Could there be a categorical mistake at play here?<p>Sure, scientifically speaking, we may all be deterministic robots. But the complexity of those robots is so astounding, that free will, regardless of it being an illusion, an emergent property, or something else, simply works at a different level of abstraction than the molecular processes that make up our brains.<p>To put it in some Hacker News terms: you will not find static types in the ASCII standard, yet the C language <i>magically</i> has them.<p>Perhaps it helps to reason from the perspective of the biological processes, instead of trying to project human attributes on them, and then reason back up to see the whole unaltered. Do you think a DNA molecule has any concept of time, place, or choice?