[Vampiero]

Quantum events may be stochastic (there's still some hope for hidden variables though from what I understand -- either way, as far as the macroscopic world is concerned, it's basically random) but that doesn't mean that somewhere in that randomness a cosmic YOU is deciding anything. It just means it's random. Anything that follows after that is perfectly causal and determined and can be understood in the context of chaos theory.

So in this view consciousness is better explained as an illusion than as the seat of your will. Because you can't really have a will if every interaction that led to your existence can, in principle, be computed forward in time from the big bang. Physicalists see it as a complex emergent phenomenon akin to a run of Conway's Game of Life that started from a random seed.

[webmaven]

It's true that the quantum mechanical influence amounts to randomness, but you're missing that this (weak) randomness is constantly being injected into biological processes and amplified, it isn't a "one and done" random seed. So it isn't true that the consequences of living systems can be modeled and computed deterministically, even in principle. And this is even less true of intelligent systems like brains.

Whether that stochasticity amounts to free will is a separate discussion, but it is fairly clear to me that many of our decisions are consequential and AREN'T predetermined. Which at least sounds like free will, or close enough to warrant being treated as such, anyway.