"You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm." - Sam Harris
When Christopher Hitchens was asked if he believed in free will, he simply replied, "I have no choice."
As Dan Dennett said in Elbow Room, "...if the question of free will matters, it must be because not having free will would be awful."
Even Mike Huemer, in a philosophy paper that I'm too dumb to properly understand, I'll link to it above, argues only for minimal free will.
I think that Christopher Hitchens' witty remark which also lacks a specific answer is really how most people, if we were as smart as Hitch, would express how we feel about free will if we go beyond the assumptions that we make and the fact that we feel like we have free will.
I mentioned people across the spectrum of thinking on free will excluding the Deepak Chopra-esque woo woo involved in belief in complete libertarianism.
The thing is, Dan Dennett is certainly right about one thing: we don't like to think about not having free will or the potential limitations of free will.
The problem is that we know that those limitations exist. Determinism has to be true to some extent. We know that we can't change our sexual orientation; that's pretty much become commonly accepted in my lifetime. We know that we can't choose our parents. We can't choose the environment in which we're born. We can't even choose who we are. We know that thoughts emerge into consciousness rather than the other way around. It simply stands to reason that we can't choose to do what doesn't occur to us to do and what occurs to us is a result of prior causes whether they be nature or nurture.
So, look, I'm not as smart as any of the people who I mentioned; but, it's pretty clear that there's at least some truth to determinism and that free will is limited.
The majority of serious philosophical conversation about free will seems to be between hard determinism and those who argue that free will is compatible with a deterministic universe. Last I checked, most philosophers fall into the latter, "compatibilist" camp. Most of the people who fall into hard determinism seen to be in the hard sciences: people like Sam Harris. But, make no mistake, the reason why they call it "compatibilism" is because determinism is regarded to be true and that free will is compatible with it.
It's funny because, whenever I have had conversations with people with formal training in philosophy rather than simpleton autodidacts like me, I've always been told that the debate between hard determinism and compatibilism is mostly semantical.
For instance, there are discussions about the "internal dialog" that we (I'm using the word "we" liberally) have in our brains when we make certain decisions. But, even the internal dialog limits freedom. I was thinking of a city to name to use as an example of how our thoughts are created in a sort of abyss that emerges into our conciseness. I found myself picking been Los Angeles and Moscow. I got called away and, ten minutes later, Atlanta popped into my head. Why did I think of Moscow? I've never been to Moscow but I've been to Atlanta several times. Is it because I was reading Dostoevsky today? Well, that's still a prior cause. My decision to read him is a prior cause. I know a lot of people who are smarter and more voracious readers than I am who have never touched Russian literature. So, without the interruption, was I free to say "Atlanta," or, is my internal dialog limited by what emerges from the abyss? Even if it is, I'm aware of the choices that emerged and seemingly made a choice. Maybe that's the free will that we have. It's still significantly limited.
I know that people, especially libertarians, hate the idea of determinism; but, it seems evidently true that determinism is true to some extent. I don't know that hard determinism is true; but, I'm confident that the free will that most of us think that we have is an illusion.
Maybe it's true to say that the puppet is free so long as he likes his strings. Maybe we have more freedom than that. If determinism is true, there are still serious questions about how we deal with the puppets who don't like their strings or the ones who cause real damage to others.
Still, to dismiss determinism in it's entirety, especially to the point of not even acknowledging that free actors are interacting with a mostly deterministic universe, seems like a stretch that determinists don't need to make.
