@kennethamy,
Yes, this is how that woman I referred to earlier (Sandra Lafave) expresses this:
Lafava wrote:It doesn’t seem right to the soft determinist, who says the hard determinist abuses ordinary language. A free act on the hard determinist view would have to be an uncaused act, and naturally the HD position looks strong because it is hard to imagine what an uncaused event might look like. Thus it follows trivially for the HD that no acts are free, since no acts are uncaused. But it is absurd and weird to claim (as the HD does) that when we say an act is “free”, we really mean it has no cause at all! This is the kernel of the soft determinist position.
Think again about “No act is free if it must occur”, particularly the “must occur” part. We always say an act “must occur” if the act is forced; but we don't mean to imply that unforced (voluntary) acts have no causes at all! If the bank robber says, “You must open the safe right now” while pointing a gun to your head, nobody would say that your subsequent opening the safe is a free act. You are forced to open the safe; and both the hard and soft determinist would agree that your act is not free. But does that mean that if you weren’t forced to open the safe, and you did anyway, that your voluntary act would have no cause? Not so either.The soft determinist agrees with the HD that all acts are caused; but points out that to say an act is caused is not the same as to say it’s forced. And when we say an act is “free”, we mean simply that it’s not forced.
tomr wrote:Give one example of something you know is completely random. Something you know to be random that does not rely on timing to give the appearance of randomness like a random number generator or something that only appears to be truely random because we cannot follow the underlying determined process. And by completely random I am thinking of a process that is unpredictable because there are no underlying determined processes.
How about things dealing with
Chaos Theory?
"Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behaviour is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos."
ughaibu wrote:Unfortunately for your friend, this view is inconsistent, as it requires a discrete ontology and the standard model is continuous.
To be honest, I do not know the difference. What are some examples of discrete ontologies?
