Do you believe in free will?

[Angrboda]

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Otherwise, I define free will as the freedom to act without certain types of constraint. My argument is that the constraints are complete and total.
Every natural system, ever investigated, whether weather systems, or the nervous system, to our concept of self, has always been proven to be determined and it is egotistical to believe we have a special ability to remove ourselves from the standard causal chain by which the universe moves from one instant to another.
Changing the future in the quoted argument of mine, is a little inaccurate, as has been pointed out, but rather we are not free to exempt ourselves from the natural progression of universal causation.
What we believe to be free will is the conscious justification for our decisions that are already made by the combination of a million factors.
Rather unkindly, Free Will is the name we give to our inability to comprehend even a hundredth part of the factors behind each and every decision, right down to a facial tick.
Thats more or less my position.

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3- OK let’s say that we took a guy, knocked him into a coma for a few months while we augmented and messed with how he thinks chemically and physically. Then he wakes up and goes about his life acting as a completely different person none the wiser, but he is the same person. Which is the real him the one caused up to that point or the one we caused while he was in the coma? What happens when he starts realizing his memories aren’t his and never really happened? None of what we did interrupted the causal chain. What we did do was affect why he makes decisions, not how he makes them. At no time could (while he’s conscious) we reduce what he define’s as who he is (or his agent) to not functioning. Whether he’s aware or unaware of the tampering of his mental self, there is an irreducible “I” and the ability to introspect

(emphasis added)

This view of self leads inexorably to what is known as the ship of Theseus paradox.

The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus' paradox, or various variants ... is a paradox that raises the question of whether an object which has had all its component parts replaced remains fundamentally the same object.

The paradox is most notably recorded by Plutarch in Life of Theseus from the late 1st century. Plutarch asked whether a ship which was restored by replacing all its wooden parts remained the same ship. The paradox had been discussed by more ancient philosophers such as Heraclitus, Socrates, and Plato prior to Plutarch's writings; and more recently by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. This problem is "a model for the philosophers"; some say "it remained the same, some saying it did not remain the same".

This paradox crops up repeatedly in philosophy of mind, and that problem is referenced in some of the cognitive science that Rhythm and I referenced. Moreover, that same research also suggests that your "irreducible 'I'" is not as irreducible as you maintain. (I would maintain a different concept for "I" is needed to resolve the paradox, but that's a digression I won't entertain.)

Anytime you change what events would have transpired absent your interference then you are interrupting the causal chain. I don't see how you think what you're hypothesizing is outside the causal chain — quite the opposite, you're interrupting the causal chain by adding another cause, that of the interloper. This was the exact lesson of Phineas Gage, who, thanks to a railroad spike shot through his temporal lobe left him forever after altered in mind and self.