Excerpt from "10 Misconceptions about Free Will" by Sabine Hossenfelder

...In this blogpost I address the most common misunderstandings, but before that let me explain why, to our best present knowledge of the laws of nature, you do not have free will. So, first the facts.

Fact 1: Everything in the universe, including you and your brain, is composed of elementary particles. What these particles do is described by the fundamental laws of physics. Everything else follows from that, in principle.

It follows in principle, but it is arguably not very practical to describe, say, human anatomy in terms of quarks and electrons. Instead, scientists of other disciplines use larger constituents and try to describe their behavior. This practical usefulness of increasingly larger scales, variables, and constituents, and the approximate accuracy of that procedure, is called “emergence”. All of these properties however derive from the fundamental description – in principle. That’s what is called reductionism.

The idea that the emergent properties of large systems do not derive from the fundamental description is called “strong emergence”. Some people like to claim that just because a system (eg your brain) consists of many constituents it is somehow exempt from reductionism and something (free will) “strongly emerges”. But fact is, there exists no known example where this happens, and there exists no known theory – not even an untested one – for how strong emergence can work. It is entirely irrelevant if your large system has adjectives like open, chaotic, complex or self-aware. It’s still just a really large number of particles that obey the fundamental laws of nature. (here I censored a tired old complaint against a belief in the Spiritual.)

Fact 2: All known fundamental laws of nature are either deterministic or random. To our best present knowledge, the universe evolves in a mixture of both, but just exactly how that mixture looks like will not be relevant in the following.

Having said that, I need to explain just exactly what I mean by the absence of free will:
a) If your future decisions are determined by the past, you do not have free will.
b) If your future decisions are random, meaning nothing can influence them, you do not have free will.
c) If your decisions are any mixture of a) and b) you do not have free will either.

In the above, you can read “you” as “any subsystem of the universe”, the details don’t matter. It follows straight from Fact 1 and Fact 2 that according to the definition of the absence of free will in a), b), c) free will is incompatible with what we presently know about nature.

I acknowledge that there are other ways to define free will. Some people for example want to call a choice “free” if nobody else could have predicted it, but for what I am concerned this is just pseudo free will.

Right! I didn’t say anything about neurobiology, the consciousness or the subconsciousness or about people pushing buttons. I don’t have to. For free will to exist it is necessary that free will be allowed by the fundamental laws of physics. It is necessary, but not sufficient: If you could make free will compatible with the laws of physics, it might still be that neurobiology finds your brain can’t make use of that option. Physics cannot tell you that free will exists, but it can tell you that it doesn’t exist. And that’s what I just told you.

Note that I neither claim strong emergence does not exist, nor do I say that a fundamental law has to be a mixture of determinism and randomness. What I am saying is this: If you want to argue that free will exists because strong emergence works, or there is an escape from determinism or randomness, then I want to see an example for how this is supposed to work.

Then the author goes on to dispel what she calls "misconceptions". A couple of interesting ones:

1. If you do not have free will you cannot or do not have to make decisions.

Regardless of whether you have free will or not, your brain performs evaluations and produces results and that’s what it means to make a decision. You cannot not make decisions. Just because your thought process is deterministic doesn’t mean the process doesn’t have to be executed in real time. The same is true if it has a random component.

This misconception stems from a split-personality perspective: People picture themselves as trying to make a decision but being hindered by some evil free-will-defying law of nature. That is nonsense of course. You are whatever brain process works with whatever input you receive. If you don’t have free will, you’ve never had free will and so far you’ve lived just fine. You can continue to think the same way you’ve always thought. You’ll do that anyway.

2. If you do not have free will you have no responsibility for your actions.

This misconception also comes from the split-personality perspective. You are what makes the decisions (takes in information and processes it) and performs the actions (acts on the results). If your actions are problematic for other people, you are the source of the problem and they’ll take measures to solve that problem. It’s not like they have any choice… If the result of your brain processes makes other people’s lives difficult, it’s you who will be blamed, locked away, sent to psychotherapy or get kicked where it really hurts. It is entirely irrelevant that your faulty information processing was inscribed in the initial conditions of the universe, the relevant question is what your future will bring if others try to get rid of you. The word ‘responsibility’ is just a red herring because it’s both ill-defined and unnecessary.

...

4. If you do not have free will your actions can be predicted.

Even if your brain processes were predictable in principle it is highly questionable anybody could do this in practice. Besides, as I explained above, these processes might have a random component that is even in principle not predictable. It is presently not very well understood just exactly how relevant such a random component might be.

5. If you do not have free will the future is determined by the past.

Same misconception that underlies 4. Randomness is for all we presently know a component of the fundamental laws. In this case the future is not determined by the past, but neither do you have free will because nothing can influence this randomness.

7. Free will is impossible.

Not necessarily. As I explained here (paper here) it is possible to conceive of laws of nature that are neither deterministic nor random and that can plausibly be said to allow for free will. Alas, we do not presently have any evidence whatsoever that this is realized in nature and neither is it known whether this is even compatible with the laws of nature that we know. Send me a big enough paycheck and give me some years and I’ll find out.

Hopefully this gives the readers an idea of an artificial concept known as "free will". This is not to say that there is no "free will", merely to say that while it's "free enough", but perhaps more properly rendered as "subjective will".