More on the Free Will issue

 I read the following article today.

Yes, We Have Free Will. No, We Absolutely Do Not

Sapolsky tells readers that the “biology over which you had no control, interacting with the environment over which you had no control, made you you.”

I disagree entirely. Neither genes nor an environment, nor both makes us what we are. We have an intrinsic essence.

[N]o matter how much you try, you can’t intend to intend something. You can’t will yourself to have willpower. You can’t think of what you’re going to think of next. It’s simply not possible.”

True, but irrelevant. As usual the free will deniers demand too much of free will. (BTW, this is a universal tendency in all topics, namely attacking a position that few if any people actually believe in).

Although I can’t intend to intend, I can intend. Where does that come from? It comes from my essence. An illustrative example is I can’t choose to be interested in celebrities rather than philosophical issues. Does this entail I don’t have free will? No, because my essence is of such a nature that I am more interested in philosophy. But where does my essence come from? I suggest that we determine our own natures. We self-define ourselves, as it were.

And, incidentally, this is all far removed from the idea we have no more free will than a boulder has as it rolls down a hill, or the moon has as it orbits the Earth. We are, in the most immediate sense, implicitly aware of our own causal agency. It requires an effort on our parts to get out of bed in the morning, the laws of nature by themselves do not suffice.

The way Sapolsky sees it, you can’t escape the biological and cultural forces and environmental factors that preceded you and shaped you. “There’s not a crack anywhere in there to shoehorn in free will,” he said. “When you look at every contemporary argument for free will that’s not invoking God or fairy dust or something, at some point, one must assume a step that bypasses the antecedent causes. But that violates the laws of how neurons work, atoms work, and universes work. Your life is nothing but that: everything that came before.”

This reference to God or fairy dust is another way of saying that he thinks that naturalism or materialism is true and there are only physical forces. The same typical pattern where materialists accuse their opponent of appealing to magic or the supernatural. It’s a technique to try and convince the reader not by arguments, but by utilizing people's aversion to supernatural or magical explanations, even though it is an incorrect employment of those words.

Essentially, here he's appealing to the notion that the world is physical closed, e.g. that physical causes account for absolutely all change in the world. But appealing to such physical causal closure is transparent question begging.