Our friend Wm. Jas. Tychonievich is writing again.  Welcome back!

His first post of weight is interesting, wise, and lucid.  Highly recommended:

The same, then, goes for agency (or “free will”). No matter how cogently it can be argued that it is a meaningless concept of the “colorless green ideas” genus, the fact remains that everyone easily and naturally does understand what it means, at least until that understanding is argued out of them. To rest content with an obviously sophistical proof (even a very good sophistical proof) that there can be no agency is to betray the fundamental insincerity and lack of seriousness which is the mark of the sophist as opposed to the philosopher — the wisdom-hobbyist as opposed to the true lover of wisdom.

(I would love to hear about the elapsed time problem and the model that made sense of it, by the way).

The post has a lot to say about the libertarian free will problem, especially Blake Ostler’s version, that preoccupied me during some of the early years of the blog.  Libertarian free will seems like obvious nonsense, since it is hard to see how a totally inscrutable effectively random choice could be meaningful morally, but the alternatives all have problems too.  I don’t know if I ever resolved the question to my satisfaction.  Probably I just lost interest.

Most of what I had to say on that I said elsewhere, but there are a few posts from back then:

The Marriage of Eternity and Forever

Choose

Is Torture Good