I understand, sort of, the positions in the free will debate. I am mostly interested in the cognitive part of it, what would it feel like to not have one, in order to pinpoint what people really mean when talking about free will, as opposed to what they say/think they mean. I found almost no discussions of this among philosophers, not surprisingly.
I would expect to have a very hard time predicting my behavior or explaining it after the fact with any kind of rational model. If I did have reasons and preferences to back up my decisions they would probably be invented after the decision had been made. Post-facto rationalizations instead of genuine reflection about the decision. Also, I would probably feel like I had a lot of reasons and preferences that contradicted each other and would often find myself doing x even though I wanted to want to not do x.
Rest assured, I have never experienced any of that.
Of course not, neither have I. That's just crazy talk.
I found almost no discussions of this among philosophers, not surprisingly.
Not surprisingly because there are so many thousands of articles and books on free will that it's hard sort through them, or not surprisingly because you found that philosophers (as you expected) did not discuss the phenomenology of free will in those many thousands of articles and books?
In my experience, it is almost impossible to find any (not obviously false) idea that hasn't been pretty throughly discussed at some point. One of the greatest things about, say, the idea of FAI...
Given the spike in free-will debates on LW recently (blame Scott Aaronson), and the usual potentially answerable meta-question "Why do we think we have free will?", I am intrigued by a sub-question, "what would it feel like to have/not have free will?". The positive version of this question is not very interesting, almost everyone feels they have free will most all the time. The negative version is more interesting and I expect the answers to be more diverse. Here are a few off the top of my head, not necessarily mutually exclusive:
Epistemic:
Psychological:
Physical:
For me personally some of these are close to the feeling of "no free will" than others, but I am not sure if any single one crosses the boundary.
I am sure that there are different takes on the answers and on how to categorize them. I think it would be useful to collect some perspectives and maybe have a poll or several after.