I'm gonna bump this bitch ass **** because it's always kind of interesting.

You know, I don't care if everything that happens is predestined to by God, or whatever we do is the result of chemical processes in the brain, but if I want to do something then I damn well can. Call me psychotic, but that's free will in my book, no lame religious nonsense or whatever. I just took a drink of water, you know why? Because I chose to. It doesn't matter to me in the slightest that someone would want to go out of their way to trace everything back to whatever the ****, because as long as I can do what I choose, then free will exists in my world. I am free to post this statement, read the comments following that will call me an idiot, and laugh at them, what a world.

And even from a mathematical/physical standpoint, that's MY damn brain making that process.

That would be willpower. The question of free will isn't whether you choose to do things you want, it's whether the things you want (and choose to do) are predetermined. So you may feel like you want to drink water and you do so at your own volition because it's what you want, but that doesn't require free will - it only requires that some dopaminergic process in your brain gets triggered by a real physical demand (thirst) that motivates your body to seek water and then suddenly you think "I'm going to have some water" and you do and you feel in control. But the thirst (and the neural mechanisms of thirst and muscle action) were really in control.

I could go kill someone if I wanted to too. Isn't that a commandment? If everything is predetermined then why would God make people sinners he could just make everything wonderful? Is sin beneficial in his masterplan?

And for the record I wasn't thirsty at all.

when you look at your computer screen, your brain is doing some work to interpret the patterns of light and represent it to you as an image that you can comprehend. is that a choice you make just because it is your brain that is doing the work? i would argue that it's not. when we think about choices we think about them in terms of us making some sort of conscious decision. not automatic responses being triggered before we even have time to think about it.

does that mean you have no agency at all? no, it means your agency is constricted by natural factors. you have a will, which is a natural result of the sum total of your evolution. you don't have a free will, imo, because that implies your will is completely under your control as a conscious entity without any sort of natural constraints. it's a metaphysical concept that was proposed back when people thought it was your soul and not your brain which was directing your behavior.

I just think it doesn't really matter if free will (whatever that even is) exists or not. I can still do what I feel

it matters to philosophers and people like that. it doesn't matter if all you are concerned about is that you can do stuff you feel like doing.

To me, for freewill to exist, then randomness also must. If everything is mathematically calculable, then there is no freewill, for everything is predestined according to mathematical laws. Human behavior might be more complex than 1+1=2, but if they are based on the same mathematical principles that govern the entire universe, then they are both just as predictable.

For freewill to exist, then you must be able to reproduce an experiment to gauge a human's behavior in a specific instance where all variables are exactly the same. Same person, same knowledge, same circumstances. All stimuli must be exactly the same in a mathematically predictable way. You'd basically have to be able to effectively time travel to the beginning of each instance of the experiment.

If even 1 time out of 1,000,000,000 a different outcome occurs, then there is freewill. Otherwise, no. And for a different outcome to occur then that would require the math of the situation to add up differently in that one instance. 1+1 would have to equal 3. And for this not to also be a mathematically calculable outcome, and therefore also not freewill, then the aberrant result would have to be completely random. For all intents and purposes, this would be magic.

For freewill to exist, the basic laws of the universe have to be broken.

I pretty much agree with all of these statements.

Well, randomness might exist, some argue, at the quantum level (which may be the case) and proponents of "Quantum Consciousness" (which I personally don't buy, especially with one of the author's peddling it under spirituality language) will argue that QM is free will's last chance or whatever. Most neuroscientists assume the brain is basically a classical object. Most quantum physicists don't buy Penrose's OR-Orch (which is basically highly speculative QM theory based around justifying consciousness as a QM process).

But, I'd think that randomness would be even more useless to free will, anyway. How can an organism ever build memories or use them in a consistent way if they are random? I suppose though, that free will would appear as random to us until we asked the subject why it made that decision.

This is why I consider myself a Secular Calvinist.