Prove your statement --- the one we were both fed in philosophy courses at University.Asimov wrote:Prove it. Free agentry implies that there is no external influence or restrictions. If there is no reason why a choice is made, then it is randomly made.
There are reasons why most of our choices were made. But those reasons were not sufficient causes for those choices. Indeed, if determinism is true, then I could not have chosen otherwise. If I could not have chosen otherwise, then I did not really have a choice at all.
Suppose I decide to purchase a car instead of leasing one. There is a reason for my choice. Purchasing a car costs less money in the long run. However, that fact was not a sufficient cause for my choice. I could have chosen otherwise. If I had done so, that choice would not necessarily have been random. There may have been other reasons for the choice. But those reasons also were not a sufficient cause for my choice.
It all reduces to the fact that the free will agent himself is the cause of his own choice. Philosophers want to restrict causation by saying that every cause is itself caused by other causes and so on infinitely into the past. But I believe that there are many "first causes", being the many free will agents whose choices have no causation outside themselves.
People can make what may be called "random choices", where the ramifications of the choice do not matter. A person may not care whether he takes a cookie with blue icing, or the same type of cookie with red icing. Nevertheless that choice was not uncaused. It was the agent himself who caused it. That's what free will is about.