[joe_the_user]

I agree that "An agent's ability to do and not to do without external influence or coercion." in the context of a social or political theory of free choice.

But in simple model, of just a world, where one only has configurations of atoms (or configurations of some substance or etc), there's nothing uniquely determining what's internal and what's external, what's an agent and what's not. So "free will" winds-up achingly ill-defined/under-determined here.

I think your definition is further relevant in that a lot of arguments confuse an ontological model and with a social/political model. And this could well be natural - as social beings, it seems like we tend to both model the world and see agents within it and so saying "in this model, you have choice but in this other model, you and choice don't exist" is highly counter-intuitive to an average human.

[gnashville]

> there's nothing uniquely determining what's internal and what's external, what's an agent and what's not. So "free will" winds-up achingly ill-defined/under-determined here.

This is really interesting. Thanks for the reply.