Block's mistake is to assume that indeterminism means only randomness. - it would be helpful to describe what other kind of indeterminism there might be.

@TKoL There is only one kind of indeterminism: the absence of determinism, where effects are incompletely determined and agents can self-cause their actions.

There is only one kind of indeterminism - that's not the point of view of a lot of people who are going to be reading these threads, so being explicit about it is nice, instead of just hoping your reader has the same point of view as you.

@TKoL There is only one kind of indeterminism and that is the total negation of determinism. There is no semi-determinism.

I hope you can see that I'm not debating this with you, I'm just encouraging you to write out your view explicitly in your answer instead of leaving it implicit and hoping your reader happens to have the same view as you.

@TKoL But I did write it explicitly. I made it clear that the negation of determinism allows agent causation. This is all about hard facts, no points of view are involved.

This is a pretty fundamental error for a professor of philosophy at NYU to make. I find it hard to believe that his argument is really as simple as presented in the question.

@JimmyJames: I think there's simply a missing premise in his argument, which he may have trusted the audience to come up with on their own. That premise being something along the lines of "The laws of physics as we understand them seem to either be deterministic, or randomly indeterministic, and don't seem to provide for agentic indeterminism, so agentic indeterminism requires an appeal to property or substance dualism. But nobody seriously believes in dualism, so agentic indeterminism can be rejected right alongside it." Or maybe he discussed dualism already, I haven't seen the whole thing.

@PerttiRuismäki you have stated that agent causation is neither deterministic nor random. What, then, is it? I think that if you could expand your answer to explain what you mean by "agent" and how an agent can cause itself to make a decision in a fashion that is not determined entirely by some combination of its current circumstances and random input, that would be helpful.

@philosodad In a deterministic system all events are completely determined by the previous event. This means that no event is incompletely determined (=random) or determined by an agent. An agent is a living being capable of deciding (=self-causing) his own actions. A decision is knowledge about the agent's immediate actions. A decision is based on knowledge about current and past circumstances and the agent's personal characteristics. A decision is not a physical event, therefore it cannot be caused, but it does cause the agent's voluntary actions.

The negation of "every action is completely determined" should be "some actions are incompletely determined", right?

@justhalf No event in probabilistic reality is completely determined.

So just like the concept of free will, determinism and randomness need to go on the scrap heap as not only useless, but actively damaging ideas. Lets move on.

@PerttiRuismäki I'm only left with more questions. What is a decision, if it isn't a physical event? How does this "self-causation" work? If it is based on knowledge, how does that imply that it isn't purely deterministic? I still think you need to expand your answer, at the moment it is more like a passing comment.

@philosodad Like I said, decision is knowledge about what the agent is about to do and why. Knowledge has no measurable physical properties, it is not physical matter, energy or an event. Self-causation means that you decide what to do and then your mind makes your body do it. There is no concept of knowledge in a deterministic system. If every event is causally determined by the previous event, then no event is determined by knowledge. I think my answer is fine, my best answer ever considering the number of upvotes.

@PerttiRuismäki I don't get it... you're asserting that knowledge isn't any of these things that it absolutely appears to be (synapses, words on a page, whatever) but you aren't saying what it is.

@philosodad I just assumed that everyone knows what knowledge is, especially in this forum. Knowledge is not physical matter, energy or an event. Knowledge information with a meaning, information that is interpreted and linked to other pieces of knowledge.

@PerttiRuismäki "Knowledge" is abstract. MY knowledge is a pattern of synapses in my brain, which is obviously physical. Your answer would be greatly improved by explaining how the knowledge I have is not in my brain.

@philosodad The "pattern of synapses" is not a physical thing. The synapses are, but the way they are configured is not.

@PerttiRuismäki That's just objectively untrue. The brain is a observably a physical thing, doing physical things, and the connections between synapses and the firing of synapses are physical phenomena. This is not, however, a forum for debate. If you have no interest in improving your answer by explaining what you are talking about, you don't, and I will leave this here.

@philosodad A book is a physical thing. A novel is a non-physical thing (protected by immaterial rights laws) printed on the book. Likewise, a brain is a physical thing. Thoughts and knowledge in the brain are not physical things. There is nothing wrong with my answer. I don't know how I could improve it. If you cannot understand the distinction between information and the medium it is written on, I cannot help you.