rationalskepticism.org

ughaibu wrote:

Chrisw wrote:But compatibilism is just the strategy of defining free will in such a way that we can be said to have free will even if the world is deterministic. The motivation for defining it in this way is that the alternative, traditional definition makes no sense.

In the contemporary literature, both compatibilists and incompatibilists define free will in pretty much the same way, that an agent has free will on any occasion on which that agent makes and enacts a conscious choice from amongst realisable alternatives. The difference is in what the two camps consider sufficient for "realisability". Compatibilists tend to argue that logical possibility or sometimes physical possibility, is enough, ".

I don't recognise that as a definition of compatibilism. Compatibilists do not think that we have free will just because alternative actions are logically (but not physically) possible. And if there are alternative physical possibilities then determinism is false. Compatibilists believe that we can have free will even when there are no realisable alternatives at all.

incompatibilists hold that there must be a time at which there is no true statement about which action the agent will subsequently perform.

This is just a definition of indeterminism.

Notice that neither require acting "differently given identical physical circumstances"

It obviously implies alternative possibilities given identical physical circumstances - if there was only one possibility then there could be a true statement that described this possibility, and this is what the libertarian incompatibilist denies.

Chrisw wrote:Furthermore, this difference has to be something other than blind randomness, it has to be "me" making the choices. This implies that I am something more than a physical being.

All that is required for the libertarian position is that in a non-determined world an agent can control some of their actions. How does that imply that such an agent is "more than a physical being"?

Because physical processes that exhibit randomness cannot give you "control" of your actions. Except in the sense accepted by compatibilists, but rejected by libertarians, that you are identical with your brain and thus your brain's choices are your choices, however they are arrived at.