Perhaps, but I do think that consciousness is logical, and I haven't heard an explanation for free decision making that sounds coherent and logical. Perhaps that is a limitation of my or our ability to present ideas and understand them. But I'm suspicious that the "no mechanism" gambit is use to facilely.
This is good stuff. I'll keep thinking about it.
Nice - and you know what? Even before I started posting here, when I was just lurking, I recognised that you are intelligent, and I have never (except in my more paranoid moments - yes, they definitely happen) bought into the idea that you are trolling or presenting yourself and your position disingenuously, I think that you are just looking for a way of understanding that "clicks" with you, from prior beliefs which differ drastically from the mainstream on this forum. So, I'm trying to supply that "click" whilst at the same time recognising that that might be hubris, and that it might go the other way around: that something you say will "click" with me and change my view.
So, in the interests of "justifying the coherence and logicality" of my idea of free decision making: perhaps you can
start by thinking of it as "free" in the sense of "not necessitated", which, surely, is coherent and logical - after all, you have admitted the logical possibility of entirely different initial conditions for our universe even if it were deterministic, thus certainly entailing that the overall contents of especially an
indeterministic universe (which we appear to exist in) are not overall "logically necessary", from which it is a short step to understanding that the contents of our free will choices themselves are not "necessary" even if they are "generally related to one another in what seems to be a causal manner".
And if you were to then divorce consciousness from reducibility to physical systems, you would have, as, again, Neil has been arguing from a slightly different metaphysic, an "ultimate source" (consciousness) of
volition for the non-necessary (free) choices which we make - which pretty much gets you all the way to my view of libertarian free will. And I know that this final step is the hardest one, the one which you see as a '"no mechanism" gambit', but:
(1) If the entire universe can be explained without a mechanism, then why not free will choices?, and,
(2) Honestly, I think it best matches with what we actually experience: that we do not feel "forced" into our decisions, but that somehow, through our consciousness, we "make" (freely create) our decisions.