"Spontaneously" conflicts with "intentionally" in English. A spontaneous act is incompatible with having made a conscious decision about acting in that way. When something happens spontaneously, it happens by itself, without any intentionality.
You're conflating unintentional actions with involuntary actions, but the two are distinct. It's unfair to punish someone for an intentional but involuntary action. And all actions are involuntary if people do not have free will.
This comment appears to depend on a model unfamiliar to me, in that I have no idea what you mean by 'intents' or the reference to causality here. Would you mind elaborating? I may not be alone in failing as yet to have taken your point.
Spontaneity implies impulse, without forethought. You just wouldn't say something was something spontaneous if it was at all planned. Having a plan to do X, but working out the exact details later is not spontaneous unless there's a radical departure from the plan.
Situation 1: On your way home from work you run into an old friend and decide to go to the nearest bar. In retrospect you would call that outing spontaneous - it was the result of unplanned, unexpected circumstances.
Situation 2: You plan to meet a friend for a drink but haven't decided a location. The two of you meet up and decide to go to a particular bar, and then walk to that bar. There's nothing about this that is spontaneous, because each step involved some amount of forethought, even if there was an amount of "winging it" in meeting up before deciding where to get a drink.
Situation 3: You plan to meet a friend for a drink, meet up and decide to go to a particular bar. On the way to the bar you spot a comedy club, and in the spur of the moment decide to go see a show instead of just grabbing a drink. This could be considered spontaneous because you had no pre-existing intention of going to see a comedy show, it just happened because of circumstance.
In short, spontaneity sort of involves departure from the expected. If your plan is to work out the details later, then it's not spontaneous. It's only spontaneous if the event disrupts what you would have expected to happen.
Every instance of problem solving I encounter involves conscious intentionality. As an analogy, when I get a drink from the fridge, there is a lot going on in my body to make that happen that I do not consciously control. But, overall it is taking place due to my conscious intentional control. I argue the same is going on in the mind, a lot of subconscious things going on that I do not directly control, but the overall effect is directed by my conscious control.
You can go the other way and say that everything we do is a cascading result of chemical and physical reactions and thus we do not act with "intention" either. It's all a matter of perspective.
Choosing not to act is choosing nonetheless. You are responsible in both situations. You didn’t set the events into motion, no — but you had full awareness of the inevitable consequences that would result from acting or not. You must make the choice, therefore, that you can live with. This is the nature of the human experience.
I think the author is distinguishing between intent/agency/free will in the case of mental action and the empty, meaningless quality of material "causes".
For causality and the slipperiness of it, read Hume.
I don't think 'conscious thought' and 'deliberation' are synonymous. You can create spontaneously while still being quite conscious of what you're doing and having feelings about it as you're doing it.
I think you mean, consciously directed intent and will. Intent and will are not necessarily the same as thought. Perhaps you are using the wrong tools, and making it more difficult than it needs to be.
> Our free will is demonstrated by our ability to consciously choose whether and how to act when presented with thoughts and emotions.
This is nonsensical, because choice is a thought before it is an action, and we accept that we do not control the comings and goings of our own thoughts.
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