The physics that suggests we have no free will
bbc.com
bbc.com
For personal life I find this one the most practical: if you have the impression that you have free will then you have free will. Even if your choices are in fact determined rather than choices, the fact that you think you're choosing makes the determination irrelevant.
Judicially the argument goes exactly the other way: unless we have proof for free will any punishment (for possibly predetermined decisions) is unjust. The justice system then only serves three possible functions: 1) keep dangerous people away from society 2) act as a deterrent, a factor that goes into any predetermined decisions and 3) to help rehabilitation, help the individual make better choices.
The justice system eg in Norway very much fits these schemes, while common people still see prison etc as punishment the actual judicial decisions much more aim at rehabilitation.
there's a joke about a man who dies and goes to heaven where he meets God. God tells him he can ask one question and get a true answer.
The man asks, did we have free will?
No, says God. Did you miss it?
You are a biological automaton, predetermined by your biological and social preconditions, i.e. programmed. Everybody is, all the time, right now, e.g. me typing and reading this and having the taste of coffee in my mouth.
Your thoughts are a phenomenon inside of your consciousness, i.e. you are not thinking (no one is), you are that what is aware of all phenomena as it occurs to you. Your thoughts and feelings are just another phenomena. As soon as you are aware of anything, it already happened/manifested. If all you can be aware of is in the past, try to argue about free will. The present is an infinitely small border between future and past.
Everybody can figure all of this out by simple observation. It's not so difficult.
There is no figuring out in a predeterminism world. Whether or not you were programmed to accept a belief is really all that matters. "Figuring out" implies some sense of free will in that you are weighing the evidence and making a choice. If there is no free will, there is no making a choice. Basically, if there is no free will, it is pointless arguing about it since all arguments are pre-determined and all responses to arguments are pre-determined.
For instance, food choice. I can't count how many times seeing or hearing about someone else eating a particular kind of food has primed me to want to eat that food. That's a pretty obvious example of how we're programmed at a social level.
You can go further and think about longer term choices and they are pretty obvious too, given your upbringing, environment, and early personal experiences. Every action stems from biological motivation.
Just because we might not be immediately consciously aware of the brain processes leading to our choice, doesn't mean it's not us making the choice.
The bit about special relativity and the trains meaning that every time is now is useless. It's more correct to say that there is no 'now' irrespective of context. A good illustration of this is showing how events A and B can at different places can occur in either order to different observers.