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Thanks, that's very helpful.
I guess this is my sticking point. After all, a billiard ball is a necessary link in the causal chain as well, and no less a computational nexus (albeit a much simpler one), but we don't think that we should attribute to the ball whatever sort of authorship we wish to talk about with reference to free will. If we end up showing that we have a property (e.g. 'being a necessary causal link') that's true of everything then we've just changed the topic and we're no longer talking about free will. Whatever we mean by free will, we certainly mean something human beings (allegedly) have, and rocks don't. So this does just strike me as straightforward anti-free-will determinism.
That may be right, and it may just be worth pointing out that determinism doesn't imply fatalism. But in that light the intuitive grounds for fatalism seem much more interesting than the intuitive grounds for the belief in free will. I'm not entirely sure we're naturally apt to think we have free will in any case: I don't think anyone before the Romans ever mentioned it, and it's not like people back then didn't have worked out (if false) metaphysical and ethical theories.
Actually, the ancient Egyptian concept of Maat seems to include free will in some sense, as a "responsibility to choose Good", according to this excerpt. But yeah, it was not separate from ethics.
That's really interesting, thanks for posting it. It's an obscure sort of notion, but I agree it's got some family resemblance to idea of free will. I guess I was thinking mostly of the absence of the idea of free will from Greek philosophy.
I took a course on ancient and medieval ethics as an undergraduate. We spent a lot of time on free will, talking about Stoic versus Epicurean views, and then how they show up in Cicero and in Thomas. My impression (as a non-expert) is that Aristotle doesn't have a term that equates to "free will", but that other Greek writers very much do.
You're right, of course, that many of those philosophers wrote in Greek. I suppose I was thinking of them as hellenistic or latin, and thinking of Greek philosophers as Plato, Aristotle, and their contemporaries. But I was speaking imprecisely.