If free will was not real

[Gemini]

It doesn't obliterate it.  You -could- tell the man holding a gun to your head, demanding your purse...to just go ahead and shoot you because you're not going to give it to him.  Or, in another context, you could tell the enemy joe on the other side that he;s going to have to gnaw his way through you with his teeth before you ever let him cross the line you've drawn in the sand.  Degrees of compulsion...and here an additional layer, their efficacy, not the presence or absence of it.  

An autonomous decision is, by definition, uncoerced. It's just defined as a decision that a rational agent made in the absence of violent threats or actions from by another agent. My claim that these terms don't apply to causally determined neural processes is quite literally true.

Having a compulsion to eat chocolate, but more in context sugar..in the way I'm using it, is the demonstrable chemical seeking habit of your brain.  Sugar does something pleasurable to us and so we seek it out, it's not even a conscious thing.  It becomes a weighted value in our decision making that we do not, ourselves, decide to set.  

One thing we agree about is that properties of a system can differ from the properties of its components. Yes, the system that is our decision-making process is not the result of decisions that we made. But this is true whether you're a compatibilist or an incompatibilist.

It also appears to be compatible with a nest thermostat having free will..since it satisfies your criteria.  They don;t -need- frontal lobes to satisfy your -previously stated- criteria..and why do you keep adding and modifying the criteria anyway?  

Going back several pages, I defined free will as "the experience of making choices." Nest thermostats don't have that, either.

But I probably would have made my case better if I'd defined free will in terms of the frontal lobes (which is just the physical correlate of our experience of making decisions).

I'm not -defining- anything, only presenting one example in which it would not be free...to give you an idea of the criteria -I- would use.  As to your question..ish, I don't think there is if we limit ourselves to sound evidentiary propositions...which is why I just call it -my will-.  That doesn't mean there can't be, or that it's impossible.  There's no shortage of examples, in this world, of things which..as a system, have abilities or properties that none of their constituent parts have.  The brain is one such system...so it's at least -plausible- that even though it;s made of "deterministic stuff" and worlks in a "deterministic way" that it's product, and it's abilities...are themselves something other than deterministic.  In that sense there -could- be a coherent "incompatibilist free will"...but it's a bit of a misapplication of terms.  That, to me, would be a legitimate -compatibilist- free will...rather than a game of semantic hide and seek.

Metaphorically, the ghost in the machine.

High level indeterminacy? Even supposing that obtained, wouldn't that just introduce randomness into the process?

For reasons it does not control, by parameters it did not set.  In this case, it's not only not free...you don't even have ownership.  It just happens "in you".  

It doesn't happen in me. It is me.

No, I don;t have to agree...because even whatever compulsion bob puts you through is...as you yourself noted above...going to manifest itself via the same internal processes.  Those internal processes are themselves, capable of coercing you and producing the same effect as bob can.  Bob could, in fact, coerce you in such a subtle way as you don't even notice - far in advance-, and the decision at the end of this process in the distant future would seem to be, and in many important ways -is- your own but entirely in accordance with the will of bob (that's how we train people to kill people).  It's not a question of metaphysics...we're not having a metaphysical discussion, and I;m not presenting metaphysical objections......so?

Correct, you're not presenting metaphysical objections. I know you wouldn't go there! That's why I assumed at the outset that you were a determinist. I think your position is more interesting than the substance-dualists, I just don't think we have any physical evidence to support it, and I don't think we can extrapolate from our experience of making decisions to physical/metaphysical models that explain the experience.

Now as for Bob--Bob is an agent who is not me, whereas the internal processes that constitute my decision-making mechanisms are me. Which is why it's coercion in the former, and not in the latter.