Here's what I'm reading:
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I'm going to stop reading A Dance with Dragons and the two Star Wars books for now and wrap up Empire, Incorporated and Determined while I continue on with Das Kapital.
Bonus question:
What do you PLAN to read later on?
Enjoy!
The mental feeling of making choices and those choices being predetermined by material conditions aren't mutually exclusive. I use my will to make all kinds of choices, and I feel like I'm making them, but my decisions are still always a product of my environment/genetics/whatever.
It's why I don't feel like arguing about free will is particularly productive, since the actual reality doesn't change how that experience feels for people. It's like arguing about whether we live in the Matrix.
I'm not referring to the mental feeling. The system making those choices - my body - is me. It is the entirety of my being, completely synonymous with myself. That system processes inputs and performs outputs based on material rules. That process is the expression of free will. I am not a mental feeling inside of a disconnected body. I am the body. I am the system. To posit otherwise is non-materialistic.
It does not matter if my choices are deterministic. They are still my choices. There is no separation between me and the deterministic system. I am the deterministic system. The only definition of free will this doesn't meet is one that is arbitrarily spiritual/non-materialistic, as if free will by necessity must exist outside of physical reality and laws. I don't see any reason why that must be the case.
(again, assuming the premise of determinism is true, which is non-falsifiable)
It sounds like you're combining agency into your definition of free will. Yes, the mechanisms of your body's behavior (choices) are occurring inside your body, you have agency. But, Free Will implies that the mind has the ability to direct those choices beyond the realm of the material world's laws (i.e. physic; most especially, inertia.)
Does it? I don't see why that's the case. This claims that there is simply no such thing as a materialist concept of free will. That's creating a definition so narrow that it cancels itself out. In what way is free will different from agency? You operate from an assumption that the "the mind" is only valid if in some way immaterial, but why should that be?
I mean, really, what is the difference between free will and agency? If your definition of agency is just free will but material, then nothing about the conclusions you draw is any different from a materialist conception of free will and you have achieved nothing philosophically or scientifically.
To be honest, I'm not really interested in getting into it, I just wanted to clarify a conflation I thought you were making. You wanna hold on to those definitions it's fine by me.