conservative judge.

There’s also an upcoming court case that is concerned with double jeopardy and federal pardons (i.e can you subsequently be charged for the equivalent state crime). — Michael

Would that be a case where Trump doesn't necessarily need that it be Kavanaugh specifically, but he needs that a fifth conservative seat be filled ASAP?

It seems tactically and politically stupid from where I'm standing but perhaps I'm missing an angle I'm not considering here. — Benkei

Maybe the Republicans don't mind so much if it isn't Kavanaugh who gets the seat. But Trump minds very much since Kavanaugh is the only one who asserted that a sitting President can't be indicted and that he ought to be able to fire at will a prosecutor investigating him. And the Republicans are bound not to make Trump and his base too angry.

I do think it's odd that Kavanaugh is so hostile to the idea of an FBI probe into these supposedly false accusations. — Erik

When he was pressed on this issue, he and the other Republicans appeared almost schizophrenic. On the one hand, they were arguing that the Senate handling of the allegations against him amounted to nothing more than a devious McCartyan show trial, and that the politicized process was more painful to Kavanaugh than living Hell. But when the possibility of a FBI handling of those matters was raised, Kavanaugh was insisting that he was delighted to being subjected to this process before the Senate committee, and that the very wise and respectable committee members were much better equipped for handling those delicate matters than the bumbling and clueless FBI.

:gasp: Woah. — StreetlightX

To be fair, he's always been a very loose cannon.

The partisanship seems to be owned wholly by the republicans by refusing to call Mark Judge to testify or to have the FBI look into Brett's moral character in more depth. — Benkei

The American Bar Association is now calling for the nomination process to be put on hold, and for the FBI to investigate. And Alan Dershowitz, of all people, is seconding their motion.

Odd. Never heard of that. Innocent me... — Baden

Neither had I, regarding the "devils triangle" thing. I heard of it when it was reported that the Wikipedia disambiguation page for this unusual phrase had been recently edited in order to make the definition match Kavanaugh's testimony. The source of the edit was traced to a Congressional IP. So, it looks like a Republican staffer Googled the phrase "devil's triangle", was directed to the Wikipedia page, saw that it referred to a sexual act involving two men and a woman, though this was rather inconvenient for Kavanaugh, and edited it to make it refer to a drinking game instead.

Something I've noticed, which may not be very significant but nevertheless is interesting: When asked about the "devil's triangle" mentioned in his calendar, Kavanaugh testified that it's a reference to a drinking quarter game. But Wikipedia and the Urban Dictionary say that it's a threesome involving two men and a woman (also, an obscure board game, and a synonym for the Bermuda Triangle). There appears to be zero Google hits for "devil's triangle" being used to refer to a drinking game and that don't relate to Kavanaugh's testimony. Of course it's entirely possible that it was a local and temporary idiom.

Also related to high-school slang: one Senator asked Kavanaugh about the "Renate Alumni" reference in his yearbook. The Senator was inquiring about the meaning of the expression. Kavanaugh already had apologized to the woman about that. But now he was implying the expression didn't even mean anything of a sexual nature and he was scolding the Senator, disingenuously suggesting that the Senator himself was trying to sully the woman's reputation rather than prompt Kavanaugh to acknowledge (as he had already done when he apologized to her!) that his bragging was rather offensive.

Here is the exchange that I mentioned above, between Grassley and Feinstein (and later, Cornyn) regarding the leaks and the Republican conspiracy theory regarding those leaks. This part of the hearings is now up on the CNN YouTube channel.

These are not incompatible beliefs based on 36 year old memories from teenage years.
which after all this testimony is really all we still have. — Rank Amateur

I think Ford might agree with you but Kavanaugh wouldn't. It's conceivable that things happened roughly as Ford remembers them and Kavanaugh was too drunk to remember any of it. It's also conceivable that something happened to Ford, in a party where Judge and Kavanaugh were present, which she now misremembers in some fashion. However, Kavanaugh isn't allowing either one of those two possibilities. He is rather arguing that, whatever happened to Ford, he couldn't possibly have been present to the party she is remembering (or misremembering). This is why his take on the events require more of a conspiratorial mindset to make sense of in light of both of their admittedly imperfect memories.

Looks like a pointed rebuke of Graham's hyperbolic and unjustified rant. And an indication he's going to go "no". — Baden

It could be read both ways. He may be signaling to Kavanaugh that his forthcoming "no" vote is a prudent statement of uncertainty rather than an indictment of him; or signaling to Ford that his forthcoming "yes" vote doesn't entail that he categorically takes Kavanaugh's word over her's either. He may also still be undecided.

That's the Republican spin, but Feinstein was directed by Ford not to release the information and there's no evidence she did. Also, according to Ford, her friends knew about it and word could have got out to the media from there. She had a journalist come snooping around her house just before she went public. We don't know. — Baden

Yes. Grassley was attempting to corner Feinstein, asking her how it might be possible that the press got a hold of the confidential letter if Feinstein or her staff didn't leak it, and if Ford merely talked to close friends about the allegations. But Feinstein told Grassley that the letter itself never was leaked, to her knowledge, and only some of the things Ford confided to her friends did. Thereafter, Ford began being hounded by the press. This is when Grassley fell silent. The Republican strategy to blame the Demograts and pretend not to be hostile to Ford at all was misfiring.

