What “Free Will” is not

<aside> 🕰️ From Guy's Lifetoward wiki : FreeWillIsNot ; 14 October 2015

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An apophatic approach to understanding intentionality.

I think intentionality is a better word for "Free will". Use interchangeably below. And similarly when we use "free" or "freedom" below, we mean the kind of freedom referenced in the notion of "free will". Intentionality is a better word for it because it is not limited by being entirely subjective. Intentionality is the position one takes observing either one's own intentional processes or another's; it works for both subjective and inter-subjective cases. "Free will" however is a decidedly subjective way to describe the same process because will is most surely felt, but only witnessed through great uncertainty. It goes similarly with freedom, being felt subjectively but always subject to deep skepticism inter-subjectively. Even so, the way freedom is witnessed in other people might be the source of the confusion of intentionality with creativity as explored below.

Intentionality has little if anything to do with randomness. Intentionality is a complex ordered process. That's why I wish everyone could finally let go of the idea that freedom and real randomness (if there is such a thing... I doubt it!) have anything to do with each other.
1. I think the attempt to find a random cause to justify a notion of freedom expresses a misunderstanding which confuses "unique complexity" with "randomness". Like many confusions in this realm, this confusion is one of the common class of problems which result from failing to understand the difference between an epistemic model versus the reality it attempts to model. Specifically, if "random" is to mean anything real, then it must refer to "real randomness", that is, aspects of reality which are provably without a real causal (analyzable) lineage. A physicist, for example, will quickly call attention to the randomness of quantum-level phenomena as a source of "true and absolute randomness". There are many problems with this approach including:
  1. All higher-order forms of existence above the quantum level damp out all quantum fluctuations through stochastic emergence. We explore this in a more applied way below in 1.2. Point here being that no single quantum fluctuation matters in the world built of atoms and molecules.
  Quantum fluctuations are all averaged out by the time we get to the ontology of "matter", let alone the much further downstream ontology of sentient minds.
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 And BTW, Schrödinger's cat was never really isolated so just get over the idea that a single quantum event can have a macroscopic consequence. It's an interesting thought experiment, but it's also nonsense.
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  1. All we mean by "without a real causal lineage" is that we do not know how to discover the causal lineage. So in the case of the quantum background noise, we can't be sure there aren't specific causes behind each fluctuation because we can't know how many delocalized event horizons or other real but inconceived phenomena are lurking out there producing that kind of effect. We can't know the limit of reality's extent in any direction of inquiry, so to say that "randomness starts there" is only to say "my ability to know the cause ends there".
  2. When we look into the complexity of an intentional mind, we have the same impenetrable veil of epistemic limitation as we have contemplating the source of quantum noise. That is, we can't see into all the myriad inputs to the creation of the unique structure which makes up the mind experiencing the intentions. And that particular epistemic limit is of a far higher order, ie. at least one which matters to the systems we care about much more nearly than anything so far upstream as quantum noise. Using the same argument as in the preceding point, it's not that we really mean "it's random" but rather that we mean
  "I can't identify, track, or model all the detail of all sources which might be relevant to push this particular atom of possibility one way or the other." And this is why I believe Dennett put it right when he said that this impenetrability of analysis, this unfathomable complexity of causal possibilities, is the most appropriate definition of intentionality. We call on intentionality as the marker to explain "determination by a system so complex as to make the prediction of its outcomes fundamentally unreliable except perhaps by gross categorical approximations."
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 It's notable and quite relevant that even the specification of that atom of possibility is imaginary and entirely epistemic, and still fully removed from those variables which affect the "real decision", whatever that might mean. It's all concepts and assertions based on presumptions, approximations, and summarized interpretations extended into a future which is similarly unknowable.
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2. Freedom must surely mean freedom to act as one intends, and nothing about that permits randomness or is aided by it in any way. Randomness destroys complexity and tears down structure. Upstream randomness is necessarily the existential enemy of all beings. A being persists exactly because it has developed a way to guard against random fluctuations of upstream conditions. If those conditions were to change, the being that depends on their stability will most likely cease to exist; the only escape is what we commonly call "adaptation", but that really just means that the adapting system has sufficient complexity and robustness to damp out, mediate, or just ignore those changes. All stable emergent phenomena rely on a relatively very stable substrate domain. Without that, there's no way for any ontology to persist. Quantum fluctuations are cited as sources of freedom amazingly often. But quantum fluctuations are all damped out far upstream from the persistence of eukaryotic cells. Consider that fluctuations of a much higher order, like sub-optimal chemical conditions which produce DNA replication errors, are far more consequential to the persistence of the animal they might produce than any quantum fluctuation could be. Thus life, for example, depends on the stability of atoms and molecules as guarding their own persistence against quantum fluctuation, and molecules come together in complex dynamic systems like cells which similarly defend themselves against instabilities, exerting a type of control on their chemical environments. Similarly organic systems defend themselves against disease, and animals defend territories. Amazingly, human beings wear seat belts, and that's far more of a factor in their decision processes, outcomes, and persistence than trillions of trillions of quantum field perturbations could be. After all, those quantum fluctuations average out, right?
Intention is enhanced by but not the same as uniqueness. This odd pairing seems to stem from a desire to pin freedom of will to a sort of cultural notion of creativity. The ability to make choices relies on imagination, and people's imaginations are believably novel. Super complex unique beings will have unique interactions with the world, and come to be composed uniquely to a very great level of detail. First passively as receivers and then, as the internal pathways for such inputs are extended deeper and deeper, with ever-increasing intention, a sentient being will develop intent in a unique but ordered and accountable way. On the far end of those unique and complex paths are the behaviors of that being, and given their derivation, those behaviors are going to be unique. All that said, freedom is not the same thing as uniqueness. Relative to these observations, one might say that freedom is a particular stage and state of that process of intention, that moment when multiple imagined future outcomes are considered in parallel and a choice looms. This is something that is "felt" (that's what stage and state mean in this ontology) by that complex system during the contemplation and decision processes which make up intentional.

One way uniqueness enhances intentionality is that I can't model something truly unique, if for no other reason than that to do so would prevent it from being unique. Any perfect model of anything must necessarily be orders of magnitude more complex than the thing modeled. That's why we can't perfectly model anything with our minds. We have to take gross approximations and summarizations, throwing out the vast majority of all that is modeled, in order to model anything at all, even with our highly capable modeling minds.

Note that these are all epistemic limitations!
Intentionality is not the same as creativity. "Create your world" they say. "Choose the good" and such. But the creation is quite surely downstream from the choice that creates it. At the moment of creation, the freedom state in the intentional process has already come and gone. At the point the behavior hits the shared reality, freedom as regards that particular choice is long gone. All that remains is being stuck with the real consequences, which will be perceived, interpreted, and then fed into the imagination engine to produce new choices if needed. So what is creativity then? Mostly uniqueness, but perhaps importantly uniqueness freed from conventions imposed upon it by social norms, fear, and other forms of expression repression.