Uh, sorry, I should have phrased it differently. What I meant was not just that this angle is probably not very popular, but also that it is hard to find, given that the specific language philosophers would use would be unfamiliar and non-obvious to someone outside the field. Additionally, it would be a topic more likely to be studied in neuroscience, psychology or even psychiatry than in philosophy of mind. Routine paywalling doesn't help, either. But yes, I also admit to a certain prejudice against a discipline which has multiple warring schools arguing opposite points with no ability to reconcile them. It's like if physics was mostly arguing about interpretations of QM.
Anyway, thanks for the links, I'll see if I can find something relevant. Feel free (as in "free will") to link if you come across something, as well. I'm looking at the Searle's article you linked (pdf), and it has one working definition of the feeling of free will:
I did not sense the antecedent causes of my action as setting causally sufficient conditions. I did not sense the reasons for making the decision as causally sufficient to force the decision, and I did not sense the decision itself as causally sufficient to force the action. In typical cases of deliberating and acting, there is, in short, a gap, or a series of gaps between the causes of each stage in the processes of deliberating, deciding and acting, and the subsequent stages. If we probe more deeply we can see that the gap can be divided into different sorts of segments. There is a gap between the reasons for the decision and the making of the decision. There is a gap between the decision and the onset of the action, and for any extended action, such as when I am trying to learn German or to swim the English Channel, there is a gap between the onset of the action and its continuation to completion. [...] Without the conscious experience of the gap, that is, without the conscious experience of the distinctive features of free, voluntary, rational actions, there would be no problem of free will.
There is some more here.
I found no descriptions like "perception of lack of free will may manifest in the following ways..." As a result, the definition above is directly contradicted by some of the no-free-will accounts posted in the comments to the OP. That it takes only one post by an amateur on an online forum to poke holes in a well-cited paper of a renown professional philosopher is not very encouraging.
I donno, that description seems to me to capture in a general way most of what people have pointed to as the experience of (or lack of) free will. Searle might say that the experience of the lack of free will is the experience of there being no such gaps where we generally expect them. That is, the experience of anticedent causes or reasons being causally sufficient for an action in the way perceptions and the causes of perceptual experiences are causally sufficient to make me believe that there's a tree in front of me.
I mean, in some sense anyone who giv...
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.