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  1. A response to the problem of wild coincidences.Christopher P. Taggart - 2020 - Synthese 198 (12):11421-11435.
    Derk Pereboom has posed an empirical objection to agent-causal libertarianism: The best empirically confirmed scientific theories feature physical laws predicting no long-run deviations from fixed conditional frequencies that govern events. If agent-causal libertarianism were true, however, then it would be virtually certain, absent ‘wild coincidences’, that such long-run deviations would occur. So, current empirical evidence makes agent-causal libertarianism unlikely. This paper formulates Pereboom’s ‘Problem of Wild Coincidences’ as a five-step argument and considers two recent responses. Then, it offers a different (...)
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  • Taming Pereboom’s Wild Coincidences.Thomas Müller - 2023 - Mind 132 (527):789-802.
    Pereboom’s ‘wild coincidences’ argument against agent-causal libertarianism is based on the claim that in a world governed by statistical laws, the dovetailing of indeterministic physical happenings with the free actions of agent causes would be a coincidence too wild to be credible. In this paper it is shown that the conclusion is valid for deterministic laws, but that it fails for statistical laws. Therefore, the ‘wild coincidences’ argument does not provide the promised empirical refutation of agent-causal libertarianism.
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  • “Let’s build an Anscombe box”: assessing Anscombe’s rebuttal of the statistics objection against indeterminism-based free agency.Thomas Müller - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-22.
    Towards the end of her famous 1971 paper “Causality and Determination”, Elizabeth Anscombe discusses the controversial idea that “ ‘physical haphazard’ could be the only physical correlate of human freedom of action”. In order to illustrate how the high-level freedom of human action can go together with micro-indeterminism without creating a problem for micro-statistics, she provides the analogy of a glass box filled with minute coloured particles whose micro-dynamics is subject to statistical laws, while its outside reliably displays a recognisable (...)
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  • Free will.Timothy O'Connor & Christopher Evan Franklin - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    “Free Will” is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. Which sort is the free will sort is what all the fuss is about. (And what a fuss it has been: philosophers have debated this question for over two millenia, and just about every major philosopher has had something to say about it.) Most philosophers suppose that the concept of free will is very (...)
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  • Growing block time structures for mathematical and conscious ontologies.Sylvain Poirier - manuscript
    A version of the growing block theory of time is developed based on the choice of both consciousness and mathematics as fundamental substances, while dismissing the reality/semantics distinction usually assumed by works on time theory. The well-analyzable growing block structure of mathematical ontology revealed by mathematical logic, is used as a model for a possible deeper working of conscious time. Physical reality is explained as emerging from a combination of both substances, with a proposed specific version of the Consciousness Causes (...)
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