Is free will an illusion?

I believe in Chisholm-magic. I am the cause of my actions. I am a prime mover. Small-l (philosophical) libertarianism.
Why? Subjective experience, a rather convincing argument that doesn't ignore the existence of neuroscience, and a personal commitment to live according to my own deliberate choices.

The answer to this question depends on the definition of free and will. If will means the goal of our brain's planning activity and free means free from any physical influence besides those who shape our brain than it becomes a tautology since our will would be purly embedded in our brains and can't be influence by anything not related to the brain. If free however means free from any physical influence it becomes a contradiction since the brain is a physical entity. If will means anything else I am not aware of it, but the basic argument would still be the same:

Information can never exist except as realized in a physical medium. No information can therefore be free from all physical effects and no information can be affected by anything that does not affect it's physical medium. Therfore the concept of free will is meaningless.

There is another way to look at this, aside from the "brain as a biologic computer" or "soul vs. body" angles.

I don't think anyone, even those in support of free will, can argue that we aren't at least influenced by our interactions with the world. To do so would be to suggest that we live in a constant state of chaos, and that is clearly not the case. If our "decisions" and associated actions are, therefore, influenced by a culmination of past experiences and those of the moment, it is not difficult to envision that we have no free will. Moreover, I would postulate that we are predestined, though not in a religious sense.

The fact of the matter is that we can only make one ultimate "decision" whenever presented with a range of choices. You can't "decide" to move AND not move, simultaneously. You can only do one or the other. If you generalize this over all of humanity, it creates a vast network of ultimate "decisions" that are woven to create the fabric of our reality. In this sense, the future is already determined and, if the complexities of the interactions of all the myriad "decisions" could only be processed by our feeble minds, can be predicted.

The issue of "free will" is so horribly muddled as to be hardly worth talking about. I will now talk about it.

• Conscious beings do not have access to some mysterious decision-making force capable of overriding physics.

• Even if we did, even if our decisions came from some force outside the investigable laws of physics, there would still be an underlying right answer to the question "How does that force work?", even if we can never know the answer; to project our ignorance onto our conception of its nature and to deem it "free" on that basis is a serious map-territory confusion. Whatever it is that results in our decisions can be systematic, random, or some combination of the two, but I don't see any coherent alternatives. If you taboo "free", "choice", "will", "decide", etc., and unpack all of your thoughts about them, you ultimately end up with something deterministic. And there's nothing wrong with that.

• "You" have a will (a set of desires and goals) and an ability to act upon it (within some external and psychological constraints — not completely freely) at the level of abstraction where there's a "you" to talk about. The fact that this can still be reduced to perfectly normal physics does not mean it's not worth talking about (just because something is made out of other things does not mean you can't think of it as real). Similarly, reducing morality to a phenomenon of minds does not make it useless or incoherent. "You" are morally responsible for your actions at the level where there's a "you" and "morality" to talk about.

• Seemingly random quantum events do not have anything to do with free will. Even if it did have some significant influence on our behaviour (and it most likely doesn't unless you're making decisions based on one of those websites that generates random numbers from radioactive decay), you know you're confused when you find being controlled by random laws to be more "free" than existing as part of a deterministic framework.

The reason why so many people are confused about whether or not humans have free will is because they think their introspection is perfectly accurate. That's not how it works. If you look at what people are actually talking about when they say, "I have free will", "I made this choice of my own free will", or the like, they are talking about a capacity to act in accordance with their own desires and values. Only on occasions far outside normal circumstances is this capacity impaired.

Free will is the ability to systematically act in accordance with one's desires. This is enabled, not threatened, by determinism.

It is my belief that everyone naturally practices self-preservation.No one willingly choses something that hurts themselves or other people,because you can't hurt someone else without being affected by it and hurting yourself.When people hurt themselves or others,it's only because they felt powerless over their feelings and felt that it would cause them less pain.Generally,we don't have freewill because we don't know what we're doing.There are tons of misconceptions and unhealthy perceptions we are unaware of,which cause us to form intents,which then lead us to actions which are more like impulses and then we are hurt and sorry.I don't believe people actually will evil.It is more like an accident

you have free will. you never do anything in your life that you don't have the choice to do. You don't have to breathe if you don't want to. but you choose to. You don't have to read this comment if you don't want to, but you choose to. You have the will to fight back or the will to surrender. If a teacher tells you to sit down, regardless of the consequences, you still have the will to obey or disobey.