Do you believe in free will?

[Whateverist]

Agreed, free will is not true or total in the archaic, religious sense. Not sure what you mean by uncaused cognition. In the absence of cause, I prefer my cognition silent.

I mean that free will is dependent on cognitive thoughts which can be translated into an effect on the physical universe from a position of being independent of natural, ie. biological and chemical influences.

I suspect there is no capacity of the brain to cognitively initiate chemical reactions which result in action. The thing I can say in favor of believing in free will is that we probably do have the capacity to put the brakes on. I speculate that we are able to tap into the body's mammalian capacity for physical response to squelch or delay that response. I further speculate that our mammalian capacity to learn where the hazards and rewards lay in the environment is able to draw on our cognitive appraisal of where the consequences and opportunities lie in our complex human cultures. We're certainly not unique in this, just an extreme case made all the more so by our capacity for language and abstract thought. We cause nothing. We analyze and that which has always made us responsive to our environment, whatever that may be, does the rest, or else it doesn't. This disconnect is probably helpful in making sense of certain aspects of human behavior, whatever the damage to our naive assumptions.

In many ways, the free will argument to me, is one that states that thought can be partly, or wholly independent of the electrochemical processes of your body. Which I feel is absurd.
If they are wholly dependent on the electrochemical processes of the mind, then you can track a causal relationship to your eventual action. Indeed, if you were omniscient, able to track a causal relationship to the first atom of matter in the universe.

To me it makes a difference that it is only partly dependent on the processes of the body and it wouldn't make any sense to me if it weren't at least partly dependent.