Similarly, we can suppress the desire to go to war after a provocation. However, we can't choose to not feel furious, at least for an instant.
Thoughts and feeling tend to arise on their own, and free will is about whether we accept or reject them.
I do think if you unravel how every decision is made and the origins behind those opinions then you ultimately end up with every reaction being a result of either biology or circumstance.
Most decisions are made with emotional compute, influenced by biology, past experience, and present psychological state.
At the same time, being mindful and observing those emotions (predicted pleasure from the flavor, predicted guilt...) does interrupt that emotional processing and allow a "decision" to be reached in a completely different way.
Free will may only exist subjectively, but mindfulness does free the self from the emotional decision-making of the monkey brain.
The positive spin on this is if we are going to apply a software development mindset to free will then you can also argue that the value of software isn’t its sentience but it’s usefulness. For example computer games don’t need sophisticated AI to be enjoyable. So however we argue the definition of free will, that shouldn’t take anything away from the experience of life.
Some things are neither determined nor random, in the "arbitrary" sense of the term. A child that grows up in a musical household is more likely to become a musician. That's neither random nor determined.
In populations, or over repeated instances, these can resolve to near deterministic results. At the individual level, they are more random seeming.
I wanted to propose "stochastic" as a better term, but apparently "random" and "stochastic" are synonyms. [1]
What it comes down to is that "random" to me has a connotation of arbitrary, unpredictable. Whereas "stochastic" to me suggests a deterministic process with random influences.
So maybe the sentiment is better expressed as making sure it is clear that deterministic and random are the two extremes of a continuum, rather than an either/or distinction.
[1] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/114373/whats-the-di...
I think our language is lacking here. In technical terms, neither random nor stochastic imply evenly distributed. In casual conversation, "random" does.
"Emergent" may be a better term for what I meant. Randomness (in the casual sense) is an ingredient in a stochastic process leading to non-random, even effectively deterministic results.
The comment I was replying to:
"the inputs that drive that subjective feeling are still either deterministic or random."
The ingredients which lead someone to suddenly sing a son apropos of nothing (seemingly random/arbitrary) are the same as those leading someone to pull their finger away from a flame... seemingly deterministic.
Evolution is not distinctly either, which is my point.
A particular child growing up to be a musician, is either random or determined.
Maybe each child in a population is determined, or random, but at least you can analyze things at the population level.
I don't disagree with you, but I find more subjective meaning in the difference between normal cognition and metacognition, compared to viewing the system up close.