I don't think anyone would deny that when you cast your ballot for Bidinotto, you're "choosing" him for president, EVEN THOUGH it is quite clear that, given your political values, you couldn't have chosen otherwise.

For example, you could choose to keep or delete this page; while a compatibilist will not try to deny that whatever choice you make will have been predetermined since the beginning of time, they will argue that this choice that you make is an example of free will because no one is forcing you to make whatever choice you make.

In contrast, someone could be holding a gun to your head and tell you that unless you delete the page, they will kill you; to a compatibilist, that is an example of a lack of free will. (The compatibilist account sometimes includes internal compulsions such as kleptomania or addiction.)

But are there any facts about humans, such that if you observed them to be different from what you presently observe, would lead you to a different view of volition or determinism?

Granting for a moment, or for an eon, that all human thought and behavior are purposeful, what observable facts (apart from that generalization, if any) provide the basis of your view?

Before presenting my own views in detail, I just want to make sure I understand your position as well as possible. So, if I interpret you correctly, you would only regard free will as existing, i.e. a choice to be 'free', if it were chosen for no reason, had no motivation, whatsoever.

Yes, because in being motivated to choose an action, one cannot be motivated simultaneously to choose an alternative action. A motivation is necessarily preferential, whereas a free choice is one in which the moral agent is capable of choosing either of two alternatives under the same conditions (including the same motivation, the same values, etc.) I don't see how this is possible.

I.e. it's only free in this sense if it's uncaused (by the person's goal-seeking). Since that's impossible -- at minimum it would violate the Law of Causality -- then determinism must be true.

But if I recall correctly, Rand answered this by the simple expedient of questioning that premise. That is, that conditional itself requires validation, doesn't it?

Also, doesn't that view rest on the supposition that there is in fact only one relevant type of causation, that which we associate with non-living entities, and which has been misnamed here "mechanistic"? It's difficult to see any distinction on the basis of which one could define teleological causation.

In the latter case, the entity is acting for an end, but the action is just as determined. It appears, based on this view, that humans have no more self-regulating capacity than a cabbage, it's just that we are aware of the process, whereas a cabbage is not.

I.e. this appears, as I noted in my earlier question, to be nothing more than conscious selection, not choice as that word is used outside philosophical tracts. (That use could, of course, encapsulate a prejudice. That's what we are here debating.)

I'm ending my part in this discussion. I can't make heads or tails of what Bill is talking about. Specifically, right up until you make a choice there are more than one alternative [sic]. Under Bill's determinism, what is the cause that necessitates the choice of one alternative over the other? He says it's the value, that which you act to gain/keep. Whatever you ended up choosing was the cause of the choice. Huh? It simply takes the outcome of the choice and claims that necessitated the choice.

No, not the outcome of the choice; the OBJECT of the choice -- what you're SEEKING to gain or keep by choosing the action. In other words, the PURPOSE of the choice is the cause of the choice.

Until the choice is made, there is no deterministic factor? He's offering a theory of after-the-fact explanation, instead of before-the-fact necessity.

And that after-the-fact explanation is compatible with either alternative of the choice. Whatever gets picked is described as necessitated. There's nothing of content to argue with here, as it doesn't offer a deterministic mechanism of choosing. It can't tell you what you'll pick, or even what factors are important, until after the fact. After the fact, you can describe why he choose that way. Is this really the point of the argument?

And to add to the confusion, he now clarifies that he thinks free-will is the same as indeterminism. This false alternative, between determinism and indeterminism, obscures the whole meaning of the free will vs. determinism debate. It would explain why simply being able to describe, after the fact, what the reason for choosing it would seem to be enough. It would argue against the indeterminism. Great. But as I said, that's not the free will position. It's a clean kill to a straw-man, but sidesteps the real debate.

Add to this his switching between value-judgments, moral values, political values, and simply values as the necessitating cause, and you've got a recipe for never being able to even communicate, let alone agree. For instance, in the Bidinotto example, it's one's political principles that allegedly necessitate the choice, but now it appears that act of voting for Bidinotto is the real cause of the choice. We went from efficient cause to final cause.

I tried showing how his stated positions don't make any sense, hoping he could either dismiss them or clarify them. But instead of achieving clarity, things are getting more obscure. Is it sloppy language? Or is it a fundamental lack of clarity in the first place? I've reach the point where I can no longer assume that his position is substantial enough to understand and argue about. Maybe others with more patience will tease out a clearer understanding. But there's always the possibility that there is no clarity underneath the confusion and sloppy language. Or, it may be even more simple. Bill may be arguing against indeterminism, and so focused on it that he is missing the point of every question and statement thrown at him.

Nor is it enough to simply say "he valued X more than Y".  That again only describes the outcome of the decision making process.  It simply says that after he made the choice, he went with X instead of Y.  Until the choice was made, this can be answered in the same way.  If "value" is that which you end up seeking, then until the choice is made, neither is really a value.

Instead, you'd have to phrase it different.  You could say for instance that he physically wanted sleep.  You could say that he had a long term goal of watching the game.  You could say that emotionally, he wants to watch the game live, but intellectually, he knows it'll be the same even if he naps first and watches it later on Tivo.  But until the choice is made, you can't say that he prefers one over the other.  You can say based on different standards he may prefer one to the other.  On the standard of good health, he may favor the sleep.  But he still must decide which of these standards he prefers.

At the beginning of the process of evaluation, he may prefer one to the other.  As he works through the issues, he may decide that part of that was based on a faulty evaluation.  He may, for instance, realize that the pleasure he'd get watching the game would be limited because he's so tired, whereas that didn't occur to him.  He may decide to weigh these options based on his best understanding of life as the standard of value, or he may instead take a shortcut and go with whichever one feels good.  This process could take seconds, or minutes.  The outcome will be based on how hard he focuses, how details an analysis he takes, and whether anything happens to distract him at the time.

Or imagine he flips a coin.  If the coin says to watch the Superbowl, he didn't decide to watch the game because he valued the entertainment higher.  He made the choice because it was very close to the value of sleep, and in fact the coin made the decision for him.  After the fact, you can say that on net, he preferred the Superbowl (including the random result of the coin toss).  But it's an after the fact description.  You certainly couldn't know that before the decision was made.  And certainly the primary reason for wanting to watch the Superbowl, the entertainment value, was not the primary reason for making the choice the way he did.

So there's a difference between why did he want to pursue an action, and why did he choose that action.  Saying that he valued it higher is a description of the results, not an indicator of what necessitated the choice.  And of course, Bill has claimed that the value actually did necessitate the choice.

I think this is the best I can do in describing it all.  Given that previous attempts have failed, I'm not optimistic.  But if anyone cares to understand why I think Bill hasn't actually been answering my questions or dealing with the issues I brought up, this post explains it.  There has to be a real effort at distinguishing before the choice is made and after.  If you're going to describe how a choice is made, it's not proper to use the result of that choice, let alone say that it necessitated the choice.  Before the choice is made, the decision-maker doesn't have that information available.