What is libertarian free will as opposed to free will alone?
Not to presume to speak for misterme987, but sfmatheson already asked that question and misterme987 already answered.
Why wouldn’t it? What part of “transgression against the will / law of God” sounds like it might require the sinner to be free in choosing to commit it? Are Calvinists non-Christian, in your opinion?
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You misspelled “moronically” Gilbert. It is not spelled n-i-c-e-l-y.
It is Durston’s (dumb-as-a) ‘pile of rocks’ argument that is “nonsensical”.
In general, we humans recognize that the concept of ‘true’ and ‘false’ does not apply to the outcomes of natural processes, governed by the laws of physics and chemistry.
Except that there are notable exceptions to this claim. A glitchy CPU chip that gives a wrong answer to a calculation could be considered to have given a “false” result without it being considered an undue stretch of the English language. Likewise an AI that ‘hallucinates’ a fictitious legal precedent/source document/etc in response to a query could reasonably be considered have given a “false” response.
Now all you have to do is apply the brain-computer analogy, and ‘true and false’ disappear as any sort of problem for materialism.
Even if this counter-argument were not true, we would run into the fact that any language, including the English language, is merely a human construct, and therefore cannot be expected to perfectly model all of reality. Therefore the fact that certain words (such as “true” and “false”) can become ‘kludgy’ for describing certain aspects of reality does not imply that our understanding of reality is false.
That’s the problem with most (all?) apologetics – it’s just bad arguments stated with sufficient confidence that the unwary don’t notice their flaws.
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The philosophical debate over free will largely involves a trilemma:
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Determinism is true.
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If determinism is true, free will does not exist.
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Free will exists.
It is not possible for all three propositions to be true, so any coherent position on free will must deny at least one of the propositions.
Libertarians believe free will exists, and reject #1.
Combatibilists/soft determinists also believe free will exists, but reject #2.
Hard determinists do not believe believe free will exists, and reject #3.
There are other shadings and subcategories of the above, but that’s the big picture.
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Free will is ambiguous. Adding “libertarian” distinguishes it from compatibilist free will. I strongly suspect that when you think of free will it’s libertarian free will, in which choices are neither determined nor capricious. Compatibilist free will, on the other hand, is compatible with determinism, but don’t ask me how. Libertarian free will is incoherent, subject neither to causality nor randomness. But what is the third thing that it could arise from?
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Doesn’t quantum mechanics destroys determinism ?
No. There are deterministic interpretations of quantum-mechanics and indeterministic interpretations.
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I must reiterate John’s question:
If your choice isn’t due to randomness, nor due to determinism, what is the other option? On what basis are you picking particular options when faced with a choice? Did you pick that basis freely too, and if so, what was that choice based on? You see the problem?
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No, not really. For one, classical physics is already less than fully deterministic. And I’m not talking about probabilistic theories like the foundations of thermodynamics and the like, but even good ol’ Newtonian mechanics. So to say that QM (or anything else so well-established, for that matter) destroys determinism is a bit of an overstatement, seeing just how little there ever was up for destroying to begin with.
Now, in most cases one wouldn’t notice that, of course. And the same can be said of Schrödinger’s equation. For most any practical purposes it is deterministic. That’s not to say exceptions couldn’t be constructed, but it is frankly more effort than finding a problem Newtonian mechanics is non-deterministic with. So, if anything, quantum mechanics is the “more” deterministic theory.
Also, as a matter of friendly, albeit unrequested advice… InspiringPhilosophy is generally a rather poor source to learn matters of philosophy from. It’s an even worse source to study matters of science with. By all means, let it inspire your search, let it invite you to ask questions, but do yourself a favour not to stop there…
By the way, all you need for a deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics is to drop the COMPLETELY UNSUBSTANTIATED assumption of statistical independence:
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Other people answered this well (in the negative). But it doesn’t particularly matter anyway. LFW would require that neither determinism nor indeterminism is true, which is plainly nonsense.
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In addition to the problems @Rumraket and @John_Harshman have raised, there is another issue with the attempt to appeal to quantum mechanics to rescue libertarianism. Even if quantum phenomena are truly random, there remains no evidence that brain functioning operates thru quantum phenomena. So if one relies on the argument that libertarianism is true because QM is non-deterministic, we would have to also conclude that rocks have free will, because quantum phenomena are occurring them.
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Whilst agreeing with prior rebuttals, I would also point out that (even under the most lenient interpretation) QM would simply turn you into a ‘robot’ controlled by a (quantum mechanical) random number generator, rather than anything possessing LFW. The choices are either Determinism or Randomness – there is no non-random Indeterminism, and so no third option.
Isn’t “I don’t know” a third option?
Only if you can specify what it is that you “don’t know”. 
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I don’t know what I don’t know, although there is a huge amount that I know I don’t know. I don’t know how to argue against the claim that a binary choice between a deist entity and no deist entity is all we have. There’s a distinct lack of imagination there (not least my own).
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Paging Rumsfeldt…
(Or however he’s spelt)
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So a nucleus decays, an emitted particle is ejected on a pre-determined path, such that, had we a complete record of the precise vectors of every particle, wave, field, unknown unknown, for the known and unknown universe, we the know every moment of history from the beginning if the/this universe and can precisely predict every future event till the end of time.
Hmm.
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But if you don’t know what you don’t know, how can you know that what you don’t know is a “third option” beyond Determinism and purely-random Indeterminism? 
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I’m a plagiarist, I admit. 
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