Do we have a freewill?

good, and very old question.

my advice - read David Hume's essay on Necessity and Responsibility in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

there are ways not to get in a muddle over this:

    - "free will" is often just a grand word for "self-control", which is a much less puzzling notion --- just a machine with own-state feedback

    - "free will" should not have anything to do with other socially determined goods like meaning, responsibility and purpose; it is not needed to give satisfactory accounts of these.

So, yes,  free will is a myth; usually it is about self-control; sometimes it is about punishment and responsibility. But it is never needed for anything.

There's lots of ways to address this question.  There's actually mroe than one question here, I'll try addressing them all. A lot of modern (particularly physicalist) philosophers like to distinguish between mere will and 'free will'. For us to have a will, the cognitive faculties involved in decision making, etc., it need not be 'free', as the question of what it means to be 'free' is also a rather complicated one. It appears coherent to understand the human mind without mention of our will being 'free', whatever that may entail.

Most people think it's completely intuitive that we are free, and that any understanding of the human mind without freedom is lacking. That is a confused simplification though.  For example, say you are sitting in your room, and you are hungry. You know there is a sandwich in the fridge (actually, it's enough for you to think there's a sandwich in the fridge, it doesn't actually have to be there), you like sandwiches, and you like this sort of sandwich. There's nothing else you are supposed to be doing. You're not tired, the phone isn't ringing or anything, windows shut and no other external stimuli catches your attention; my question is, to what extent can we call you 'free' when you 'freely' choose to go to the fridge to pick up and eat the sandwich? 

Personally I like Kant's approach, where to act according to your freewill is to act in accordance with a rational judgment. The capacity to act irrationally or without rhyme or reason is not freedom, it's madness. Hell, the madman himself would be the first to tell you he is not free, but more often than not a captive of some neruo-chemical imbalance of one sort or another.

So here again there is a concept of 'free' which seems counterintuitive at first - Afterall, there is only one rational judgment, so if I am free, shouldn't I be free to choose? But upon this reading, that is not the case. 

Before taking any position though, when we approach different philosophical stances, it's prudent to consider the pros and cons that follow from each position.

Certainly, "explaining away" free-will would be easier than actually explaining it, as it does not seem to mesh well with our current mechanical understanding of the universe, and the concept of 'freedom' itself seems almost unintelligible. However, giving up freewill has it's own dangerous consequences, particularly to the field ethics. It's not a knockdown argument, but there are good reasons to deny that morality has any place in a world without freewill.

With these consequences in mind, perhaps some sort of synthesis is where the truth lies, something like a Chaos-Theory understanding of how deterministic but nonlinear (and thus unpredictable to any fine detail) behaviour is possible in nature. Perhaps new discoveries in the scientific field of neurocognitive science will break new grounds in our understanding of what our will really is anyway.

or perhaps the real truth is simply beyond the scope of human science and understanding (a position sometimes called New Mysterianism I believe) .

We certainly have the perception that we have freewill.

In the end this is a question that science cannot yet answer and philosophers cannot agree on, so strictly speaking my position must necessarily be one of agnostic.

However, my opinion and personal thinking is that freewill is a matter of perspective and thus an illusion.  I think the entire question arises from a mistaken Dualism and a perceptive misunderstanding regarding the nature of time. 

Dualism. The mind is not separate from the body and thus we are at all times conforming to laws of the universe.  Since we are so entombed in these laws it is impossible for the mind to be free in the sense that freewill means.

Time. The whole notion of freewill rests on the notion of causality. That one thing happens after another and will continue to do so.  As Hume points out in the human sphere we call the expectancy of causality custom, eg that fire will continue to be hot.  However, there is nothing in the Universe to say that this has to be so or that time itself even exists as we perceive it.

So, yes we do have an effect on the world that is determined by our being and actions.

But also we are as much a part of the world and as free as a pebble in a landslide.

Thus while we have an effect we are the result of, and affected by, multiple manifold causes and therefore only a part of the tapestry of the working Universe.

Personally, I like to think that we do have freedom of choise, but on the other hand there are things I believe to be predefined as well. I suppose the best way of saying what my standpoint of the whole freewill question is, is that the universe presents us with said number of predefined lives (

The Hinduism has the concept of Karma. For every action,

Only in how we react to what is predetermined.

Freewill will was given to us in the beginning with the creation of man. Man needed it for the job God gave us. To subdue the earth. What was the need for freewill. Without it you cannot solve problems. What we lost was the job that God gave us. It has been convoluted by organised religion.