If free will was not real

[The Grand Nudger]

I'm under pressure from people, but the pressure (usually) falls short of duress.

I think , again, it's a semantic switch rather than a meaningful distinction.  In any case, the most generous assessment of this is that you are discussing -degrees- of duress, compulsion, or coercion..rather than any absence thereof, making your criteria self defeating on it's own terms. You only call compulsion compulsion when it feels really strong...but a low simmer will evaporate water just as surely as a rolling boil will. The effect of a mountain of minor compulsions, perhaps unnoticed by you or unknown to you, will produce the same ultimate effect as a person holding a gun to your head - except that there's no need to go through the trouble to hold a gun to your head.

To refer to my conscious decision to, for instance, eat a slice of chocolate cake for breakfast as being made under "duress" simply because it was causally determined and not contra-causal is a category error. 

I'm referring more to your compulsion to eat chocolate when I say duress, just as a heroin addict is under duress regardless of whether or not any external force or agent is turning the screw.

Duress applies to coercion or compulsion by threat or force from agents. Since I am identical to the brain processes that determined the decision, there is no imposition of force involved in my decision.

Is there no coercion? Is the process itself, by which you make decisions - not coerced, constrained...and at times visciously so, even in the absence of any exterior agent - by that process itself? Is there -ever- a moment where exterior forces such as your environment -aren't- providing coercive input? The term "my will" covers the posession of your will, your ownership of it...that no one else "makes" you do something (by force, by compulsion, by coercion or duress). Why use the term free will for that if it's not meaningfully free, even if it is meaningfully -yours-? In the same vein, are the compulsions you may have - internally, not a legitimate force in context, leveraged in a great many cases against your own best interests. Is cake for breakfast such a wonderful idea?

Lets come at it from another angle, again for you both.

Would it be fair to say that neither of you object to casually determistic this and thats as "free will".  As in, if the process were causally deterministic..you're both still comfortable calling it free-in-context?

Would it be fair to say that the local ownership of reasons, parameters, or decision-making criteria and condition are sufficient to consider it your "free" wills, regardless of where or what those things are..and just as above, whether or not they are products - themselves- of causally deterministic this and thats?

That's fair. "Free-in-context" is a good way of putting it.

Excellent, so in what way, then..does a nest thermostat -not- have free-in-context will?  It;s a learning thermostat that requires no duress or coercion from an exterior agent in order to make selections as regards microclimates within a given structure. If free will is the ability to make a decision free of duress from external agents, then it trivially and absolutely has free will - because it does that. This is why I don't see much utility in the concept.  The free will of a nest thermostat -can't- be what we're hoping to establish or refer to when we discuss this, can it?

I think what the debate boils down to is the proper referent of "free will." If it means "what we have that people with frontal lobe damage don't," then it's irrelevant whether or not it's deterministic. If the referent is "the experience of engaging my executive functions in decision making," then the metaphysics of causality is likewise irrelevant.

Personally, I could never say that something being deterministic is irrelevant if we're going to call it free.  Nor could I ignore causality for that same reason in that same context.

If free will is defined as, "I can create events that have no causal antecedents out of nothing by the metaphysical power of my spirit," then I'm not sure free will is well defined. What the hell does that even mean?

Well, I don;t believe in spirits, but I do acknowledge the existence of a mind.  If the mind has, as an ability, the power to be the initiator of events which are not themselves programmed -into- it by..say, our biology and environment.  If our minds arent just elaborate computers....for example (wherein our decisions aren't the product of a biological algorithm), then I'd be willing to consider them as free in some meaningful context - magical spirit powers are a non-issue to me.  This is obviously what "free-will" is angling for...after all..we're searching for something here that matches our experience of being the initiator and even your invocation of possesion speaks to that. However, compatibalist free will ends up being the business of calling red green, rather than discovering or establishing that something -is- green, and ignoring all of the ways that it is red...even by the self serving criteria one uses to call it green. In your description, for example..it's not a free will, it's an owned will, a possessed will. That it (and the environment) are just as capable of doing all the things that you insist it be free from in the case of exterior agents makes the distinction you've made, imo, difficult to maintain.

Bob didn't make you do something, but your sugar junky brain -did-. Compulsion, coercion, duress....it applies to either case, and seeing as how your internal compulsions have, at their very heart, external value setting mechanisms (why do you like sugar so much?) then the difference is superficial and, imo, uninformative.

(Mind you, I don't doubt your ability to make decisions free of external bob, I just wonder how thoroughly you've considered the bob-of-mind. Your level of control over the process and decisions, assuming that you own them, that they're local rather than distributed.,...and -why- your internal decision-making parameters are whatever they are.)