There are no stupid determinists; it takes a certain level of intelligence to become so disconnected from literal moment-to-moment lived experience.
Edit: I erred in saying it is false; that is too generous. It is arbitrary.
One framing of determinism is that you can only choose from the options in your head, weighted by your preferences. Both your preferences and those options were acquired through your experience, so how can choose anything other than what your experience already influenced you to do?
It's fine to disagree, but do you find that "incoherent" and "self-evidently false"?
You are relying on my free will: that I will focus my mind, read your argument, incorporate my experience, judge its truth using my reasoning faculty, and choose.
Without free will, reason is impotent. Philosophers can’t agree or disagree because they have no choice in the matter.
Free will is not about being able to choose any random thing at all. That would be like saying I’m not a human because I can’t will myself into becoming a banana peel.
Entities act in accordance with their nature. Aspects of a man’s nature of man include consciousness, free will, and the character he cultivates. This doesn’t mean they behave randomly.
I cannot imagine a 'free will' that is not founded on randomness, but that may be a personal limit.
The law of causality affirms a necessary connection between entities and their actions. It does not, however, specify any particular kind of entity or of action. The law does not say that only mechanistic relationships can occur, the kind that apply when one billiard ball strikes another; this is one common form of causation, but it does not preempt the field. Similarly, the law does not say that only choices governed by ideas and values are possible; this, too, is merely a form of causation; it is common but not universal within the realm of consciousness. The law of causality does not inventory the universe; it does not tell us what kinds of entities or actions are possible. It tells us only that whatever entities there are, they act in accordance with their nature, and whatever actions there are, they are performed and determined by the entity which acts.
The law of causality by itself, therefore, does not affirm or deny the reality of an irreducible choice. It says only this much: if such a choice does exist, then it, too, as a form of action, is performed and necessitated by an entity of a specific nature.
The content of one’s choice could always have gone in the opposite direction; the choice to focus could have been the choice not to focus, and vice versa. But the action itself, the fact of choosing as such, in one direction or the other, is unavoidable. Since man is an entity of a certain kind, since his brain and consciousness possess a certain identity, he must act in a certain way. He must continuously choose between focus and nonfocus. Given a certain kind of cause, in other words, a certain kind of effect must follow. This is not a violation of the law of causality, but an instance of it.Interesting idea, I'm a bit sceptical but would love to learn more about this argument. Where does it come from?
If we don’t have free will, then we can’t reason. If we can’t reason, then there is no such thing as evidence.
To learn more about this approach, see Rand’s “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology” and Peikoff’s “Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand”.