Perhaps we should also ask "Why do we feel we have free will?". The simplest answer, of course, is that we actually do. Albeit, it wouldn't be beyond the scope of human biases to believe that we do if we don't. Ultimately, if we were certain that we couldn't feel more like we have free will than we already do, then we could reduce the question "Do we have free will?" to "Would someone without free will feel any differently than we do?".
Taboo "free will" and then defend that the simplest answer is that we have it. X being true is weakly correlated to us believing X, where belief in X is an intuition rather than a conclusion from strong evidence.
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.