Free Will Debate

[Anomalocaris]

Because there are no married bachelors.

Boru

If I will something, it doesn't stop being willed simply because it was pre-determined.

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If the conditions in your brain that determined which brand of milk you choose ultimately depends largely on the totality of your external experience and the genes which were passed externally to the first cell that would become you,  is there still really a causal nexus is within you, or your “mind” simply become a convenient accounting bucket in which to place not the cause, but a collection of intermediate processes somewhere in the middle between cause and the effect in question, that so happen to occur within a particular durable configuration of molecules to which we attach particular emotive significance?

Yes, there is. if something had been slightly different within my brain, then I would have made a different decision. If, instead, something in that first cell had been slightly different, I would not have been at the store at all.

Yes, the mind (and will) are intermediate stages in a process going back billions of years. So? that doesn't change the fact that my mind is where the 'decision' was made.

the question seems to me to be, can something be sufficiently different in your brain to have caused you to make different decision, without that difference being directly traceably to an earlier difference that had already existed outside your brain? 

if not, then no decision really originated in your brain.   it is just first perceived by you as a difference in your brain.