No soul? No free will and no responsibility then, yet the latter's essential...

[Sal]

We make the decisions regardless of whether we freely will anything, and we hope to dissuade poor decision-making...especially by non freely willed means. If the candy machine gave us a snickers when we ordered a twix, we'd be just as pissed.

I also don't understand why people have this notion that not having free will absolves them from responsibility or, more aptly, consequences from their actions.

The experience of a Self is the main reason we even have this idea of "free will", IMO. If we take into account that everything else in nature follows a regular and determinable pattern, that we're able to explain with accuracy (natural laws), then I think the same is true for brains. Some try to escape this with quantum woo randomness, but this would just mean our volition were random too.

At the face of it, "free will" is to me two incompatible concepts put together. Instead I think we have an illusion of making completely independent actions, when the reality is that we are just as much a part of the natural and causal physical reality as everything else. A brain isn't some exotic structure capable of defying causality.