Is libertarian free will really a joke?

[NickNack]

I've always heard libertarian freewill be described as the ability to choose otherwise, but that wouldn't be a good definition because clearly a random law of the universe that does not involve an individual that could go one way or the other does not have libertarian freewill, so I think its better described as "the ability to have control over your actions".

But what does it mean to have control over your actions? All that means is to have the ability to direct your actions through the power of your will, but this could happen in a deterministic world, so for LFW to hold it would have to mean "to be able to direct your actions through the power of your will AND have your actions be undetermined".

Keep in mind that it can be a spectrum of how much LFW one being has compared to another. Perhaps LFW is only present in some actions but not in others, that would be a real possibility. So now that we have our definition of LFW, we can begin to see if we have any good arguments in support of this.

The first thing that comes to my mind is that its very likely that we would have machines in the future that could predict our actions with a very high accuracy if determinism is true, but the problem with this is what happens when a person sees their own future. If they know what they will most likely do based on the machines prediction, people may want to rebel. So on one hand we would expect the machine to be able to most likely predict peoples actions based on what the machine does, but on the other hand we have this thought process that people will not want to submit to the machines predictions and go against the machines prediction if they see it. So we have two contradicting conclusions based on determinism, that the machine should likely predict peoples actions based on its calculation but at the same time it shouldn't because people would most likely rebel against these predictions.

You could argue that even if determinism isn't true, the universe operating out of randomness leaves no room for freewill, and that would be true if the only two options were for the universe to operate were from randomness or determinism. But it completely forgets about the third option, that being the ability to be able to direct your actions thru your own will. A lot of our previous thoughts align with our future actions, so I think that's evidence enough that our will guides some of our actions.

So we have the futuristic machine scenario showing us our actions are likely undetermined, and the fact that our previous thoughts align with our future actions shows that our will guides our actions sometimes, so when you combine these two things together, you have actions that are undetermined guided thru our will, which is LFW. The third thing we need to solve is what type of actions have both of these things combined?

I would say the more attention you pay towards your own thoughts/actions, the more your using LFW. I say this because the more attention you pay towards your thoughts, the more you remember your previous thoughts which leads to future action. But how do we know which actions are undetermined? You have to go back to the futuristic machine hypothetical and ask "what makes these actions undetermined?". Its the more you pay attention to the details of what the machine says you will do, but most importantly when you pay attention to your actions. The more you know about your so called "future" and pay attention to your actions, the more you can rebel against the machines predictions. So paying attention to thoughts leads to more actions being directed by your sentience, and the more you pay attention to your actions leads to more indeterministic outcomes in the future.

A lot of you may try to post studies of human action being predicted in the future but I think these studies can be misleading because they really only take into account very simple actions and not very high stake scenarios. In these studies, there's no incentive for people to act in a particular way which makes them not care about their actions, and when people don't care about their actions, they are less likely to pay attention to their thoughts and actions, and when people are less likely to pay attention to their thoughts and actions, they are less likely to use more of their LFW. So if anyone has any studies on peoples actions when they are in higher stake scenarios, I'm all ears, but I'm kind of tired of the studies that don't incentivize people to pay attention to their thoughts and actions. LFW is a spectrum and sometimes you can use it more then other times. So yeah, any thoughts?