If free will was not real

[Gemini]

No kudos required, I'd happily kudos myself for this one... this post was too pontificantingly pretentiously verbosely pedantically awesome to be arrogant

I'll kudos it anyway, because I love pontificatingly pretentious verbose pedantic awesomeness.  

I've discussed this subject so many times over the years I know it to death. Most of the time I can't be arsed to say anything other than "Compatabilism is trivally true and labelling "will" as "free will" whereas contra-causal free will is a bunch of silly magic most people believe in" or something to that effect.

We're not very far apart on this. I think the reason I'm a compatibilist is because I think when people refer to "free will," they're referencing the phenomenology of decision making, and not the metaphysical model of contra-causal free. And I think people tend to err in looking at the neural processes that correlate to the decision as something outside of their identity, acting on them as an external, constraining force, instead of properly understanding the neural processes to be what their decision is made out of--the physical instrument that gives them the ability to consciously will things in the first place.

Now I'm going to say "phenomenology" again and eat more chocolate cake while drinking a dark Italian roast with lots of cream and sugar. OM NOM NOM!