If free will was not real

[Gemini]

Because that's the legal definition of coercion--it's just stipulated as being made by an agent.

If you define all deterministic causal processes as agents, then we need a new word to describe organisms that interact with their environments via complex information processing systems, with the ability to prevision the outcomes of multiple different courses of action and select between them based on which outcome best supports the values within their motivational framework.

Isn't organisms that interact with their environments via complex information processing systems, with the ability to prevision the outcomes of multiple different courses of action and select between them based on which outcome best supports the values within their motivational framework merely the result of neurons interacting? Aren't neurons made of particles and aren't particles causal? Doesn't that make every single thought, decision, movement, every complex evaluation (you get the point) already determined? It isn't free if it's already determined. You can dream and think of all kinds of capabilities and "possibilities" but only one of them will happen and the one that happens was bound to happen, it isn't free in that case. That's what they call the illusion of free will. And don't tell me it's trivial, whether it's trivial or not, it's true. And it isn't trivial.

Compatibilists have no problem with the determinism you describe. The way Sean Carroll puts it is that the fundamental laws of physics don't have anything to say about baseball. Yet baseball is real. Free will is real in the same way. Not fundamental, and not real as a physical/metaphysical thesis, but real as a social/legal/cultural construct.