If you take an action based on determining the probabilities of an event, you would take that action every single time because the state would be identical every time.
You look at the roulette board. You bet on red.
We rewind time.
You still bet on red. The state is identical.
Did _you_ come up with that decision? Of course you did, who else could have?
My claim is not that there's no "you".
It's that "free will" is meaningless unless we use a weird interpretation of terminology.
If you'd do the same thing every time, there's no 'freedom'.
If you do different things, but it's based on some sort of tiebreaker RNG, there's no 'will'.
That is true, but only for some definitions of free and will. I don't accept definitions of 'free' that exclude inputs from my personal mental state. If my mental state doesn't determine the choice, then the choice isn't mine.
Note that there could be random elements in my mental makeup. i.e. my mental state might include input from an RNG, but it's still part of me and as long as it's not the only input into any of my choices, we can still talk about responsibility.
See my comment about No Country for old Men on choosing to use randomness.
If probabilistic outcomes are the same as having a free will, then elementary particles also have free will. That doesn't fit the intuitive fuzzy definition of free will.
Some readers may object to our use of the
term “free will” to describe the indeterminism of
particle responses. Our provocative ascription of
free will to elementary particles is deliberate, since
our theorem asserts that if experimenters have a
certain freedom, then particles have exactly the
same kind of freedom. Indeed, it is natural to
suppose that this latter freedom is the ultimate
explanation of our own.
