I agree with this. Whether is does or not, changes nothing. That is my opinion anyway. I just be :)

I wonder where this sense of duality comes from? You are the sum of your synapses doing the work. You did do the work and the appropriate response to that is thankfulness. (reinforcing your good behavior)

There is no pre-programming (well there is a lot actually but not on a case by case basis) and while your behavior may be predictable up to a point, there is also the problem of not being able to fully understand/measure a system from within that system. To us, the future is unknowable.

Perhaps free will is simply a by product of the evolution of our brain. The main purpose of the brain is pattern recognition, identifying cause and effect, predicting outcomes while determining causes. Turn that onto itself and the brain comes up with free will and perhaps consciousness as an explanation of its inner workings. God made the earth, free will makes me choose. Could it be as simple as that.

Perhaps not believing in free will has been weeded out by evolution. If as you say not believing in free will leads to why laugh, why love, why do anything. Not a good recipe for procreation. Same as brains that believe there is no point to life are going to procreate as fast or even at all. We're all a product of millions of years of natural selection, which has very much shaped the way we think.

Back to the duality. Why is it not you doing the good deeds if free will is a myth. Why should you not be rewarded. It's still you weighing up the actions and deciding to do the good thing, whether it's chemicals and electrical signals in a neural network making the decision, or something else.

Studies have shown that not believing in free will can have a negative impact on your work proficiency and a lot of other things in your life. It can make you less dedicated to everything basically. So evolutionarily, it totally makes sense that we believe in free will, even if it is an illusion. It is as they say, ignorance is bliss.

I didn't expect to trigger a drawn out debate between you and Teeqoz but he pretty much covered it ... 

As Teeqoz mentioned you don't get to choose your behaviour since your body dominates your mind and not the other way around so it's exactly like I meant ... 

The closest thing that your going to get to "free will" is being able to act on the nonpredetermined future and even then how we act is based off of our feedback system ... 

Teeqoz is absolutely right that it boils down to a crazy complex chain of chemical reactions and that we should stop being so arrogant in comparison to animals when their "decision making" process is fundamentally the same as ours ... 

I've read most of the posts here, so it actually comes to this:

People who believe in Free Will have issues to understand the part of physics in this equation or ignore those completely. But what I miss most of the time is your lack of understanding your choice. If you can choose between 2 different things and go for one of them and argue you could also go for the second, than why didn't you in the first place? <- That's the main question in this debate. Why did you choose? When your answer is: I don't know, I felt like it, then you are ignorant of your own thoughts and are unable to provide any deeper insight of how you work. I would even go as far and tell you, that you don't understand yourself.

People who don't believe in Free Will like me, using methods like logical deduction, known laws of physics, knowledge of neuroscience, observation and skepticism (to some degree) in the equation. I for instance question every thought I make. Why do I think that way, what made me think that way. Where does these thoughts came from. And all I see is the trail and chain of previous thoughts and informations leading to the ones I currently have. Thus, I can see what previos thought made my choice.

Your consciousness is always the last one who receives information. Several parts of your brain, which you cannot alter at any given time, determine what your senses receive from the outside world. And according to those information, the brain will release specific Hormons and trigger specific behaviour depending on what it receives. Again, you (let's say as the consciousness) have mostly no influence to this. That's the subconsciousness. After that is done, you will be made aware of those things. Meaning, you also have a lag to reality, because of the processing time your brain needs. That's a fact. 

When we talk about triggers in the brain, laws of physics and causality. We go down to the neuron level, the part where electrons are traveling from one cell to the other one. The part which makes you think. What triggers thoughts. When we say that Free Will could break the laws of physics, then the following will happen at that level.

Causality should be a term everyone should understand by now. The simple cause and effect. The way everything physical works in this world. I would even go further, but let's stay a bit away from quantum mechanics, because it is unnecessary. If someone would possess the ability of Free Will. Meaning, acting differently in the same specific situation, it would look like this:

You have the option to choose between to different things. Your brain receives certain information through your senses for these 2 different things and makes you aware of it. Different thoughts will emerge in your consciousness making a debate of what to choose. You going through a list of pro's and con's to determine your choice. During your debate of thought more information perceive through your senses and going constantly into your thought process building an equation. At one point you become aware of the time which went by and decide to (another choice being made) ...due to your other tasks which have to be done (Chilling, working, having fun, whatsever) you have to come to a conclusion. All the thought processing is done and your choice should go to A. Well, you go for B and don't understand why. Something in your brain triggered on it's own without a cause which changed your decision and threw all your reason over board. You didn't wanted to go for B, but all of a sudden you did. That's what you would call Free Will. So, what the fuck happened? It seems some neurons triggered randomly which led you to choose one over the other by completely ignoring the causality of your brain and overwrote your thought process.
But, wait, something is not right. You didn't went with B. You went with C. But that didn't was a part of the debate. What the hell is going on? Nothing makes any sense anymore. Why did you stopped breathing? Are trying to kill yourself? For fucking sake, Neurons! Stop shooting randomly.

Later at the Hospital: Congratulations, you have Free Will. Nah, I'm kidding, that's tourette. Something is triggering your Neurons to shoot, and we can't figure out what it is.

OK, just to sum up this strange example. Free Will wouldn't wait for the choice to be made, it would be active all the time and randomly trigger thoughts and everything without ever being a cause for this. A neuron shooting is caused by another one doing the same and so on and so on and from the beginning your brain as been built.

Hope that helps... more or less.

That's correct. We have a larger thought processing, memory capazity and thus, awareness of time itself.

The consequences of not believing in Free Will can lead to fatalism.

We must go deeper.. deeper than those drain signals, chemicals and electrical impulses. Our brain is made up of atoms, and those atoms is made up of electrons and neutrons but even deeper than that is quarks..Still even more deeper...Higgs Bosons.. and.. deeper still? Photons? At what point are we different from the air that we breathe and the light that we see?

I don't believe in free will either, for all the already mentioned reasons. On the other hand, I guess there is a certain truth in the following:

In the end, this question is really only/most relevant when it comes to people committing crimes. The absence of a free will leads to a certain dilemma in this respect, because it doesn't fit very well with our traditional understanding of people wilfully deciding to act "evil". If their actions were ultimately deterministic, it's questionable how much they can actually even be considered responsible etc. I guess we prefer the idea of simply placing all responsibility solely on the one "evil", misled homidical maniac/terrorist/whatever who must be punished, instead of considering his behaviour the product of circumstances that ultimately everyone and nobody is responsible for.

Maybe it really makes sense what some people say: There is no free will, but we still have to act like there is.

It's a sociologically proven fact free will exist, as long as you take into account education, upbringing, job, family, friends and other sources of influence.

So no, free will does exist.