I usually pick up tomes on this subject and peruse them. The basic script is short and sweet: there is no evidence from neural biology that there is nothing in the nervous system that hasn’t arisen there: the notion of free will is a meaningless superaddition to the electrochemistry of nerve conduction. We cannot choose our path because the nervous system never presents a choice of paths. The key evidence cited is a classic study in which a subject (college sophomore?) is told to press a button when a particular image is displayed. Sure enough, they can do it, and quite ably. But, marvel of marvels, the instruction to push the button comes after the button push by no less than 3 μs. Thus, the reasoning goes, it could not possibly be the cause of the event, so free will is an illusion.
So what? It is just as easy to imagine that the 3μs pulse is not an instruction to push, so much as a query to determine that the pulse actually occurred. Such a sequence makes no evolutionary sense, because requiring that all actions be activated immediately by the CNS ineluctably slows the organism’s response and thus ensures its offensive/defensive capability is less than optimal, and hence likely to increase an individual's chance of dying early. Why not allow a lower threshold which does not require full CNS verification and is therefore faster (although thus more susceptible to error). I frequently have my own experience of something like this: namely, when I have my hearing tested. If I hear a sound, I must press a button. I am sure that I push the button more often than I hear sounds. Being on a knife edge, it is easy to slip to the wrong side. I am on a knife edge because of my conscious desire to comply with my instructions.
And that is the best definition of free will. My conscious desire to comply with the button push instruction is my intention to act. We form (for whatever reason) intentions: consciously accepted definitions for future actions. Somehow this intention then resets the sensitivity of certain neural (central and peripheral) neurons, making us more likely to act as we “intended” when the occasion arises. These actions then bend the future for us in ways which may or may not evolutionarily adaptive, but they may still be meaningful in achieving our personal goals. Thus, I chose to go to Harvard because of my prior intention to spend my adulthood either as a Methodist minister or a chemistry prof, and this intention led me to a whole raft of subsequent actions, one being an application for undergraduate work at Harvard.
The problem with arguments like Harris’s is that they embody the straw man fallacy. unless it is significant in all our neural choices, it is not free. Again, we are generally not very good at doing this, so natural selection seems to eliminated the possibility. [As Norman Thomas once put it, “I am glad I do not have to make hepatic decisions for my liver.”] It is our intentions that give us our sense of free will, much more than our immediate responses to novel situations. Not all choices are free of the neurochemical automata (reflexes?) with which nature has provided all mammals facing complex situations and capable of directed locomotion.
As a theist, I can only add: “Thank God, and, God willing, I will use my intentionality wisely."
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