I understand that US intelligence had some inkling of what OBL&co were planning, and in principle they could have looked into it with a fairly high degree of thoroughness.
Okay, but I am not a spy, nor are virtually all people in the US spies, so we could not know, even if someone could know. I don’t consider your “with sufficient work, could know” claim to be established as fact – it’s a conjecture based on the motto “anything is possible”.
What about this says anything about the predictability of human action?
That it is not possible to know with certainty that a person will select action A versus B. You might turn out to be right about your estimation of the man’s unswerving dedication to self-destruction so that you can be 95% certain of his intent to destroy himself and the plane he is in, if you know an awful lot more than you do actually know. Free will means that even if an Islamist has a very strong commitment to the destruction of western civilization in favor of a mystics dictatorship, he can still chose to not act, and if he opts to not act, the plane will land safely.
If I offer you a cool billion in cash, no strings attached, I know that you have a free choice in the matter of whether or not you’ll take it, but I’m also pretty sure you’ll take it.
You are completely wrong, and I can prove it to you.
It certainly does imply unpredictability. It has to, or else it isn’t “free”. In fact the only reason that I am able to accept that human choices “could have been otherwise” - which on its face would seem to be an arbitrary statement since nothing that ever was can be shown to have actually been otherwise - is to treat the issue as epistemological, i.e. it is the unpredictability of human choice that enables us to say with any sense at all that such a choice could go either way. Take away the the unpredictability, and you’ve taken away free will altogether.
When critics of Objectivism quibble with the notion that human free will somehow creates a loophole to causality, what they fail to see is the epistemological nature of the problem. As far as I know, metaphysically, human neurons obey the laws of physics like anything else. I do not believe (though someone may correct me) that Objectivism claims that human minds have any metaphysical special rights to operate free from causality. To the contrary, it claims that everything acts according to its nature. The concept belongs to epistemology. You don’t need quantum mechanics to explain free will. All you need is to understand that the issue relates to our inability to *predict* human choices, that that is fundamentally what makes free will “free”.
If I offer you a cool billion in cash, no strings attached, I know that you have a free choice in the matter of whether or not you’ll take it, but I’m also pretty sure you’ll take it.
I wouldn’t take it. Do you have any idea what kind of hassle that much cash would be? I would probably end up being interrogated by the police, not to mention the fact that a billion dollars in cash (since you can’t get bills over $100 any more) weighs more than eleven tons.
Heck, I probably wouldn’t even accept it if you just walked up to me in the street and offered me ten dollars, because I have no idea what your motivations are. What a silly example.