Be careful for what you wish for, winter knight, for you just might get it!
Free will is the invention of theologians. First of all, free will is incoherent, and second of all, it cannot be proven through self-awareness.
Argument #1
All versions of the free will doctrine are incoherent and fundamentally opposed to the basic presuppositions of human comprehension. This argument is based on the simple idea that human will contains certain elements that allow us to judge other people's character, and that in the absence of these elements, it would make no sense to hold anybody responsible for what they have done. If human beings really had free will in the traditional sense of the concept, their behavior would be inextricably unfathomable.
Schopenhauer - as one of the few philosophers to really explicate what is at issue in the whole debate since Will is the centerpiece of his philosophy - shows that, under the assumption of freedom of the will, a man's "
character must be from the very beginning a tabula rasa... and cannot have any inborn inclination to one side or the other." This point of view, however, would utterly destroy the conception of human nature illustrated by the classics of literature and the researches of social scientists. Under the free will premise, individuals would have no set character at all, and people in general would have no common nature. It would be useless to study the humanities or the social sciences in order to learn about human beings, because there is no common human nature. Either human beings are the products of pure chance, or they would be spontaneous "self-creators," devising their personalities ex nihilo, out of nothing.
If this is the case, then free will has dire philosophical implications its advocates are terribly ignorant of. However, LaRochefoucauld is right when he said that none of us have the strength to follow all the implications of our reasoning.
Argument #2
Free will cannot be proven through self-awareness, because sifting through one’s own self-awareness will only locate the illusion of freedom. Self-awareness is what’s leftover after all the “awareness of other things” has been eliminated. Since the awareness of other things is almost ubiquitous, all-encompassing, then analyzing self-awareness itself will be rather difficult. A person becomes aware of him/herself as of something that wills. The self that does not direct awareness outwards is a willing self. However, the “will” of a person is not limited to the realized acts of the will or the formal decisions, for it also includes emotions, passions, ranging from the intentional ones such as desiring, striving, wishing, longing, yearning, hoping, loving, rejoicing to the negative ones – repunging, detesting, fleeing, fear, anger, and etc.
All these aspects of the will, although internal, are always related to something external, for they are directed towards at or by the object of concern. Those external things do not belong to the realm of self-awareness, but to the “awareness of other things.” Therefore, if self-awareness is the awareness that always directly accompanies the event of the will, then it can never reach beyond that internally experiencable event in itself. Self-experienced will is found at the beginning of self-awareness, and cannot be otherwise, because awareness must be switched off against external things that may stimulate the will by motivation or causation.
The belief that I am free because my actions depend on my will is a self-deception because once the will itself becomes action it is no longer free. Otherwise, I would be free to will. However, this cannot be the case from the perspective of self-awareness, because according to self-awareness, the will is primal, and primarily basic – I know what I want only after I already will it. All we have is the ex post facto awareness of our own will. Consequently, we cannot know whether the will itself is free from self-awareness. Stepping outside of the inner world, towards the world of things, people, objects that act upon my will, condition it, and suggest motivations, the world of causality.
