(in construction)
Clarity applies to many things, not only to reason but also, for instance, in dexterity, equilibrium, and many other things. We are now going to apply it to something that may seem obvious, but that, in fact, is extremely difficult: being free.
Freedom is difficult to achieve because of all the "inbuilt" systems we have with pre-programmed actions and strategies (including fear and needs), it is also difficult to achieve because it is not obviously something to be desired, especially when it conflicts with other "values" (being accepted, being useful, etc).
Today there is an ideology, propagated by the US, that puts freedom in the first place, although, in our days, it is not so much the freedom to think (as in the the days of the "founding fathers") but the freedom to buy, be rich and succeed. As the decline of the wester societies accelerates this kind of ideology will probably give rise to others in which freedom is not so important or even denigrate in the name of order and authority as it was many times in the past.
In any case, the freedom that I'm talking about is a much more specific thing it means an action that is not fully determined by previous events, and not fully random. It is something akin to an individual radioactive decay, which, as far as we know, has only a propensity to do something, but not a mechanism that makes it do it in some precise way. But we attribute this atomic behavior of matter to true randomness. Human actions "feel" like they are not being forced. We also feel that there is a propensity to behave in a certain way (to go to McDonalds when we're hungry), but nothing forces us to do it. We feel that we can "choose" in a world of propensities. And that choice was neither determined neither random.
Whether this kind of freedom really exists is something nobody know by now. We would have to see the brain in a much higher temporal and spatial resolutions to answer that question. So the existence of this kind of freedom is merely a speculation, and, at first sight, a speculation that is not very appealing from a rational perspective because we actually have no concept for something that is both undetermined and not-random. From a rational point of view determinism is lack of randomness, just as randomness is the absence of cause. Freedom, in my sense, is something that is both uncaused and not-random which is as absurd as the square root of a negative number (impossible because each number multiplied by itself, is always positive).
For all these reasons, and also because I saw the strong influence of biology and society in human behavior, I have believed that free will was only a social construct, a massive illusion, a way to describe ourselves to ourselves and others (just like Dennet defends), a way to have a "personality", a story in which we identify and discover who we are.
In a sense I still believe in that: it is quite obvious that practically all of the things we believe and desire are the fruit of our biology and environment. Even the words we use to think were given to us, and from the way we clean to the way we love, all that has been at least heavily shaped by society and given by biology. So what kind of freedom can we have in such a complex and well defined mechanism (both at the biological and at the social level)?
Well the problem with this "mechanical" vision of ourselves is, of course, consciousness, because, if we are indeed mechanisms, why should all this action happen "in the dark", without consciousness. After all, a machine does not need to be aware of what it's doing. It's just an "it". If we are not making choices "we" shouldn't be here, our mechanical bodies would do everything automatically. Now, from a subjective point of view, it is precisely this ability to choose that distinguishes us from a ere automatic procedure. Choice and consciousness are intimately connected in our subjective experience of the world. But are they really connected, objectively?
Like we said before, no one really knows if indeterminism is allowed at the brain level, what we know is what we feel, but because we sometimes feel things that are illusions, the fact that we feel we are free is not sufficient to prove that we are free.
we will have to wait until a time when we can see better how the brain operates. However when we study physical systems where indeterminism is the major factor what do we find?
Well, to understand this we should go back to Heisenberg uncertainty principle which says that there are pairs of properties which cannot be fully determined at the same time.