Who said they were different?
Are you really satisfied with that? False accreditation of agency to some vague entity that science has never discovered and has no function?
They have to be different, otherwise pretermination is true, which is incompatible with any kind of choice at all. At least, that’s the obvious logic.
That statement just totally ignored everything previous to it in the discussion.
You are your biological body, in which your unconscious and conscious realms are produced from. You are not the big bang (if you subscribe to that). You are not your dad’s sperm, and you are not anything in between.
I am not a vague entity nor are you.
How so?
Yes actually the previous two comments from anon did…
you ignored a number of posts which talk about how the idea of “choice” is not necessarily at odds with determinism. it’s the choice itself that was determined, the choice still exists and is made…determinism just says that only one choice can and will be made. still a choice.
Well yes, I don’t think your arguments are very compelling. Yet, anyway. So of course.
That’s fine, but that doesn’t excuse you from this, its just that you’re not understanding my arguments. Which is fine as well, but just making you aware of it.
I think the common person generally assumes that we all have some sort of soul, and make our decisions such that we are in some sense morally culpable for them as they are internally-generated. I may be wrong.
Sorry, I can’t follow what it is you’re saying here. Could you explain?
Around about the Enlightenment, people got the hang of cause and effect, causal chains and so on. Everything had a cause, everything was an effect of antecedent causes, and so on. Mechanics was born. People got to notice that other people weren’t quite so predictable, in fact downright unpredictable, so they assumed some internal cause must exist - in fact, this proved the Christian theology of souls. So they took concepts that people had no problems using - guilt, social responsibility, volition, and so forth, and tried to match them to parts in a causal chain.
If I say I want something, I’m describing my relation to that thing in terms of my dispositions to act in certain ways. But there’s no causal link there! So volitions became things that echo around in our heads, pulling us one way unless a greater volition pulls us the other. It’s ridiculous when you try and work it out in detail - if a friend asks me if I fancy a drink, my volition to go to bed early fights against my volition to agree and go with him - but is there also a volition to go for one quiet one and another to go out and get wrecked, or are these sub-volitions of the agreement volition? And what about my volition to stay up and post on ILP? These volitions must be countless, springing into existence each time they are needed to explain a pull, or maybe diving from our subconscious to our conscious. And these in turn have no causes, so we must have a prime volition-generator generating them. And by the cosmological argument, you’re led to a libertarian soul.
“I decided yesterday to quit my job and work in a charity” is not a sentence describing a physical state of the world, like “I see a cat sitting on my car” is. It’s not me talking about some process churning away inside my head called deciding, it’s announcing a change in my plans, letting people know I’ll be doing different things in the future. “He did that of his own free will” is not describing the operations of an acausal soul, nor is it describing a deterministic process of conditioned response to stimulus, but talking about something non-physical - the context in which we are to judge his actions. But philosophers see a noun and assume there’s some Thing to be said about it, because they spend so long analysing simple propositions. 
They see the library and the arts faculty and the science labs and the law halls and then go looking for the university.
Nice thread, by the way! I think the ironist outlook is a little like the universal doubt thing - it’s a useful tool rather than a final position on anything.
Yes well aside from the soul bit, which I find irrelevant, I am saying we do generate our choices internally, which as well as being affected by the outside environment.
Sorry about being unclear on that definition I posted, I was just stating I refuted the requirements for an incompatibilist viewpoint in the definition of free will I posted.
Just say “choice” where you said “free will” in the following statement of yours…
Determinism doesn’t care about inside versus outside.
Thanks! And I agree. I’ll study your post more closely when I have more time.
I’m not arguing against determinism.
Yeah, I understand that you might conflate choice with free will, an easy mistake to make. I don’t, though.
Ok, so you’re a determinist. And a “choice” is just what you necessarily had to do. So freedom, in your dictionary, means bondage?
I don’t conflate the two. I’m saying that from the point of view of determinism, choice and free will are both equally illusory.
EDIT: I’m also saying choice means you could have done otherwise. That’s what choice means. Determinists say you couldn’t have done otherwise.