All discussion of "free will" starts with the fact that we feel like we are freely choosing from possible alternatives.
it might be the case that the issue "starts with" the feeling of being able to make choices, but it starts in the sense that what the debate is about is the most direct interpretation of this feeling that we actually can make free choices. The debate is about what causes, or underlies, or best explains the feeling. For centuries there has been a debate about the conflict between free will and determinism (or, earlier, between free will and divine omniscience or foreordination). That hasn't been centuries of people stupidly failing to notice that the feeling of freedom is trivially compatible with any amount of determinism so long as the feeling is taken to be an illusion.
It doesn't matter here how the alternatives were generated: when presented with a multiple choice test, where the alternatives are fixed, we still we're exercising free will in answering it.
How do you know? For what value of "free will"? It is now acknowledged that there are different concepts of free will. The compatibilist concept is about being able to make choices without external duress, so by that definition your answers are freely chosen so long as no one is pointing a gun at your head, or anything like that. But is is obvious that most people are free most of the time under that definition, so the historical debate cannot have been about that concept.
The incompatibilist concept of free will contains further conditions, in particular the condition that when we make a free choice we could have done otherwise. That is a straight contradicition to strict determinism, because under determinism, there is no way things could have been otherwise.
Why does it help to specify that the generation of possibilities is random?
Because random possibilities are free from determination by past events, thus allowing that affairs in fact could be otherwise, that multiple real possibilities are actually available.
(Some of) the philosophers quoted in your link say the benefit is being able to choose otherwise in exactly identical repeating circumstances (e.g. simulation reruns) because the generation of alternatives is not deterministic. I don't see why that would be a good thing: it just means that some of the time you won't generate an alternative that you would have chosen in those runs where you did generate - in other words, you lose out because you don't or can't generate all the alternatives all the time.
The point is to give an explanation of what the feeling of free choice seems, directly, to be, not to give an account of why it is valuable or optimal.
If the generation process is thought to be completely random, and the selection process completely deterministic,
The generation process cant be completely random, the range of ideas you can generate has to be constrained by your past history and experience...a caveman can't come up with relativity.
So what are the empirical claims these models make? At least, that we should find in the brain a separation between random generation of ideas (e.g. amplification of chance or chaotic events) and rational selection of outcomes. That would be a great day for the neuro sciences. I just don't think it would convince anyone about anything regarding "free will" or the lack thereof. (After all, philosophers kept believing in free will even when physicists were quite sure the universe was deterministic...)
A lot of philosophers kept believing in compatibilist free will, which is..well..compatible with determinsim. Very few kept believing in incompatibilist free will. In fact, the revival of incompatibilist libertarianism has come partly from physics, since the "news" that the universe isn't necessarily deterministic has filtered through very slowly to philosophy...Tony Dore, the Information Philosopher actually has a physics background.
That hasn't been centuries of people stupidly failing to notice that the feeling of freedom is trivially compatible with any amount of determinism so long as the feeling is taken to be an illusion.
Suppose we're in one of two possible worlds, and we don't know which. One is deterministic (or its random components are irrelevant to human choice) and has an illusion of free will. The other has 'real' free will, whether in a two-stage model or otherwise. The humans in both worlds have the same experiences and intuitions about free will.
How can we tell in wh...
One of the great challenges of learning philosophy is trying to understand the difference between different schools of thought. Often it can be almost impossible to craft a definition that is specific enough to be understandable, whilst also being general enough to convey to breadth of that school of thought. I would suggest that this is a result of trying to define a school as taking a particular position in a debate, when they would be better defined as taking a particular approach to answering a question.
Take for example dualism and monism. Dualists believe that there exist two substances (typically the material substance and some kind of soul/consciousness), while monists believe that there only exists one. The question of whether this debate is defined precisely enough to actually be answerable immediately crops up. Few people would object to labelling the traditional Christian model of souls which went to an afterlife as being a Dualist model or a model of our universe with no conscious beings whatsoever as being monist. However, providing a good, general definition of what would count as two substances and what would count as one seems extraordinarily difficult. The question then arises of whether the dualism vs. monism debate is actually in a form that is answerable.
In contrast, if Dualism and Monism are thought of as approaches, then there can conceivably exist some situations Dualism is clearly better, some situations where Monism is clearly better and some situations where it is debatable. Rather than labelling the situation to be unanswerable, it would be better to call it possibly unanswerable.
Once it is accepted that dualism and monism are approaches, rather than positions the debate becomes much clearer. We can define these approaches as follows: Monism argues for describing reality as containing a single substance, while dualism argues for describing reality as containing two substances: typically one being physical and the other being mental or spiritual. I originally wrote this sentence using the word ‘modelling’ instead of ‘describing’, but I changed it because I wanted to be neutral on the issue on whether we can talk about what actually exists or can only talk about models of reality. If it was meaningful to talk about whether one or two substances actually existed (as opposed to simply being useful models), then the monism and dualism approaches would collapse down to being positions. However, the assumption that they have a "real" existence, if that is actually a valid concept, should not be made at the outset, and hence we describe them as approaches.
Can we still have our dualism vs. monism debate? Sure, kind of. We begin by using philosophy to establish the facts. In some cases, only one description may match the situation, but in other cases, it may be ambiguous. If this occurs, we could allow a debate to occur over which is the better description . This seems like a positional debate, but simply understanding that it is a descriptional debate changes how the debate plays out. Some people would argue that this question isn’t a job for philosophers, but for linguists, and I acknowledge that's there's a lot of validity to this point of view. Secondly, these approaches could be crystalised into actual positions. This would involve creating criteria for one side to win and the other to lose. Many philosophers who belong to monism, for example, would dislike the "crystalised" monism for not representing their name, so it might be wise to give these crystilised positions their own name.
We also consider free will. Instead of understanding the free will school of philosophy to hold the position that F0 exists where F0 is what is really meant by free will, it is better to understand it as an general approach that argues that there is some aspect of reality accurately described by the phrase “free will”. Some people will find this definition unsatisfactory and almost tauntological, but no more precise statement can be made if we want to capture the actual breadth of thought. If you want to know what this person actually believes, then you’ll have to ask them to define what they are using free will to mean.
This discussion also leads us a better way to teach people about these terms. The first part is to explain how the particular approach tries to describe reality. The second is to explain why particular situations or thought experiments seems to make more sense with this description.
While I have maintained that philosophical schools should be understood as approaches, rather than positions, I admit the possibility than in a few cases philosophers might have actually managed to come to consensus and make the opposing schools of thought positions rather than approaches. This analysis would not apply to them. However, if these cases do in fact exist, the appear to be far and few between.
Note: I'm not completely happy with the monism, dualism example, I'll probably replace it later when I come across a better example for demonstrating my point.