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wisnij comments on Absolute denial for atheists - Less Wrong
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That "free will", at least as commonly defined, is largely illusory.
What's the "common definition" you're drawing on?
"The ability for a consciousness to nondeterministically make choices"?
But what does that mean? I've asked people who believe in libertarian free will what they are getting at many times. They do not mean that actions are random, and they don't believe they're determined by prior states of affairs. I literally cannot wrap my mind around what else might be possible, let alone what other possible thing could reasonably go by the name "freedom".
They're trying to pretend that the model that we had before we had any idea how the brain worked is still correct. It doesn't mean anything, it's just commonly taken as a given. It would be stupid to say it was random and depressing (but true!) to say that choices are a function of brain states.
As someone who audited a three-credit "Action and Responsibility" class in college, my impression is that there is no more explanation to be had. There are some people who construct more elaborate theories which do have internals (cf. Robert Kane - actually, his "A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will" is short, readable, and accurate as an introduction to the classic theories and to his own), but the "naive libertarians" refuse to believe that it is any more complicated than that.
Edit: What am I doing? You're training to be a philosopher! You're the one who should be telling me!
When I say free will, I mean that I'm too ignorant to use production rules in a given optimization search space.
The notion "a common notion of 'free will' exists" is largely illusory.
That doesn't make life any less enjoyable.