If everything follows natural order, including the electrical activities in our brains, then what is free will? Is it just an illusion? What makes us so special that our thoughts—despite being shaped by natural laws in every way—are the only things that seem to defy these orders, even though opinions (rooted in ego) have no bearing on reality?
There's a common misconception that natural laws imply predictable determinism. Consider weather patterns, quantum behaviors, or the motion of a double pendulum—these are natural phenomena governed by natural laws. Just because something isn't predictable by human standards doesn't mean it isn't following natural laws. I totally disagree with the notion that uncertainty in quantum mechanics suggests a violation of natural laws. Again, it’s a natural phenomena. In addition to that, it would imply that everything has freewill and not just human.
Isn’t free will just self-indulgence, where the ego asserts its place and importance in the world? After all, the ego is driven by fear—afraid to look bad, constantly seeking comfort and approval. It’s imperfect, making mistakes repeatedly. Is it God that it can break natural laws? Yet, easily perish from natural causes. It believes it can make choices—defying natural order—simply bc it feels like it has control?
Do people choose which memories surface when something triggers them? Or pick their feelings out of the blue when they arise? 95% of our daily actions occur with little to no awareness. Are the remaining actions merely reconstructions that we label as 'choosing,' shaped by our conditioning? Understanding one's own conditioning and still arriving at the conclusion that free will doesn't exist might be the closest thing to having free will.


Richard A. Nichols III
Just because something isn't predictable by human standards doesn't mean it isn't following natural laws."
What does "natural" mean here? It would seem that you're implying it to mean *mechanistic*, perhaps even in a deterministic way. But if there is some transcendental mind, spirit, consciousness, life, soul, or whatever that has free will, that would be natural, too. And it could very well be both nondeterministic and non-mechanistic.
As for "natural law", it's a humanistic folly to presume that everything that happens happens according to "law" of any sort, whether physical or spiritual. I mean just think about how clumsy the wording is: we can only think to analogize it to human legal ordinances and enforcement. This is telling regarding our unconscious assumptions involved in thinking about "natural law."
And not to mention that, if everything is subject to natural law, what is it that makes these things behave according to these laws? And then, what is it that makes the things that make the things behave according to natural laws do that? Ad infinitum.
With respect to causality, all we can really know is that there are particular patterns that associate past events with future events; we don't know why those patterns exist, what the nature of them is, how comprehensive this manner of thinking is with regard to accounting for all natural phenomena, or how inviolable/invariable those patterns are.
"In addition to that, it would imply that everything has freewill and not just human."
No, it wouldn't imply that, because we don't know if other sorts of objects than animal bodies with brains, and perhaps other biological forms too, serve to embody/attract/channel/whatever transcendental/non-physical minds, spirits, or whatever.
And even if it does imply that, so what? It's very possible that all of life has free will. We just wouldn't relate to and recognize the free-will expressions of other types of objects, like atoms, because they're not sophisticated constructs like us capable of making intelligent decisions and on the bases that we're used to.
And yes, something like a rock seems to have hardly any agency at all, thus seemingly disallowing for free will, but this is because it's a highly macroscopic, zoomed out, aggregate view of the behavior of matter. Quantum mechanics shows that, on the microscopic scale, things are unpredictable, even in principle (so we may consider that they act freely), and that things only appear to behave non-randomly and according to classical mechanics because all the tiny unpredictable actions statistically average out.
"Isn’t free will just self-indulgence"?
This depends on how great we really are. It's completely possible that we really are wondrous and great, and not just we but life in general. It's probably that we *underappreciate* how awesome we and everything else is, rather than overestimate it, which is why we deem things we naturally perceive in ourselves such as free will to be "self-indulgence." "How gibbering man becomes, when he is really clever, and thinks he is giving the ultimate and final description of the universe! Can't he see that he is merely describing himself, and that the self he is describing is merely one of the more dead and dreary states that man can exist in?" -D.H. Lawrence
"Are the remaining actions merely reconstructions that we label as 'choosing,' shaped by our conditioning?"
No, not necessarily, this would merely be an unwarranted extrapolation or assumption. Having free will doesn't necessarily imply that we're free in every conceivable respect--not even within our own minds.
And assuming that all the remaining aspects of choice are equally subject to these non-free principles contradicts our own experience of ourselves as having free will in the remaining respects. (I know that the conjecture of non-free-willists is that the perception of ourselves as having free will is merely an illusion, but it still matters because you're using aspects in which we *don't* experience ourselves as having free will to imply that we should extrapolate them to the ones in which we do, so your own premise is equally relying on our subjective experience, and the proposed extrapolation contradicts that experience.
And also, we should naturally give some weight to our own direct experience of ourselves having free will, because, in general, our direct experience of our own mental states is the thing we can be most sure of out of everything. For example, if you think you're sad, how is it possible that you're not sad? Being sad *is* the experience of being sad. And yes, the subject of free will may be a bit different because it seems to have external metaphysical implications, but the weight of direct experience still bears on it, and furthermore, the arguments against us having free will are merely theoretical, so they bear less weight. (I know most of them are considered to be empirically verified or logical necessities, but I argue in my essay below that none of them are.)
(I guess the sadness example is a bad example because having free will is not the experience of it by definition like being sad is, because of the metaphysical implications, but direct experience of our own minds still has paramount weight because all other knowledge is less direct, it's based on experience through our sense organs which could be faulty or misleading, and a good proportion of that knowledge is indirectly inferred from those unreliable sense experiences that were further particularly limited in some way, and the reasoning used to infer that knowledge from them has a good chance of being faulty or of involving educated guesses.))
I wrote more here, including on some of the subjects you've brought up and that I've replied with: https://philosophy.inhahe.com/2016/12/13/notes-on-free-will/