Summary

We want to believe that we have free will.  We want to believe that we are fully in control of our actions, that what we do is carefully considered rather than the result of a complex system of automatic responses. However, our actions are dictated by our mental makeup and our circumstances. Note that the definition is key here: we do not have philosophical free will (i.e. philosophical free will would mean there is some other internal factor beyond makeup and circumstances), but we do have practical free will in that the factors that dictate our actions are so fantastically complex that they are impossible to predict in practice. It is because of this that we are so susceptible to the belief that we have philosophical free will; that is how it feels to us.

Process

Underlying axioms and provisional beliefs:

• Skepticism
  • If you take away the primal desire to believe that we have free will there is no reason to believe that we do