Something is either determined or it is undetermined, to some degree random. We can make sense of no third option. The free will you want is apparently not compatible with determinism (too bad, mine is). But the free will you want is also not random- how could we be held responsible for a random event? Could a flip of a coin be what determines whether you act wrongly or rightly?
You ask for something that is neither determined nor undetermined and such a thing is impossible on pain of sacrificing the basic concepts we use to understand the world.
The perception of every human being who has ever lived and is alive today tells us clearly that our actions are based on free will decisions. I can change the way I feel, I can change the way I behave by exercising my free will. I can decide what I want to think about and when I want to think about it. I can decide whether to shut off the alarm and go back to sleep or get out of bed early and do my daily exercise regimen.
Of course we can. But that isn't evidence of the sort of free will you're talking about. I can do whatever I want. It just so happens that what I want is causally determined. That's okay, almost everything is causally determined. The kind of free will you're talking about isn't even magic. At least everything Harry Potter, Santa Clause and Jesus do is conceptually coherent. Jesus didn't turn water into square circles!
You ask for something that is neither determined nor undetermined and such a thing is impossible on pain of sacrificing the basic concepts we use to understand the world.
Can you say a bit more about that? I dislike disturbing other's basic concepts of world-understanding without good reason, but my basic categories are simply threefold: it seems basic to me that events can be caused, chosen, or random.
To hear that it is impossible for something to be non-caused and non-random at the same time feels to me a bit like hearing that it's impossible for a color with a pure hue to be non-red and non-green; the answer is simply that the color must be blue.
A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).
ETA: It would seem that rationality quotes are no longer desired. After several days this thread stands voted into the negatives. Wolud whoever chose to to downvote this below 0 would care to express their disapproval of the regular quotes tradition more explicitly? Or perhaps they may like to browse around for some alternative posts that they could downvote instead of this one? Or, since we're in the business of quotation, they could "come on if they think they're hard enough!"