Darnit, you had to write this while I was out of the country with limited Internet access, so now you'll never read my insightful (and two weeks late) comment, the crux of which is "I've been thinking much the same thing, as a rebuttal to your previous posts about free will."

I recall in a much earlier post you set up a test of free will as something like this: If a surgeon can trigger the exact neurons in your brain to make your arm raise, and yet you can keep it from happening (or vice-versa), you have free will.

I recall rephrasing it in high-level technical terms as "you have free will only if you can overcome the limitations of our mind/body hardware." It immediately became as useful/interesting to me as saying "You have no free will because you can't flap your arms and fly to the moon, no matter how much you think you will it."

But it did get me thinking that we shouldn't be asking whether or not we have free will, but what are the limitations of free will? For example, we've witnessed for a long time that addiction seems to override/limit free will, and yet very few people make the leap from "some people get addicted to drugs and can't control their behavior" to "free will doesn't exist." Obviously we believe that free will is limited/can be limited by overriding factors, so what really are the limitations of free will? I should say that I started out believing in free will, so I was definitely looking at this as a rebuttal to your earlier posts.

We can pretty easily set the extreme possibilities. On one end free will doesn't exist at all (can you think of a limitation greater than non-existence?) It's completely an illusion, you're not even self-programming you're just pre-programmed to think and act as if you are. On the other end, free will is absolute. You actually can flap your arms and fly to the moon if you really concentrated right. I think it's safe-ish to say that reality is somewhere in the middle.

I didn't use the words "self-programming," but now that you wrote them I realize that's a perfect term for the model of free will I hypothesized. I postulated that all immediate actions are simple stimulus-response interractions--no thought and therefore no "free will" involved. However, while you cannot change the response to a stimulus you've already experienced, you can through conscious thought and actions modify the (probabilities of) responses to future stimuli. Note that it doesn't need to be deterministic--"I want to do this therefore this always happens" to work. If a dieter breaking down and eating a delicious chocolate cake is an example of no free will, the weeks of successful starvation before that point should be considered an example of free will (it's just an example of the limitations of free will).

Now here's a trick I think we all do to more or less extent. For a wide range of stimuli, we've self-programmed ourselves for the response to be...do nothing. For the very contemplative/serene, perhaps that's the response to all but life-threatening stimuli. For the more impulsive, it's only the response to completely boring stimuli. The interesting thing about the "do nothing" response is the stimuli almost never goes away, so you keep responding "do nothing" to this stimuli. Now while this stimulus-->"do nothing" subroutine runs along, you can consciously decide how best to respond when the stimulus next comes along. And sure enough, a split second later that stimulus is still there and instead of "do nothing" you "respond like I decided I would". To all outside (and maybe inside) observers, it looked like stimulus-->thought-->response (it could've all been done in less than a second, depending on how fast your brain works). Illusion of free will achieved!

So...if my model of human thought is correct (and for the record, I see no reason to believe that many higher animals don't think similarly), the question is this: Is a background program running a "do nothing" subroutine really the difference between no free will and free will?

Anyway, I really just wanted to say that you must be a very brilliant man to come over to my way of thinking without me ever having to explain it to you (at least, not until you already got there). Either that, or my powers of persuasion are so incredible that they're psychic.