Another Free-will poll, please bear with me!

[Whateverist]

Determinism. I don't need to explain it, proponents of free will need to make a case for it with evidence. Everything I do has a preemptive cause, I'm conditioned since birth by biology and sociological barriers - All I do is pre-scheduled by variables that lead me to the result.

Why not (to the part I bolded)?  What makes determinism the default position barring an adequate defense of free will?  I should probably just counter with free will, because.


The free will we seem to have we really do have.  However the freewill we seem to have is highly constrained by environmental, formative factors.  We don't choose the desires and values which animate our choices.  We can take note of them, reflect on them and sometimes even act to change one of them.  Of course in doing so we aren't acting from some spurious 'free' choice.  We are merely acting to achieve better harmony between our desires.  You might say our free will amounts to those of a referee in the ring of our desires.

I chose other because "free will" is too often thought of as disembodied, unhindered random choosing.  That doesn't describe what anyone would think of as free will.  The self is not a blank slate on which we scribble graffiti on a whim.  We embodied humans who manage symbolic language and have the capacity to move our limbs deliberately are not home alone.  Beneath and supporting the portions of our brain which provide us with the sense of free will are many unconscious mental acts upon which we are dependent - but not determined.  

Memory is not a muscle to be flexed when we say.  It is provided and selected at a level beyond our direct control.  It's a gift that can be withdrawn.  The very choice of which memories are the relevant ones is likewise chosen pre-consciously.  We are not in charge of the whole show so we lack the means to be purely free.

But given that our conscious minds are dependent, does that alone mean we are determined?  Of course not.  We are not as in charge as we might like to believe but neither are we zombies.  We have highly constrained and conditional free will.  Nothing more or less.  The extremes to either side of my position break down in their ability to describe the life we actually do experience and border on conspiracy theories.