(On edit: Both Grassley and Cornyn were involved in this exchange)

Over the last few hours the Republican Senators have been hammering the point that the Democrats who call for an FBI investigation are dishonest and hypocritical since they ought to have called for an investigation as soon as Ford brought her allegations to Sen Feinstein. But then Sen Blumenthal referred to Kavanaugh's complaint that the whole thing is a conspiracy engineered by the Democrats; isn't he thus implying that Ford's allegations are politically motivated? Kavanaugh replied that he isn't blaming her but rather blaming the Democrats who violated her request for confidentiality. So, it appears that Sen Feinstein, and whoever else she shared Ford's allegations with, behaved unconscionably when they *did* respect their pledge of confidentiality and also when they *didn't* keep the allegations confidential anymore after Ford herself came out following the leaks.

On edit: And then, minutes ago, there was an interesting exchange between Feinstein and Grassley where Grassley revealed that he was quite confused regarding the nature of the leaks. He got caught into the contradictions of his theory and fell silent. The Republican conspiracy theory seems to be falling appart, under close scrutiny, but I don't think this is going to have much of an impact on the outcome of those messy public hearings. There is presently a huge rally for Kavanaugh's side on the Predictic prediction market.

A question of tactics then? I dunno, I think the corruption is too deep-set; I'm not convinced tinkering is the right way to go. We've had literal centuries of that. — StreetlightX

I'm doing what I can to separate the wheat from the shaff. @Aaron R attempted this also in a thread on scholasticism a little while ago. Any kind of a "return" to Aristotle, to Kant, to Frege, to Sellars, or to anyone else, must be done with discernement, of course. But it's not just a question of tactics. @Christoffer offered a defense of hard determinism above. While it concludes that free will is an illusion and that determinism is true, his post can be glossed, it seems to me, as an argument that the Sellarsian 'manifest image' is false while the 'scientific image' is true.

I don't think most contemporary compatibilist attempts to reconcile the two images are successful, but I agree with you that the main impediment to the attempted reconciliation is a thin disembodied conception of the self. Maybe some elements of this thin conception already were inchoate in Aristotle and other pre-modern religious thinkers, as you argue. But they have been greatly buttressed and entrenched into contemporary scientifically informed thinking as a result a the movement away from Aristotle, and from scholasticism, which has been in part propelled by the rise of the mechanistic conception of the natural world. In a way, as a result of this, the wheat has been buried under the shaff.

The only way forward is out, to reject even the terms of the debate, let alone the answers to it. — StreetlightX

I agree that the thinness of the disembodied subject, or of the rational soul, is a big part of the problem. On the Aristotelian conception of agency, the subject-agent is a rational animal, essentially embodied and encultured. Since the thorny questions of rational, moral and political autonomy, determinism and responsibility, can be discussed in the context where the thickness of the subject is acknowledged, I don't think those discussions are fruitless. Also, one must grant to the proponent of a crude scientism (e.g. Cartesian materialist), or of a naïve Cartesian dualism, some of her terms if only to be able to draw out the problems inherent to her view and then propose better terms, or better uses of those terms. (Oftentimes, it seems to me, it's not the terms themselves that are at fault but rather semi-technical uses made of them that import philosophical prejudice into the discourse and obscures the nuances of their ordinary usages).

Cool. Yeah, people who haven't looked into the history of 'free will' - i.e almost everyone - don't tend to realize what a limited, historically shallow, and conceptually empty idea it is. It was essentially a device for self-loathing Christians to address the problem of evil and subject human beings to the masochism of its sister-concept, God's grace. Its theological fetters have largely fallen away, and now the idea is rootless and even more nonsensical than ever. — StreetlightX

Old bad ideas die off and newer equally bad ideas take hold. What is becoming fashionable nowadays is to claim that autonomous rational agency and responsibility (either personal or collective, moral or political) are illusions that are being dispelled by cognitive sciences and that unconscious neurophysiological processes are the genuine sources of our choices and actions. It is being alleged that we don't know what our motives are and only science will enlighten us on the best way to pull our own strings. That seems to me more incoherent, and possibly more dangerous, than the rather innocuous religious accounts and myths that rather clumsily attempt to explain how or why animals such as us can be rationally and morally autonomous.

Science's mechanical view of nature is what has been at issue. Freewill just becomes the most convincing argument against the modern understanding of the mind being a product of machine-like information processes. — apokrisis

Yes, I think the third-rate literature that @StreetlightX deplores, because of the confused ways in which it problematizes 'the freedom of the will', can be viewed as a reductio of the attempt to account for agency and practical knowledge from a third-personal disengaged view on the material process of decision making. If agency rather is viewed as a natural (and social) phenomenon that can only be disclosed as intelligible from an empathetic and engaged participatory perspective, then there is nothing problematic in asserting that the will is a power that is being freely exercised by mature and responsible fellow rational agents.

I don't doubt this, but I think a good first step is in putting to question the very vocabulary involved;: freedom, but no 'will' please. This I think would have at least a primarily disorienting effect, which, given just how entrenched the idea is, would have value in itself. — StreetlightX

I find it useful to speak of the will and of the intellect as distinct faculties albeit ones that a rational animal can only possess conjointly. Those faculties are sets of powers, to decide what to do (and do it), in one case, and to judge how things are, in the other case. It's useful for engaging with Aristotelian and Kantian scholarship about theoretical and practical reasoning. My own view on "the will" is a mishmash of Kantian and Aristotelian notions(*), so I'm using the word "will" to distinguish the power (the will, proper) from its acts or exercises (acts of the will). Acts of the will are paradigmatically intentional actions and, at the same time, expressions of practical knowledge. However, bits of practical knowledge can remain unexpressed, when the time to act hasn't come. In that case, an act of the will can take the form of an (as of yet) unrealized intention.

(*) It owes much to Anscombe and Wittgenstein too.