How Free Will and Omniscience Works

[Angrboda]

apophenia,

would you clarify what you mean by "cannot" choose otherwise?

When philosophers discuss free will, they often invoke the idea that, for any given choice or act, the individual "could have done otherwise." Typically, though, it comes up in the context of compatibilist arguments of free will, and the "could have done otherwise" is framed in terms of possible worlds and counterfactuals, ala David Lewis. In their argument, we can imagine a world just like the one that existed prior to the act or choice, but which from that point diverges from this world in which the choice was not made. I must confess to not fully understanding Lewis' work, nor the use of it by people like Dennett, but it seems to require either special abilities or causal laws, or some sort of ontological privileging of what goes on inside a human as being fundamentally disconnected from what goes on outside it. I find neither formulation satisfactory.

You posit, implicitly, a similar type of "could have done otherwise," were it not for what he chose to do. Are you positing a form of dualism, ala classic theology, a shift in meaning in the form of a compatibilist account, or a purely metaphysical libertarian view that, determined or not, we still have choice.

What has to be added or taken away from a beast whose actions are purely a consequence of determinate facts at time t-1, which are determined at t-2, t-3, t-4 ... all the way into the past before the person was born.

What does your view of free will propose as distinguishing what we have, according to you, and what we would have if our minds were just computing devices, mindlessly grinding through line after line of code, helpless to deviate from the program in any way.

How is the human who could have voted Democrat or Republican, but voted Democrat, different, than a human whose mind was destined to choose Democrat by the facts of his mind the moment before deciding, which were determined by the facts just the moment before that, and so on, in to infinity.

(And note, I'm not implying pre-destination, that all are choices are predetermined, only that our choices are determined by natural cause and effect, and there is no non-natural nor non-deterministic event in the stream of cause and effect.)