Free will re-redux

[Laird]

You're essentially asking me just to imagine libertarian free will

No. Here's a rough summary of the overall dynamic between us in this thread (in the context of all of the other free will-related threads in which we've engaged on PQ and Skeptiko).

1. You offer an implied argument against free will based on a mutually exclusive dichotomy (necessity versus randomness), both horns of which you claim (more or less implicitly) are incompatible with free will.
   
2. I point out that that dichotomy is not mutually exclusive, and that there is a third option (which I've christened "contingent causality") compatible with free will. Here, your argument is defeated, except that...
   
3. ... You try to get your argument to limp on by claiming that you cannot "conceive" of "how" that third option could work. So, in the post to which you've just responded...
   
4. ... I point out a good reason why you cannot "conceive" of this third option - an enthrallment to reductionism - and offer a conceptual pathway out of it to conceivability. At this point, your argument's legs are cut off and it can no longer even limp.
   

Thus, if you want us to continue to consider your argument, then you'll need to do further work.

it doesn't help me.

That's because you don't want to be helped in this way; you want to prosecute an argument in an indirect and implicit way. "Helping" you in the way you want would be for me to concede your argument, which I won't do, because it's unsound.

Though my post doesn't help you, it might at least help others to see what's wrong with the argument you're prosecuting.