Free Will: Fact or Fiction

[Tino]

This supposes that a decision can be made after the chemical processes. It would still require a physiological process to make a decision. If the decision is not a direct result of these, how does thought manefest outside any physiological process?

I've seen this view before and it mystifies me a bit. You seem to be describing a mechanism of the brain operation that is so isolated that it doesn't seem relevant - ie a chemical process happens and then a thought occurs. I don't think anyone fully understands how the brain works, but the general model I've read about is you take 100 billion neurons, with heavy inter-connection, all of them operating on an electro-chemical basis, and all together they create a neural network that in humans supports consciousness. This ongoing mechanism is what responds to internal and external stimulus, and supports a mind capable of making decisions.

I haven't heard that we know that a specific individual chemical exchange leads to a specific individual thought. But this also feels like the type of thinking that believers use to justify god, with some sort of "from nothing, nothing comes" argument that is far from the point.

I am interested in the question of free will, I'm open to learning that we don't have free will, but other than this "every thought requires a physiologic process" I haven't seen the argument fleshed out to say, eg:

1. If our will isn't free, what is it? What controls it? Is observed behavior consistent with the proposed controller?

2. If our will isn't free, we ought to be able to demonstrate it somehow. Shouldn't there be a scenario, demonstration, experiment, whatever, that illustrates that we don't have free will?

3. Going in the other direction, what would it take to convince you that we do have free will?