Yep, the law of the excluded middle is one place to start attacking your argument, I assume you know not all philosophers accept it.
Then, you are also right that semantics intertwine with logic in a way that needs careful interrogation and is open to different perspectives. I'd be very careful making the leap you make from:
> non-random + not-caused
to:
> non-(non-determined) and non-determined.
Your arguments also contain an interesting thing to think about: True randomness. If you really think about it, true randomness should not exist. And yet we think radioactive decay at the quantum level is truly, fundamentally, irreducibly random. If that is so, here is an example of things happening that we, by definition, cannot explain in any more fundamental way.
Which is to say, the universe is not bound by the logic of our experience. In the same way we had to break out of our basic intuition about numbers to create new ones that gave us more power, in the same way we could never have logically reasoned our way into quantum mechanics and needed experimental evidence to accept something so radical, yes in the same way math does not care that our minds/logic is currently too weak to conceive of a mechanism for free will.
Here is mind twister for you: Imagine a chain of antecedents for an action. In our intuition, the chain stretches backwards infinitely. But what is it could somehow wrap around to form a ring at infinity? Analogous to the way cosmologists think the universe is not infinite in all dimensions
Then, you are also right that semantics intertwine with logic in a way that needs careful interrogation and is open to different perspectives. I'd be very careful making the leap you make from:
> non-random + not-caused
to:
> non-(non-determined) and non-determined.
Your arguments also contain an interesting thing to think about: True randomness. If you really think about it, true randomness should not exist. And yet we think radioactive decay at the quantum level is truly, fundamentally, irreducibly random. If that is so, here is an example of things happening that we, by definition, cannot explain in any more fundamental way.
Which is to say, the universe is not bound by the logic of our experience. In the same way we had to break out of our basic intuition about numbers to create new ones that gave us more power, in the same way we could never have logically reasoned our way into quantum mechanics and needed experimental evidence to accept something so radical, yes in the same way math does not care that our minds/logic is currently too weak to conceive of a mechanism for free will.
Here is mind twister for you: Imagine a chain of antecedents for an action. In our intuition, the chain stretches backwards infinitely. But what is it could somehow wrap around to form a ring at infinity? Analogous to the way cosmologists think the universe is not infinite in all dimensions