Functional Free Will, Redux

propositional posts: Deterministic Compatibilism

In a May 2008 post, I made an attempt at defining free will under Determinism. Here is a more refined attempt.

Now, Libertarian free will is this:

"The ability to willfully make current-state decisions without any dependency on prior states."

• This definition is incoherent. It makes an appeal to an antecedent will and yet demands no antecedents.
• This definition is contradicted by observation. Everything we've observed tells us that people's decisions are subject, eventually, to antecedent causes over which they have no control.

Libertarian free will is certainly illusory. But we have Libertarian feelings nonetheless. Thus we should identify what patterns, in a Deterministic context, give us the functional impression of Libertarian free will and call that true free will.

• I propose that a perfectly free will has purely self-referential desires ("recursion") and optimal translation of desires to expression ("expression").
• I propose that no one has this perfectly free will (save for God perhaps), but that we have some degree of free will.
• I propose that free will means "will free from that which infringes upon recursion and expression."