But would those decisions not be difficult to make because of the lack of instinct to guide us? unless the roll of a dice is divinely controlled the outcome is going to be unpredictable. Suppose you have natural instinct and social etiquette both pushing for contradictory actions, if you fail to find one more appealing than the other would you not be left with a choice of which one to let guide you?

Life is not predetermined. Only mental cases would think in such a way.

Obviously. We had a choice to vote yes or no and we are free to choose either option. And we are free to choose which idea we agree with.

Your "choice" is the result of a bunch of chemical reactions and neurons in your brain.

Which are controlled by me. I just hit myself on the head.

That's just a load of ****. Im not saying what you said isn't true but it's stupid. Its like saying we aren't alive, our heart is just pumping and our brain is thinking.

Then it's the chemical reactions which give us a free will. And they're some very complex chemical reactions because there are many choices in life and if those reactions weren't complex and didn't vary person to person, we'd all be making the Same choices over and over.

The above pretty much sums it up.

When we look closely at a flower, we see that it is made up of many smaller components, eventually down to the microscopic level. When they're examined closely, we can indentify these individual parts which make up the whole. When we examine big picture, it is simply a flower.

The flower is not an illusion, it is simply the whole of the object — the result of the billions of combinations which build upon each other.

Just because the process of choice takes place as a result of chemical reactions and electrical impulses doesn't make free will non existent, it is simply the make up of it, the very structure, the building blocks of free will itself.

But that's not why some say free will doesn't exist. It's the thinking that you never really had free will, it's just a reaction your brain makes to a given situation based on your past experiences and your genetic makeup, basically biological determinism.

I think prison, for example, isn't punishment but rehabiliation.

There's more to it than just th chemical reactions alone. So the chemical reactions and neurons of others don't become a factor? I'd have to say they do.

To quote an article from psychology today:

"Mechanistically speaking, you could say that although we may not have free will at the level of the neuron, we do have free won’t at the conscious level.

Why? Because consciousness is a mental state, and because free will is a reality in the mentalistic universe of other people’s minds even if it is not in the physical world of the brain. This is why consciousness needs a veto: only consciousness can allow for the mental factor of other people’s possible reactions. Consider a simple scenario: that of a fugitive and his pursuers. The fugitive, by definition, is free—indeed, he is determined to remain free. But the question is: how free? And in what sense is he free?

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Suppose the pursuers know that the fugitive is likely to resort to location A with the highest probability (his home, say), B with less probability (his family perhaps), or C with less likelihood still (for example, acquaintances), and so on, with decreasing probability for each subsequent suspected place of refuge. If the fugitive thinks for a moment, he immediately realizes that the pursuers will think this. In other words, he becomes conscious of what they might do, and in practice exercises normal mind-reading skills (something which an autistic fugitive might not do at all, or do badly). What this means is that the fugitive instantly sees that, wherever he goes, he is not free to visit A, almost certainly not B, and probably not C either. However, knowing that his pursuers cannot cover all possible refuges at one time, he might decide to go to some very improbable ones, say X, Y, or Z. But there again, he might reflect that, if he is sure his pursuers will foresee that he might think this, he might consider A, B, or C after all on the premise that, since he is expected to go there first, they will not look for him there if they anticipate his reaction to their reaction. Nevertheless, the fugitive cannot rule out his pursuers foreseeing this in its turn and therefore continuing to search for him at A, B, and C—which once again suggests somewhere like X, Y or Z…*

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Considerations like this show that free will is a reality, but it is one that relates to the mental world of other people, not to the physical world of neurons."