When the behavior of organisms is concerned, the lawful mechanisms are conventionally categorized into those that operate from the inside and those that operate from the outside. Biologist Anthony Cashmore recently put it this way: Behavior is the result of "a trinity of forces," namely "genes, environment, and stochasticism" (i.e., chance; from the Greek word for guessing). What else is there? Cashmore argues that to assume the existence of free (uncaused) will is to assume the existence of a magical cause, that is, a cause that springs from nothing. To ensure that free will is independent from brain processes, it must be located beyond the physical world encased by the cranium, so Cashmore. Hence, the idea of free will requires a dualist philosophy, which allows non-physical systems to act on the physical world. Belief in free will is philosophically the same as belief in a soul that is independent of the body.

Most advocates of free will do not deny most of the universe's (and the brain's) deterministic machinery. They rather believe that unless mechanistic science explains everything, there is room for free will. Notice that this argument does not refute soft determinism because soft determinism allows for irreducible uncertainty arising from chance. In other words, belief in free will is compatible with (soft) determinism.

Or is it? Like any belief that wants to be part of the scientific conversation, the belief in free will must have a foundation that is broader than mere faith. The problem is that free will requires irreducible unpredictability, which makes it tough to distinguish from chance. The burden is on those who believe in free will to show how freely willed behavior can be distinguished from random behavior. I am aware of no successful attempt to do so.

What we have instead is the subjective feeling that a behavior is freely willed. This feeling can be quite powerful, but it is easily mistaken. Suppose I have a choice between watching a movie with Cecile de France and watching a documentary on basket weaving in the Mato Grosso. I enthusiastically choose the former and claim that I am doing so freely. No one is holding a gun to my head, after all. Indeed, my choice is intentional because I have a desire to see Cecile and I am terribly indifferent about baskets. Intentionality does not presuppose freedom, however. I am comfortable with the idea that my desire to see Cecile is fully determined by my genetically and environmentally shaped schemas of attractive people. Every time we make a choice forcefully, confidently, and comfortably, it is easy to construct a causal account using pre-existing preferences that match the properties of the stimulus. We should want it to be so for without preferences and other features of our character how could we maintain a sense of identity? A perfectly free person would have no personality.

Now consider a choice between watching a documentary on basket making in the Mato Grosso and a documentary on basket-making in lower Patagonia. This shapes up to be a yawn for someone like me. There is no strong preference either way. Yet, I have to choose [if I am denied the freedom not to choose, even this scenario has its own constraints]. I could toss a physical coin and let randomness decide or I could toss a mental coin [remember the dice man]. It is hard, if not impossible, to mentally simulate randomness. Perhaps it is here that I can lay a claim for free will. But even if so, it would be the kind of free will least worth having. It would be the freedom to choose among options that we do not care about. Think of the child that wants the chocolate pudding, whereas the parents offer a choice between broccoli and spinach. The choice the child cares about is determined by the physiology of desire.

What if desire favors both options? Say you have a choice between going out with Brad, who is rich and handsome, and going out with George, who is loyal and who enjoys discussing his feelings. If the pull of both is equally strong, isn't this a perfect opportunity to freely break the decisional gridlock? Perhaps, but notice again the difficulty of ruling out chance or a subtle inequality in the strength of desire. Indeed, when approach - approach conflicts come to a head (figuratively and literally), individuals tend to become distressed. Instead of enjoying the golden opportunity to exercise free will, they want to discover their true preference, the stronger preference, the preference that tells them who they really are. In short, they place their hopes in determinism.

After considering avoidance - avoidance conflicts (basket weaving) and approach - approach conflicts (desirable dates), what's left are approach - avoidance conflicts. Long the subject of behavioral studies, these conflicts are now prominent in the literature on "intertemporal choice" or "discounting." George Loewenstein puts the problem sharply, saying that in the typical conflict pits an immediate, viscerally gratifying reward against a larger but more distant and cerebral reward. Whether an individual yields to temptation must be, in large part, a function of how much desire the immediate reward stokes.

From the perspective of free will, a person is said to have the choice to resist temptation no matter how strong that temptation is. Notice that this is a much stronger claim than the one I introduced earlier. There is no search for a decision region here that is left open by soft determinism. Here, we have the idea that free will can and must trump determinism. In my view, this feature makes the claim a moralistic one. It sets the stage for the disbursement of blame and praise, respectively after yielding to and resisting temptation. This notion treats free will as true by definition. You yield to temptation because you want to; after all, you could decide differently. Hence, you must be blamed. You resist temptation because you want to; you could decide differently. As I enjoy ironies, how about this one: Does it ever occur to moralists to stop blaming the tempters and the tempted? Can they not choose not to blame? Or is it a free will for you but not for the judge?

In approach - avoidance conflicts, we often experience our mental deliberations as hard work. Effortful reasoning is time-consuming, mentally costly, and even painful. We can literally feel the price we're paying, and that price is measured in burnt calories. It is tempting [ ☺ ] to conclude that we engage in this sort of reasoning only out of our own free will. But then again, why freely choose a taxing activity? I rather think that the idea of identifying effortful thinking with free thinking is a derivative of the idea that "If all thinking is the reflection of fully deterministic brain processes, then there is no point why these processes should feel like work," which leads to the conclusion that "If thinking feels like work, it must be free." This conclusion comes from modus tollens [proof by denial] or the negation of the consequent, and it is valid. The question is, of course, whether the original if-then claim is empirically true. Surely, many deterministic processes consume a lot of energy (e.g., turning milk into butter). This means we have no empirical basis to begin with the claim that "If thinking is deterministic, it must be easy."