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Squark comments on Explanations for Less Wrong articles that you didn't understand - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'll take a shot at it:
1) On the one hand, the natural world of which we are a part is governed by laws, in the sense that any causal relations within the natural world obey law-like (if probabilistic) principles. Any effect is the necessary result of some sufficiently rich set of antecedent causes plus the laws that govern the relations between them. Human beings are natural objects, subject to the same physical laws as everything else. Further, our minds are likewise the product of law like causal relationships.
2) On the other hand, human thought and action does not obey law-like principles, except normatively. Nothing we do or think is the result of necessity.
(1) and (2) seem to be inconsistent. Either one of the two is false, or they merely appear inconsistant.
That's the problem of free will as I understand it.
To me, (2) seems obviously false. You cannot predict what you're going to do before you decide what you're going to do. Therefore from an inside view, it seems to be unpredictable. But from an outside view, it is perfectly predictable.
I didn't say anything about predictability though. To my mind, prediction is not relevant to free will either way.