All social behavior can be modeled as an emergent process, and the perception of free will external to causality is essentially a gift of ignorance. You percieve that everything your doing is because you are choosing to do it and hold the illusion that at any moment you could just change anything you wanted about yourself. Free will is an illusion and we are all essentially robots following predetermined code based on our current environment with our current upbringing code. Don't generalize too much, two brothers can be raised in the same household and go to the same schools yet have completely different experiences and radically different equipment.
Our brains are constructed of synapses that process our input signals and then trigger a reaction and work much like a modern computer. We have desires because those desires were imprinted from some external source. For example you may want to go to Chili's more often then other restaurants and would still believe you chose to go there while denying their monthly blitz ad campaign had anything to do with influencing you to go there.
Here's a quote from Spinoza on the subject:
“The mind is determined to this or that choice by a cause which is also determined by another cause, and this again by another, and so on ad infinitum,” Spinoza wrote. “This doctrine teaches us to hate no one, to despise no one, to mock no one, to be angry with no one, and to envy no one.”
So you may not currently be able to predict what will happen at any given moment but I do not want to mistake programming and randomness for free will.
I am truly personally debating this with myself and when the mood strikes me I research it and take notes and try to come to some conclusions... but I am just debating it.
It is a very interesting subject. I know there are some transhumanists here so one of their trademarks if you take a person and switch one neuron with a machine that performs the same function and that person acted and reacted and even felt exactly the same is that person still human?
So take it farther, replace another and another until they are all replaced. Essentially you have a very, very complex machine but essentially it is a machine and it is running its code. To say it has free will one way or the other may just be a fundamental disconnect when it comes to explaining or understanding free will.
