t47477

I think a reasonable interpretation of the colloquial sense of incompatibilist free will is that people want to be (or have the experience that they are) their own causal origins or prime movers. That they originate an action that is not (purely) the effect of all other actions that have occurred, but in such a way that they decided what that action was.

From the outside, this is indistinguishable from randomness. But from the inside, the difference is that the individual had a say in what the action would be.

Where this tends to get tangled up with notions of a soul, I think, is that one could argue that such a free choice needs some kind of internal state. If not, then the grounds by which the person makes the choice is a combination of something that is fixed and their environment, which then intuitively seems to reduce the free-will process to a combination of determined and random. So the natural thing to do is then to assign the required "being-ness" (or internal state if you will) to a soul.

But there may exist subtle philosophical arguments that sidestep this dilemma. I am not a philosopher: this is just my impression of what commonsense notions of free will mean.