AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
My position on this issue is, let's say, evasive or trying to be meta (as I think the form of this text indicates). The naive question (is free will real or not) is not that interesting, but the efforts of individuals to try to construct versions of themselves that conform to these conflicting ideas, well, that is interesting to me. But if you must Choose your own review/my actual position
In case this all seems like an elaborate effort to avoid taking a position, here are some things I think are true:
Computation and cybernetics have solved like 85% of the mind-body problem. But we can't adjust to it, our concepts are too rooted in thousands of years of mind-body dualism.
Hard determinism is a disembodied theory of reality. It makes perfect sense if you are God, who can view all of reality from outside. God is outside of time and so all moments are equally real, and every choice has already happened.
But we aren't God, and we can't think like God. We are temporal, our thinking is also temporal. Trying to think like God is a source of massive confusion.
eliminativism (saying that freedom, mind, selves etc do not exist) is an error, and fundamentally obnoxious and anti-human. Sometimes its useful for shock value, but the better Way to think About them is that they are real as anything else, but their nature is not quite what we thought they were. Hey
All of us, whatever our metaphysical states, are obligated to act under conditions of extreme uncertainty. We have to make choices, whether or not we are free in some metaphysical sense. We have to think of ourselves as agents, it's a cognitive-moral requirement. We are responsible for ourselves; a large part of social cognition is devoted to making this be true. The selves that we construct are based on a sense of responsibility, fictive though it may be.
We can't nope out of this process (possible exception for actual psychopaths). This I think is the basic teaching of existentialism; we can't avoid acting, whether or not we have political or metaphysical freedom. We are obliged to create ourselves and take responsibility for ourselves, and we should thus learn to get better at it.