Neuroscience and free will

Now my ignorance shows. How does Final Cause explain why something else doesn't happen under a free decision, given that something else could have happened?

There's a need (or so I would argue) for Final Causes, and if Mind can select the Final Cause that's how it makes a free decision.
How I see it is:
Efficient Cause -> What is usually regarded as the Cause of an Event.
Final Cause -> What selects a Possibility from the set of Possible Effects.

Or are you saying there is no deterministic causal chain in any world?

I mean if there is a Mind that has set Final/Inner Causes in such a way, sure. If it's just so, then it's just randomness of a special kind right - things happen predictably for no reason just as they would happen stochastically for no reason?

I'll have to get used to the nomenclature. As far as I know, the Final Cause is the purpose for making the decision. I'm not sure how that helps us to understand how the decision was made.

Is "Possibility Selector" better?

I have the same question you asked a few pages ago: Why/How did I make the final choice out of the possibility space? Why chicken and not fish?

By Mind's ability to make use of Final Cause through Intentionality / Subjectivity / Rationality.

It explains why something else doesn't happen at the higher levels of the events.

But we have numerous examples for that, like "force" or "energy". I don't think that helps for what you are looking for here because if I said Free Will was a "force unto itself" or it was "Unity of Force & Will in a panpsychic sense" you wouldn't be satisfied right?

I agree that there have to be axioms at the lowest level. But that is true for any system, including one involving free will. You are not going to be able to explain the free-causal chain all the way to the bottom, either.

Free will is at the bottom if it's Possibility Selection, and we know there has to be Possibility Selection of some kind b/c we see change.

When you give me the axioms of free will choices, then I'll tell you whether they seem more satisfying then the assumptions of physics. And I can tell you that if the axiom is "... here I make a free decision ...", then I will not be more satisfied.

My point was the axiom of needing Final Causes to be paired with Efficient Causes is applicable where there is change. So would the axiom "Change is bringing about the Potential into Actuality, and can only be done by something that is Actual".

Those apply in all possible worlds, or at least those which have change. (I suspect it holds in static worlds as well.

I will now give up trying to explain why randomness doesn't bother me. It has nothing to do with free decisions, so it really doesn't matter.

Well the randomness you are talking about isn't really random, and is instead neither deterministic nor random. Seems relevant to this dichotomy you believe is an actual thing in Nature as it disproves it outright without even getting into the error of reifying math as describing causation?

I have no idea about this. Is God the axiom underlying the entire thing? What sort of explanations does God give?

My point was the "how" explanation has to include an explanation for change itself, if it is going to get to an explanation for free will. Why the how examples you give are in the wrong explanatory space because I can fit them on after the explanations for events.

Okay, I'll give up asking my question, even though it's the same question you asked a few pages ago. There are too many undefined terms in your paragraph. I need to do more homework to understand it.

I didn't say you need to give up, I said I don't understand what your problem is given the varied answers already given about the failures of the physicalist paradigm and how those explanatory gaps re: Causes + Consciousness have been filled.

Pretty sure all the terms have been defined in the thread?

How does the Final Cause determine the Effect of an Efficient Cause? The Final Cause is the reason a thing is what it is. The Efficient Cause is the agency of the event. How does the reason a thing is what it is determine the agency of the event?

Agency is in the Final Cause, which directs the outcome of Efficient Causes. Free will has to be in the selection of the effect of an Efficient Cause.