Well, not really.

It's especially important in punishment for crimes. In many (modern at that) countries today, people are still punished for the sake of punishing the one who comitted the crime. If there is no free will, then there is no rational reason for punishment for punishment's sake, and the only reason to punish criminals is to avoid crimes being comitted in the future, by the person himself, or by others.

Isn't...punishing the criminal an act of deterrence in almost every case, instead of your punishing because of yes scenario?

It would still be a result of the laws of physics, it's just that the input led to that being the result of the chemical reactions and electricalt impulses.

"rational" and "irrational" does, as Peh said, not have any impact on this.

Well in your sense I think metaphysics delves into that and the hard part is proving or disproving anything since you can't carry out scientific evidence on having a soul or not. Yet when you die, theoretically if all of your cells are brought back to life, you would live again but practically that does not happen and science has a difficulty explaining death so until death is explained I don't think we can truly know free will exists or not. Is the chemical process the causal phenomena or is it caused by something we can't fully comprehend. Are the chemicals just a physical messenger of the body to do the action or are they the ones creating the action directly? I believe in souls so I think free will is there at least in that metaphysical sense but it's not there in a political sense. But that's another discussion altogether

I don't really understand where you are going.

You can't beat or break the laws of physics. Meaning, you can't move your pinky finger without willing to do so.

Deterrence is often part of the motivation, but like I said, in many modern countries, part of the reason for punishment is the punishment itself, regardless of how preventive it is.

Explaining consciousness on a scientific level is really difficult to do. As far as I know, being able to create memories and having a sense of time can be the key elements for having a consciousness.

What if you dream of doing so? What if you dream impossible figures or situations? Is dreaming an act of free will or also a result of physics?

Not sure I agree there. I would argue the punishment reason in both modern and old countries was the deterrence itself. You forbid people of doing certain things because of the punishment; you don't arbitrary chose to punish a behaviour just because.

If you know every single physical constituent of the universe at one moment and all physical laws, you can determine exactly what the universe will look like after any given time. But you can't so it may look like free will exists.