[DougEiffel]

The only reason I sometimes hesitate to agree with this line of thinking is precisely because we have the ability to think about free will at all.

I can take a moment right now to consider whether I want to lift my right hand over my head - to no benefit of my own. I can also consider how free will plays into that and decide to lift my left hand instead, stay with my right hand, or lift no hands at all.

When you have the ability to do that, I think you have free will. At least, you have the closest thing to free will anyone can ever have.

By the way, I wiggled my right foot. That was my decision after my comment.

[ethanbond]

All of your thoughts of lifting your right hand or to wiggle your foot were downstream of reading my comment. You can definitely have thoughts before making actions, but you don’t choose to have the thought. It just appears!

[Planktonne]

Are you not capable of thinking about something deliberately?

If so, I would be cautious about generalising that limitation to other people.

[ethanbond]

What was responsible for the idea to think about something deliberately?

[Planktonne]

Any one of a number of things, one of which is volition.

The majority of people are capable of determining both proximal and ultimate causes/motivations for their actions. They're influenced by external stimuli, sure, but humans are capable of directing their thoughts deliberately to, for example, perform simple mental arithmetic.

Every time someone thinks "What's 20% of 38?" or "How do I spell conceive?" or "What's the quickest way to Dave's house?", they are triggering a mental process. They are choosing to focus their thoughts in a particular direction to get a result that they will then use in future decision making.

It's not relevant what caused the thought that led to them making the decision; the decision still gets made and acted on by the person. The sequence of thoughts from the decision point to the result/abandonment is volitional.

Is that really not something you can do?

[ethanbond]

You cannot hear or read "What's 20% of 38?" and choose whether to process it or not. Your brain might resolve that into the correct answer, an incorrect answer, or a refusal to answer, but your brain just does it. If it's not your brain producing the sensation you call "volition," what is? If it is your brain, then what mechanism causes it that's neither deterministic nor random?

[Planktonne]

If that was true, then all mathematics teaching would be both impossible and superfluous.

You don't choose whether or not to process the audio, but you absolutely do choose to do the mathematical processing to arrive at an answer. If that's a struggle to contemplate, increase the complexity of the problem until you can't reach the answer in one step, and then you should see the chain of thought.