CHOICE... is still ours. It is as individual as our fingerprints.
You can choose what you believe but why is the reason you must account for to yourselves as individuals.
Choice is either:
a) the consequence of those events which have gone before, those which have shaped your character, determined your mood at the time and determined the information available to your consciousness. If this is the case, then it is not free at all; or
b) independent of those events which have occured before, in which case whilst it might be considered 'free' it cannot be 'will' as it is essentially random.
Our will, our thought patterns, are determined by the genetic tendencies we inherit, the epigenetic influences upon those traits, and then the accumulation of our experiences and the sequence in which they occur, which determines our constantly updating and changing character and body of experience.
There is no mechanism for a 'will' component independent of these influences.
People do not 'choose' what to believe, though they could be considered in the common understanding to have a degree of choice over what experiences they expose themselves to in order to shape the subconscious that determines their beliefs.
We have arguments about free will because people think they have no choice in the decisions they make. When they confuse their own self control with the ability to choose.
No, this is not a confusion of 'self-control' with the idea of 'free will'.
You don't eat the things you don't like.
But you don't choose to like or dislike those things, either, those are inevitable consequences of the chemical activity within the taste-buds, the state of the brain at the time of exposure and previous experience and association.
If starving you would eat the things you don't like because you would feel you had no choice. In reality you still have the choice you just do not want to die.
Yet despite that 'choice' about whether to act or not, you can't 'choose' to like or dislike what you are eating just because you're hungry.
When it comes to being human we make choices for ourselves based on how we feel as individuals and what we want.
And how we feel and what we want are, themselves, determined by prior events: that's why our will isn't free, our 'will' at any given point in time is the inevitable consequence of the conditions that were present before we existed.
Sometimes you have to overcome the physical senses to find the reality of your choices...
And having the previous experience to lead to the situation where you could ignore the influence of a particular sensory input is, itself, a function of that previous experience.
O.
