Free will does not exist

Thank you for accepting in such a fanciful way. This is my first round of debate, so please let me know if I'm doing something incorrectly. I would like to approach this debate from two different perspectives: 1) a theoretical approach and 2) a more practical approach. 1) The decisions people make are decided by their personality, which is who they are. So a question then becomes what makes a person who they are? Do they have a "choice" over that? The answer is no. Assuming both sides of the nature vs nurture debate are relevant, a person is determined by both their heritage and their environment, neither of which a person has control over. If a person cannot control who they are (which determines the decisions they make), then they cannot control the decisions they make by extension, it's simple logic. This could prove convincing point on its own, but I'd like to expand this approach. One way to approach the underlying reasons we make decisions is to look at causality. Philosopher Thomas Hobbes explains causality in Elements of Philosophy: an agent affects the patient (the object affected) when it is the necessary action of physics. When a patient is influenced by an agent, the patient will become an agent itself, and so on until the end of time. In other words, there is only one outcome of any given situation, and the objects effected will go on to effect other objects. Even something as freeflowing as smoke is actually very determinate: where the smoke flows and dissipates depends on the temperature of the smoke, the temperature of the outside environment, air pressure, etc. Any physical action can only have one outcome when all the factors are considered. The same can be said of the human brain in heritage: when one specific sperm and one specific egg meet, the physical brain that is created by the two cannot be any different if all the factors remain exactly the same (temperature, nutrition, blood type, etc). Similarly, that brain can be no different when all of the same stimuli are present, experiences shape the mind and to be a different person the experiences would need to be different; nobody has control over their environment. For example, when you see little brats running around a store and yelling at each other, what do you think? Those parents are not raising their children very well, those kids are going to grow up and be a-holes. Why? Because environment creates habit. Using that same logic then, why is the parent to blame? Aren't they simply the way that they are because of how their parents raised them, and so on? When we think of hypotheticals or a different possible outcome of a situation, we are looking at a situation in which physics is different, where the outcome of the agent/patient relationship had a different set of factors that caused a different necessary outcome with the exact same natural laws. This is impossible, since there is only one universe we live in and only one set of natural laws; the brain, along with synapses and neurons, are part of the physical world we live in and are subjected to the same physics of the universe like any other material thing. If my opponent disagrees on this point, I would be happy to go more in depth using the psychology of William James. Going back to the smoke example however, the smoke has only one option based of what is comprised within the smoke and the environment around the smoke. However, if the smoke were self-aware it would also believe itself to have free will in it's movements. The same can be said of the human brain; simply because we are AWARE that we are having thoughts, we assume that we control them. We do not. All thoughts are connected, because all neurons are connected. You see a dog on the sidewalk, so you think of animals, and then zoos, and then that experience you had at the zoo. This is why those suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder have such difficulty in every day lives; certain stimuli triggers their thoughts into something traumatizing. Any attempt to 'randomize' thought is futile: you thinking of something 'random' is only a result because I made the claim that it cannot be random and you are challenging it, and any thought you have is somehow connected in your mind to 'random', such as a zebra or pink elephants. An example Hobbes uses is just "as when a man throws his goods into the sea for fear the ship should sink" So a man sometimes pays his debt, only for fear of Imprisonment"" The reason for an action is grounded in the agent/patient necessity and without that previous stimuli, the resulting action would not have occurred. These examples greatly oversimplify the issue, our brains take in a significant amount more information that affect our decisions than we are aware, if my opponent disagrees I will be happy to provide sources of subconscious manipulation. Just as any other part of the physical world, the human mind is a continuous reaction to previous actions that flow necessarily from those causes. On the other hand, some philosophers view humanity as "non-beings" whose being, moment to moment, is simply to choose. In response, the rebuttal can be made that every human has a "nature" that determines what we have the "option" to choose from, and our past choices and environmental influences also shape the possibilities for us at that specific moment. There are clearly influences over the decisions we make, and having a broad brush of freedom without influences is an unrealistic conclusion. Another contention I would like to bring up is that the human mind can only think of ideas and thoughts once they have been created, we are not able to decide what we think beforehand, we are simply subjected to our thoughts as they come up; where is the free will in that? To have "free will", we would need to be able to have complete control over our thoughts and influences. Since we cannot control our minds to that degree (for example, not being able to fully understand why we want something specific like a burrito in one moment, but something completely different in another, we just know it), we are influenced without our knowledge. But even if we did have complete control over our influences, what would influence our decision over those influences? More influences? Free will itself is a paradox. 2). The next area I would like to explore is that of neurological science. One of the scientific sources I will use was written by Dr. J. D. Haynes on an experiment where Haynes and other researchers used modern neurological readers to determining whether or not human decisions could be traced in the brain (http://rifters.com...). The results were extremely astonishing and persuasive: in a study where subjects were given a series of two numbers and told to pick one at their leisure, the subjects" decision could be traced back to the mind and predicted which number they would pick, a full 7-10 seconds before they had even made their decision, let alone act. Another study found that using only a mere 256 neurons, scientists are able to predict with 80% accuracy exactly which decision a human will make a complete 700 milliseconds before the mind has actually reached the decision and told itself that the idea was self-generated and free will (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...). The brain is the most complex organ known to man, and we are still centuries away from fulling understanding its action. While these studies are little more than a step in the right direction, I believe they still help support my argument. I look forward to this debate and thank my opponent for accepting! If I need to make my future rounds shorter, I apologize for the rambling.