uncaused

They prefer to see an uncaused, omniscient mind.

We call that uncaused root of causality God.

It works just as well to take the earliest known thing on the sequence of causes and say “this cause is uncaused”.

Both require the presupposition of some kind of uncaused system.

After all, the atheist says "there is no need for another uncaused cause because ..." - that "because" serves the purpose of religion.

Hume pretty much refuted this point of view 300 years ago. Lack of determinism does not create free will; if your actions were totally random and uncaused, then they could not be said to be free.

The notion that something is only free will if it uncaused is not at all the compatibalist position.

Rejecting as unwarranted the assertion that all facts must have causes isn't asserting the existence of uncaused facts.

> The posters I'm engaging here don't believe in uncaused causationFree will is, by definition, both uncaused and a cause of other actions.

You've independently come up with a stronger version of the uncaused cause argument, one of the many arguments Aquinas gives for the Christian God.

If everything has to come from somewhere, then the first cause of all other things must be an uncaused thing, otherwise we have an infinite recursion of things and thus nothing existing at all.

"I don't pretend to understand randomness on any sophisticated level, but it is my understanding that a phenomena being random does not mean that it is uncaused.

They are irrelevant to any predictive model of observed behavior, and it is impossible to distinguish by observation between the existence of such non-physical, uncaused causes and processes that are purely physical.

You now have as much free will as a rock rolling down a hill.> If you choose to define an action as representing free will only if it is uncaused then first, you've made up a definition entirely at odds with the normal English usagesI was trying to be precise, and assumed you agree that something that's part of a causal chain cannot be reasonably be called "free" by any common sense definition.

The general compatibilist position is that an action is done with free will of a person if the causal chain it is part of runs through that person's intent for the action to occur, or conventionally that person's 'will'.If you choose to define an action as representing free will only if it is uncaused then first, you've made up a definition entirely at odds with the normal English usages and, second, your definition is useless because it only cuts actions into those actions that exist and those that don't and we already have a perfectly good word for that so the new one is redundant.