Agent-causal libertarianism, statistical neural laws and wild coincidences

Abstract

Agent--causal libertarians maintain we are irreducible agents who, by acting, settle matters that aren't already settled. This implies that the neural matters underlying the exercise of our agency don't conform to deterministic laws, but it does not appear to exclude the possibility that they conform to statistical laws. However, Pereboom (1995; has argued that, if these neural matters conform to either statistical or deterministic physical laws, the complete conformity of an irreducible agent's settling of matters with what should be expected given the applicable laws would involve coincidences too wild to be credible. Here, I show that Pereboom's argument depends on the assumption that, at times, the antecedent probability certain behavior will occur applies in each of a number of occasions, and is incapable of changing as a result of what one does from one occasion to the next. There is, however, no evidence this assumption is true. The upshot is the wild coincidence objection is an empirical objection lacking empirical support. Thus, it isn't a compelling argument against agent--causal libertarianism.2

“Let’s build an Anscombe box”: assessing Anscombe’s rebuttal of the statistics objection against indeterminism-based free agency

“…The simulation results reported here may also shed some light on Pereboom's "wild coincidences" objection to agent-causal libertarianism mentioned in notes 3, 7, and 8 (Pereboom, 2001(Pereboom, , 2014 and the ensuing recent discussion (e.g., Baker, 2017;Runyan, 2018;Taggart, 2021), which unfortunately does not refer to Anscombe's box analogy. At least prima facie, the stability of the simulated micro-statistics under the action of an external pattern-generating cause suggests that it may be possible to avoid Pereboom's objection.…”

“…SeeKane (1998),Palmer (2014), andMüller and Briegel (2018) for different attempts at providing more details.3 The statistics objection bears certain interesting similarities to Pereboom's "wild coincidences" objection against agent-causal libertarianism(Pereboom, 2001(Pereboom, , 2014, which has been the focus of several recent papers (e.g.,Baker, 2017;Runyan, 2018;Taggart, 2021). See notes 7 and 8 for some details about Pereboom's argument and its relation to Anscombe's text.…”