A common argument against free will is that RAN1) The universe is strictly determined; a particular state-of-affairs having occured at time T1, another must inevitably follow at time T2.
A common counter-argument is RAN2) that the universe is not in fact deterministic, but is indeterministic -- a fact scientifically proved by Bell's Theorem and the Aspect experiment....
and the standard rebuttal to *that* argument is that:
RAN3) 'indeterministic' means 'random'.
RAN4) randomness is incompatible with any kind of free-will worth having.
I have no quibble with (RAN2) and (RAN4). This article will deal with (RAN3).
Is indeterminism a *fact ? Is randomness a *fact* ?
Let us consider the second question first. Can randomness be a fact? You prove that something is non-random by showing that it follows some (known) pattern. So how do you show that something is non-random. Well, you can showthat it follows no *known* pattern, by trying out all *known* pattern, and seeing that it does not follow any of them. Which proves it is random....right ? Wrong, because folowing no *known* pattern is not the same as following no pattern at all, and only following no pattern at all is precisely the same as being random. (There is of course a trivial sense in which any set of data follows a pattern -- the pattern which is idntical to the data set itself. The non-trivial sense of following a pattern is what is technically called redundancy in information science).
Since we do not have every possible pattern available to us to test against, there is no way we can prove scientifically that something is random, ie patternless. That is why there is a determistic case against the standard version of quantum mechanics, with its assumption of intrinsic randomness. So intrinsic randomness is not necesarily true, even given the experimental evidence for indeterminism. That intrinsic randomness is not necessarily true does not logically entail that determinism is necessarily true. Moreover, determinism, or a form of determinism, namely local determinism, is known experimentally to be false. Indeterminism is therefore a fact, but not a fact equivalent to a the existence of intrinsic randomness, which is not and cannot be a empirical fact.
There is a loose, analogical resemblance between relativity and relativism, but it is no more than that. To say that something is subjective, ie relative to persons, is to make the epistemological claim that the truth of a statement legitimately depends on someone's psychology. Thus, aesthetic preferences are subjective because everyone has their own taste. To say that something is is relative, in the Einsteinian sense is to say that physical measurements made by obserervers will vary accoding to objective, physical characteristics of observers, such as their relative velocity.
Even the word 'observer' is misleading here as the same relativistic distortions and dilations would be recorded by an automatic apparatus, such as a rocket-mounted video camera, travelling the same trajectory as a human observer. Some subjectivists try to evade this counterargument by claiming that a human oberserver is still needed to examine the video footage (or whatever) -- presumably meaning that the footage is somehow ontologically indeterminate until a human looks at it. But for a human observer to generate the right data, in agreement with the theory, she would have to know the trajectory of the camera, and what evidence would she have for that except the tape itself. This manoeuvre is surely pretty desparate.