[colanderman]

Yep. This is what I mean by my second paragraph -- when I believe something else to be free-willed is exactly when I cannot predict its actions, but believe it to be capable of doing so (i.e., it believes itself to have free will). So, a pachinko ball, while its haphazard movement is unpredictable by me, does not have free will, because it does not have the capability to predict its own movement. Nor does an individual ant, since I can predict its actions in response to chemical stimuli, regardless of whether it can.

Whereas myself... I know people in general can have a variety of responses to any given stimuli. But I know exactly what response I will have to a stimuli that has just occurred. From my point of view, I am very free-willed! After all, I'm "choosing" one out of a multitude of possible responses to this stimuli. But really, my "choice" is determined by physics, and the illusion of free will is exactly that I -- as the sole entity with the capability to observe my own internal state -- can predict my response, and no-one else can.

I think also, an additional factor is that of volition: the actions I take should somehow derive from, and act to fulfill, what I consider to be my (chemically deterministically determined) desires. Otherwise I might perceive "someone else" to be in control of my person.

[jymbo]

I like to think of things like hurricanes as kinda proto-alive things, in the sense that they are somewhat unpredictable, though have dynamic structure and somewhat maintains that structure in the face of chaotic environment.

But, if we were to speed your brain up a million times, when you look at my brain, it might seem a lot more predictable - much more like an inert machine than a dynamic animal. So there's a kind of relativism to whether one subject perceives another subject as "alive" or free-willed, given their own context.