It was probably obvious anyway, but for the record, the above text was meant to read: "Pacherie's proposal is that we're probably never aware of M-intentions, and we can carry out either or both D-intentions or P-intentions with or without awareness."

@HWalters I don't think awareness is critical for free will. By the time we are aware we have already made choices. I haven't had a chance to read Pacherie yet, but it seems promising.

Awareness seems, from a pragmatic perspective, to be more useful to help us navigate environments we're not too familiar with

The more we're familiar with how to do a particular action, the less awareness we need to do it

Predictability of the environment in relation to attaining a goal probably plays a role as well; things that require constant "adjustments" are at least psychologically more draining

See, that's the thing with me; I've got tons to say about action, but nearly nothing about free will proper :)

@HWalters I agree with your description of the value of awareness. I don't think awareness is what makes free will possible. This would allow many other species whose awareness is different from our own to also have free will.

@NikolajDiRondò Here is the chat room I mentioned in the comments to your question about whether free will requires mental or top-down causation.

Hi there! I was asking myself if free will does require mental or top-down causation as said by Frank. According to him it's possible a libertarian view without commitment to mental causation. But if there's no mental causation, can we truly say we are in control? Afterall, if certain neural states cause other neural states it makes me hard to believe we have some kind of control, whether this form of causation entails determinism or not. What do you think ?

@NikolajDiRondò Hi. In your last comment, you use the word "I", as in:

> "If are other neural events, then , it seems to me, i am not really in control. The choice i make are merely a result of what happens inside my brain.

But what is "I" in this? What are you? Because you are describing this "I" as if it were something apart from your brain.

Indeed i am tacitly making the assumption that if i am only my brain, my self would coincide with a set of physical events. But physical events do not have the power to decide anything: they merely happens according to certain laws. Where the agent would be in such a view? That's why it seems to me free will does require dualism and top down causality

What i mean is: intentional and free agency requires an ontological commitment to top-down causality, which in turn seems to entail at least a weak form of dualism. If we endorse a reductionist view of agents (agents do identify with physical entities such as the brain), the agent simply disappear; nobody does anything, some neural states merely happen according to certain laws and that's all we can say.