Yes, I agree with that. It's a good definition, very succinct.
Yes, precognition certainly seems to be implied by determinism. If an individual's actions are determined by preexisting states of the universe and by some laws of physics, then complete and perfect knowledge of those states and laws should allow such an omniscient knower to know all of the individual's future actions. That's why I put some emphasis on predictability earlier.
The deterministic incompatibilists deny freedom and dismiss it as an illusion.
(Compatibilists define it much as your source did. I'm a compatibilist and that's what I tried to do.)
The deterministic incompatibilists deny that the philosophical definition holds true of anything.
My strategy in earlier posts was to address your definition this way:
"For many philosophers, to believe in free will is to believe that human beings can be the authors of their own actions"
I rejected the idea that this implies a causal vacuum. (The idea that free-will can only occur in the absence of causes.) I accept the idea that the human mind is an emergent property of the human nervous system and hence causal at its machine language level. So my task is to provide a halfway plausible argument for how free-will can happen in the presence of causes.
I think of human beings as being embedded in a causal matrix. There's causality on the molecular level, on the cellular level, on the organismic level and on the emergent 'mental' level. What we do when we label something a "human being", a "self" or "me" is draw a rather arbitrary circle around some of it. We sometimes use the human body for that, sometimes the sphere of consciousness. But however we do it, what's inside the circle is going to be interacting causally with what's outside.
So when we say that "human beings can be the authors of their own actions", we are saying that the actions originated within the circle, even if it was an internal causal process of some sort that generated it.
"and to reject the idea that human actions are determined by external conditions or fate."
That's the idea that human beings are merely puppets, with all of their thoughts, decisions and actions predetermined by their environments and by the universe's previous history.
The "If A then B" idea kind of suggests that. Given the state of the universe at A along with the laws of physics that somehow connect A to B, and B can't be anything other than what it is. A determines B. So writ large, expanding that vision to the cosmic scale, everything that happens in such a way (if A, then B) can't be anything other than what it is. It's all predetermined by prior states of the universe and ultimately by the universe's initial state and by the laws of physics. It's creationism in a new guise, whether we attribute the initial state and the laws of physics to God or to chance.
I'm skeptical about that. Frankly, I don't picture the universe operating that way. Whether true or not, it seems to be a speculative metaphysical theory.
My discussion of probabilistic causality was meant to challenge that kind of determinism. A and the laws of physics may indeed predetermine immediately proximate B to a high degree of accuracy (but perhaps not quite perfectly, especially on the microscale). But A and the laws of physics might not determine temporally distant Z at all. There might not be any cosmic 'If A then Z' function. On the bigger scales things might just unfold unpredictably. I'm inclined to think of the universe and its evolution as the mother of all chaotic systems.
Note that I'm not challenging causation per-se. Each event has a preceding cause in an unbroken chain all the way back to the beginning. Each event can be given a scientific explanation by citing the immediately prior cause.
So where does that leave our human being? Our little causal system surrounded by its arbitrary circle. Its actions are going to be determined by what goes on inside that circle. (We can call some of those events in the circle 'beliefs' and 'intentions' and various psychologistic terms like that.) An adherent of free will doesn't want to deny that human actions are the result of the actor's beliefs and intentions. Free will isn't just a bunch of random uncaused movements. That's convulsions, not free-will.
And I think that we can agree that the human being's actions are going to be influenced (but perhaps not determined) by the being's immediate environment. The human perceives, and that involves interactions with the surrounding world. He forms beliefs about the world. Circumstances constrain him. (He isn't free to jump over the Moon.) Social mores influence him. He visits the fridge because he's hungry and because he believes there's food there. We might not be able to precisely predict his actions by knowing his proximate environment and history (including the inner psychological bits), but we can put strong constraints around what's going to happen. My claim is that conceding that doesn't do fatal harm to the idea of free-will, since free-will adherents don't want to deny that a person's actions come as the result of his beliefs, desires and motivations in whatever situation he finds himself.
But while the human being's immediate short-range environment influence him greatly, that's progressively less so for environments 100, 1000 or a million years ago. I'm skeptical that knowledge of the initial state of the universe at the big bang, or knowledge of all of the laws of physics, however precise and complete that knowledge (to the point of complete omniscience), would permit any prediction of what our human chooses to do today. The idea that it would, even in principle (if not practically) is where determinism strikes me as speculative metaphysical belief about the nature of reality and how it behaves.
