That we have apparent free will, is eeerm, apparent. Lots of things seem untuitively undeniable to us, but that is often a facet of how things seem to us. The chair I am sitting on feels solid, but it isn't, really. Look out of the window, the sky looks blue, but it isn't, really. I feel like a human, but by cell count I am really a bacterial colony on legs. But for most practical purposes I can go about life enjoying the blueness of the sky and the comfort of my armchair; when I am introduced to someone I don't bother introducing also the billions of cohabiting microbes that form the bulk of me. Likewise i can go around making choices happily without consideration for whether my choices are truly free or are they ultimately largely predetermined. So long as it feels free then I am happy with that. But if you want to develop a deeper understanding of what we are, that entails delving down and dismissing our illusions in order to come to terms with the underlying realities of life, and there is nothing that we have discovered through research that would lend support to the idea that we are truly free. Like all else in life, we are the ultimately products of natural law, our choices express natural law, we cannot fashion it, subvert it, avoid it, or remake it by willpower.
So sometimes what seems obviously true is not true. I don't think anyone would disagree with that, but what evidence is there that freewill does not exist? We could bung in lots of words instead of "free will" in your statement. Let's try "external minds".
That there are apparently external minds, is eeerm, apparent. "Lots of things seem untuitively undeniable to us, but that is often a facet of how things seem to us. The chair I am sitting on feels solid, but it isn't, really. Look out of the window, the sky looks blue, but it isn't, really. I feel like a human, but by cell count I am really a bacterial colony on legs. But for most practical purposes I can go about life enjoying the blueness of the sky and the comfort of my armchair; when I am introduced to someone I don't bother introducing also the billions of cohabiting microbes that form the bulk of me. Likewise i can go around making choices happily without consideration for whether my choices are truly free or are they ultimately largely predetermined. So long as it feels free then I am happy with that. But if you want to develop a deeper understanding of what we are, that entails delving down and dismissing our illusions in order to come to terms with the underlying realities of life, and there is nothing that we have discovered through research that would lend support to the idea that we are truly free. Like all else in life, we are the ultimately products of natural law, our choices express natural law, we cannot fashion it, subvert it, avoid it, or remake it by willpower."
See? I've changed the subject of your statement and it no more demonstrates that external minds (external to mine or yours) do not exist than your original statement demonstrated the non-existence of free will.
I don't think you thought that through very well, if your point is that solipsism is demonstrated by application of the same logic. That there are external minds is both apparent, intuitively valid and consistent with science; free-will on the other hand is intuitive, apparent, but not consistent with science.
How is free will not consistent with science?
Science has revealed an observed, material world that is ovewhelmingly true to the principal of cause and effect. Victorian science gave us a clockwork universe with no room at all for freedom from determinism; now the issue is muddied by discovery of the quantum substrate in which unobserved reality is probabilistic and perhaps whereas Sartre gave us
existence precedes essence, we could now mischieviously add
probability precedes existence but notwithstanding that the notion of free-will offends the principal of cause and effect which is seen to pertain at the levels of chemistry, biology and up. Things happen for a reason; a ball thrown in the air pretty much always comes back down again, it rarely ever flies off at a tangent or morphs into a bowl of petunuias. If we make a choice, it must be for a reason, even if we cannot discern the reason.
Those who argue that quantum indeterminacy could be a basis for free will are arguing a foolish case. There may be some genuine randomness in the cosmos, in which case there might be some randomness in the choices made in human brains but randomness is an enemy of purposefulness, you cannot claim accidental choices as part of your volition. What any such indeterminacy would give us would be a measure of (relative) unpredictability; this would be of potential value to a prey animal (which humans are) as a predators depend on their ability to predict the behaviour of their prey. Unpredictabiity could be of value to adaptive predators (which humans are) as it would help them to explore a greater diversity of opportunities and niches. But unpredictability is not will.
Will is a manifestion of the ubiquitous principal of cause and effect at the messy complex level of animal behaviours and I see nothing from biology or neuroscience to suggest that human brains are so categorically different from other animal brains as to suppose that humans can escape the great chain of cause and effect. Things happen for reasons, and it is good that it is so.
