Mind = Brain?

[Purple Rabbit]

Why are you simply quoting Arcanus, is he your house guru? Are you a free agent acting according to your own will or are you a copycat?

"freedom is predicated of persons, not faculties. In other words, the agent is free, not his will. A person's will is determined by his character and desires." - Arcanus

That's wordplay at best. With free will generally is meant the freedom of a person to act according to his/her will. Most notably freedom from persuasion by other agents. So my question to you in these terms would be: what delivers will, body or soul?

"In order for choice to be meaningful and morally significant, it must be deliberate. To make a deliberate choice is to contemplate a set of options (e.g., chocolate or vanilla pudding) and to instantiate that which enjoys the greater degree of our desires (e.g., chocolate pudding), whether those desires are rational or emotional or some concert of both. If we evaluate this series closely, we realize that our choices are a function of our cognitive faculties; for example, the choice of chocolate pudding is a causal chain that is propagated and filtered through the motivational complex of our desires. This is why choices of the will always reveal the character of the person. The causal chain runs through the agent's cognitive faculties, not irrespective of them (libertarianism) but concordantly with them. Put in other words, the volitional activity of our will actively shapes this causal chain, as opposed to passively responding to a causal chain (determinism). We are not puppets. Nothing makes our choices for us. We make our own choices. Although our will is determined or "causally necessitated," it is so in the right way by forces internal to the choice-maker, not external. We know from the laws of nature that determinism is real, but we also know from the human experience that choice is real. Compatibilism is the theory that takes both seriously and articulates them as co-existent realities." - Arcanus

Some bullet style remarks on this:

• It is rather presumptuous to assert that choice should a priori be morally significant. It reveals special pleading.
  
• Arcanus postulates that a causal chain is 'actively shaped' but presents no argument or evidence to sustain this.
  
• The rest of his reasoning points to monism stating that while the choices are being made from within the body, therefore the agent is free. A rather simplified version of physical monism. There is no room for a soul separate from the body in this reasoning. Which is fine by me.
  

"Free will is not being defined differently so much as properly, foremost by the rejection of "free will" as a misnomer because the will is not free. I once shared your confusion because, perhaps like you, I persisted in the notion that the will is free, but it was a confusion that disappeared when I let go of that idea, substituting it with "free agency" instead. But I had to be shown the incoherence of "free will"—how it creates a dissonance in our intuitions and is violently inconsistent with a biblical world view—before I was able to drop it and pursue a more coherent view. Indeterminism or "free will" simply does not work. But neither does determinism, which, when held consistently, results in the nihilistic repudiation of truth, knowledge, science, etc. Evidently the truth was somewhere in between. Ergo, compatibilism. It is coherent and consistent biblically, logically, intuitively, and scientifically." - Arcanus

Some bullet style remarks on this:

• A lot more drabble on the filological interpretation of 'free will' that only, as we saw in the above, rephrases the question.
  
• I'm not sure if he meant it but surely indeterminsm does not equate to free will.
  
• From determinism he jumps to the conclusions that truth will be repudiated. Clearly a non sequitur.