Don’t you think you can make choices?
Not in any meaningful way. Can you?
What would you count as meaningful? Devoid of any necessity imposed from without or within? Choice from nothing is probably not possible. So I guess that makes us marionettes.
Without a puppeteer. But yeah. We come with strings attached. Pre-wired for experience. I’m amazed that no one can give me an example of free will making a difference. Not just here. Anywhere. Ever.
I think examples of what most people think of as free will are as common as dirt.
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How could you tell?
Aye. Please provide one. Just one. From today. That you exercised.
I have no idea. Have you?
FREE WILL IN ACTION; A case study
Today, as soon as I got home, I realized I’d left my library book at the Y. I considered driving back to get it. But decided to call instead and have them hold it for me until tomorrow when I’m going to an 8 a.m. pilates class anyhow. Of course that means I won’t have it to read as I’m going to sleep tonight but I decided I would forgo that to save myself an errand.
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And that demonstrates free will how?
True deeper_researcher. But neutral.
Had a free choice whether to go get the book today or wait for tomorrow. I opted for the latter.
Suppose my wife had held a gun to my head and said, go get it today. If someone asked if I had gotten it of my own free will I could factually claim I did not, that I had been coerced. But in the example I gave I was not coerced in my choice. So it is an example of an action taken freely.
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You were coerced by rationality.
If someone chooses to believe that free will does not exist, how could anyone demonstrate to them that that it does? It would be precluded a priori by their worldview. “Hyper-Calvinism” comes to mind.
It can also be used to relieve oneself from any personal responsibility and liability, a cop-out and a victim mentality.
You got me.
That was all third person, and all need not apply to any one individual – there was no ‘you’ in there. 
Are you copping to something in particular?
Daniel Dennett convinced me that I can only have Free Will if God exists! And I’m sure he had no intention of doing that:
Do you feel coerced by rationality? Maybe you are. But vast majority of people don’t feel that way at all. But I do not doubt that others feel coerced by other things like feelings or circumstances. But all this proves is that maybe YOU and these others who feel similarly don’t have any free will. I certainly do not think there is anything absolute or universal about free will. Not only does it require awareness of possibilities but it is clearly affected by a large number of conditions like drugs, illness, and bad habits. Jesus seemed to think that a lot of people are like the walking dead, “let the dead bury their own dead,” he says in Luke 9:60.
But one thing we must reject completely is the absurd idea that you can know if someone else is “coerced by rationality.” Despite being a rational person (some say to an excessive degree), I do not feel coerced by rationality or anything else. When I make a decision I consider many different alternative and all the different reasons for those alternative and then I choose the reasons which best fit the person which I am then deciding I want to become. But of course this is not all the time. Many of my actions throughout a day are very much like driving on autopilot. And the difference is very clear to me. If you don’t experience this then perhaps you are just stuck in autopilot all the time.
But the decisions you make reprogram your autopilot. If I shift my focus and reflect on my feelings, I will react slightly differently in the future. Free Will demonstrates itself over time.
Yes. An autopilot kind of points to a progammer, doesn’t it?