Is free will real?

[Mudhammam]

I'm pretty sure nobody here is living in a near-perfect zen-like condition, watching detachedly as his body goes through a deterministic, hormone-driven existence, and always maintaining a cool, rational vision of a purely mechanical universal truth. Frankly, I think the ideas you guys are willing to own up to and the ideas you guys actually live by and act on are highly unlikely to be the same. Also, you're ugly, your caretakers dress you funny, and your breath smells like the private parts of unwashed donkeys!

"Philosophical truths are only systems, the most seductive of which is the one whose author has the most skill, wit and enlightenment, and in which each can decide for himself because, for most readers, the arguments in favour are no more proved than those against, and because a few degrees of probability more or less on one side or the other are enough to decide and force our agreement; and only well-formed minds (who are much rarer than those who are called wits) can feel or grasp these differences. How many arguments, mistakes, hatreds and contradictions have arisen from the famous question of liberty or fatalism! Yet they are only hypotheses. A narrow or fanatical mind, believing the doctrines in bad pamphlets, which he recites to us with a self-satisfied air, naturally imagines that all is lost -- morality, religion, society -- if it is proved that man is not free. The man of genius, on the contrary, the impartial and unprejudiced man, sees the solution to the problem, whatever it is, as completely unimportant both in itself and in relation to society. Why? Because it does not lead in practice to the delicate and dangerous implications with which the theory seems to threaten society. I think I have proved that remorse is a prejudice created by education and that man is a machine despotically governed by absolute fatalism. I may be mistaken and I am willing to believe so. But suppose, as I sincerely believe, that it is philosophically true; what does it matter? All these issues can be put in the same class as the mathematical point, which only exists in the heads of mathematicians, and so many other geometrical and algebraic problems whose clear and ideal solutions demonstrate all the power of the human mind. This power is not the enemy of the laws and this theory is innocent, the result of pure curiosity, which is so little applicable in practice that it can no more be used than can all the metaphysical truths of the most advanced geometry."

- Julien Offray de La Mettrie