We have free will.

I will be arguing for the existence of what philosophers call agent causal libertarian free will, which is the position that we have the ability to make free choices which are neither random nor deterministic, but proceed from our rational nature as an agent. The existence of free will is an axiom, which means that it is both self evident and presupposed by all other knowledge, including any attempt to deny it. Another example of an axiom is the proposition "there is an objective reality." Anyone can see directly that there is an objective reality, so the proposition is self evident, and it is self refuting to deny that there is an objective reality, since any such denial entails that it itself is not objectively correct. It is self evident that we have free will, as anyone can see by introspection. As you read this post, you have the ability to bring yourself to a state of full focus, carefully weighing each of my arguments. You also have the ability to drift lazily along, not absorbing the points I make in favor of my position. Finally, you have the ability to deliberately evade my arguments by consciously exerting effort not to understand them. The overwhelming testimony of experience shows that these three alternatives, focus, drift, and evasion, are always present to us. When we choose to be in focus, which is the primary choice, we can choose which influences will cause our subsequent thoughts and actions, which is the secondary choice. Every action we perform is done for a reason, but if we make the effort to think clearly we can decide which influences are efficacious, and which are not. So, every action has a cause, but that doesn't mean we don't have free will, since our free will is precisely the ability to choose the causes of our actions. For example, a runner who is tired and wants to stop can choose to think clearly about whether to stop, as opposed to making the decision on a momentary impulse. Once he makes a commitment to be in focus, he can decide whether he wants to be motivated by his long term health (keep running) or by the exhaustion he feels (stop running). No matter which choice he makes, his decision is caused, but he chose what the cause would be. Now that I have described the nature of free will, it is self evident from introspection and observation of other people that we have free will. It is self evident that we can choose to bring ourselves into focus, then weigh alternatives for and against our decisions, as I have described. In addition to the fact that free will is self evident, any attempt to deny that we have free will is self refuting, since any such attempt tacitly presupposes that we have free will. The determinist maintains that his thoughts, including determinism, are not caused by a free process of deliberation. Rather, according to the determinist, his thoughts and actions are all caused by deterministic external factors over which he has no control, and which he may have no awareness of, like chemical processes in his brain. This immediately raises a problem: If the determinist's thoughts are all caused by external factors that he cannot control, how does he know that his thoughts are correct? He has no access to the chemical processes that go on in his brain, they are a mystery to him. All he can say, really, is that the blind forces that control his decisions have resulted in his accepting his current set of beliefs. He has no way of checking his beliefs against reality, since the process of checking as well as its outcome would also be caused by the unknowable, blind chemical processes that he thinks control all of his thoughts. Worse, on the determinist's view, the chemical processes going on in other people's brains have led them to countless conclusions that contradict his own. He has no rational way of resolving these disputes, since any attempt at a resolution would simply be another questionable output of the unknowable forces churning in his brain. All he can say is that his brain produced output A and the other person's brain produced output B. If we accept that we have free will, then none of these problems come up, because our conclusions are the product of the free process of deliberation that we observe when we introspect, and we can check our conclusions by applying the canons of logic and epistemology to the reasoning that led to them. It doesn't matter if other people disagree with us, provided we can prove that we are right logically, because we know that the actual source of our beliefs is the rational deliberation we went through to arrive at them, not some hidden chemical process. To sum up, it is an axiom that we have free will. Free will is self evident, because we can observe it at work using introspection and when we observe other people, and it is self refuting to deny it, because all knowledge tacitly presupposes our ability to engage in a free process of rational deliberation.