If free will was not real

[Gemini]

You just linked a popularizing article that uses the term free for the same reasons as anyone else does.  Flourish.  As for (2)...yes, by defining all of the "freedom" out of it.

These are researchers at John Hopkins and this is to be published in a special October edition of "Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics."

Which is a freedom nowhere in evidence.  What is in evidence is a vast mountain of observations to the contrary, cutting even at the heart of what you -want- in the first place.  

None of what you define as freedom. More from the article: "Classical compatibilism is often associated with the thesis that the word freedom in the expression freedom of will modifies a condition of action and not the agent’s will." http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compat...rFreWilPro

I don't think a nest has a will either (if we're the standard of reference), but I don't think that what we have is too far off from what it has, and I expect to see thermostats with a will before I die.  

I will still stomp on it!

That would be a -less damning- comparison, specifically to your position...but better, idk why.  No one doubts the will of those folks, you know.  We just see it to be compromised.  They wanted to do it, that's why they did it.  It;s a point you;ll have to take up with the other "compatibilist" in thread, Benny, who has very literally defined free will as the ability to act in accordance with ones nature...etc etc tc.

The whole point is that nest thermometers are free from external impediments--which satisfies one of the conditions of free will, but they don't have a will, i.e., agency or intelligence. And that's why they don't have free will.

In any case, you think that some people are about as free as a nest thermo...but that you're different, do you?

Nope, I'm just as causally determined as a nest thermometer. That is the compatibilist position.