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by xaa 3249 days ago
I was really into this question a few years ago. I had quite a bit of existential angst about it as well.

I read Penrose, etc, but at the end of it could not find any plausible mechanism for humans having free will in the sense of uncaused causation. But I use a modified version of Daniel Dennett's take on it: we CAN choose, we just can't choose what we choose.

Another way of looking at it is to have two different "modes" for thinking of free will: in everyone's daily lives, they use the "traditional" view (how else could we have such things as moral praise or blame?), but when you look at the human brain as a physical system, you use the deterministic/pseudodeterministic view.