If free will was not real

[bennyboy]

You seem to assume that you decide what your intention is. You don't. Your intention originates in your brain (or you) however your brain/you still follow the causal chain therefore your intentions aren't free either. Your intentions are also fully determined, and if indeterminism is true and affects your intention then it's partly random and there's no free in random except free from determinism but not free for choice. So even by your definition "free intention" doesn't exist either in other words your intention isn't free.

You are still talking about things I've never talked about. I never talked about "free intention," or about indeterminism. That's what you guys want this debate to be about, but it's not the assertion I'm making.

I'm saying that will is the capacity of a thinking agent to express intent as behavior, i.e. to bring about some change in the world outside the self. Free will is the capacity to form intent based on one's personhood, and to express it without either compulsion or obstacle from outside.

And it doesn't matter whether you like it or not, whether it's an interesting view of reality, if it's true it's true. And when you evaluate and something seems good to your nature even the process of that evaluation isn't ultimately your decision, it was either partly random or bound to happen exactly the way it happened.

Well then, if you agree that you cannot break the causal chain, problem solved. All your intentions, actions, desires and such are a part of the causal chain and you cannot do anything to do otherwise but you can imagine different things to do. However even those imaginations i.e what you'll imagine would also be a part of that causal chain, in other words not under your control ultimately speaking.

There's this "you" again. Everything involved with my forming intent, including all the brain function, is part of me. So I do not accept that I have to have some magical non-deterministic yet self-expressed capacity to change my brain function in order to say I have free will. Free will is the expression of the self, and cannot therefore be applied to anything about the self, including the process of forming intent. If you do that, you're demanding that the self and the expression of the self are identical, which is not a very sensible statement.