ABSTRACT
To ground Buddhist Soft Compatibilism, the view that Buddhist free will is compatible with all plausible forms of causation and conceptions of the person, I unite elements of free will optimism from Chapters 2 and 3, such as my counterfactual analysis in Chapter 2, the Buddha’s implicit ‘control’ criterion for the self, and an Indo-Tibetan causal criterion for real existence, with the Buddha's claim that the meditation adept can have or not have the thought or volition she wants to have or not have, etc., which implicitly involves a mega-autonomy over all mental states. The meditation adept’s titanic mental autonomy constitutes freedom of the mind (having the mental states one wants), which far exceeds and subsumes freedom of the will (having the volition one wants), both weak and strong interpretations thereof, and freedom of action (ability to enact volitions), as well as freedom of the emotions (having the emotion one wants), freedom of attention (having the focus one wants), etc. Freedom of the mind is the goal of Buddhism, and, if cogent, constitutes a powerful challenge to, if not a refutation of, all major Western free skeptical arguments (the Consequence, Manipulation, Randomness, Luck, and Impossibility Arguments) and skepticisms about mental causation, as well as Buddhist free will skeptical arguments based on the literalist no-self view. The adept, I argue, can maintain mental freedom (can have the mind she wants) regardless of the causal origins of her mental contents – whether they are generated deterministically, indeterministically, by manipulation, by luck, or otherwise.
