> How do you understand the concept of "volition"?

I understand life and will as follows.

The human experience is built on top of many layers of subconscious awareness. Animals are given the ability to reason about themselves and their physical environment by our shared genes, and so we can conceive of spatial reasoning and execute real-time plans in this way. In addition, all our biological needs - requirements to maintain our existence - are compulsive due to the underlying body driving these requirements. This is why there was a point in this tree where someone invoked the idea that you are compelled sometimes by hunger, sleepiness, or other biological needs to act.

The next level of intellect above most animals is the ability to execute reasoning which is not only focused around cause and effect of one's own actions. All animals, to me, have the ability to understand how they can impact their environment and in doing so hunt, move, climb, or socialize, but they are not well-versed in reasonings of two separate entities beyond themselves. This is what I roughly call abstract reasoning.

In so having abstract reasoning, I am given meaningful will. As I exist, with my needs well-handled by my comfortable first-world existence in a human society, my subconscious freely feeds me ideas. These can be simple; hunger. They can be complex; an echo of a memory. They can be completely abstract; a graph of the program I was working on earlier, a subconscious solution built deep in some internal processing. I agree one certainly does not compel these things, and therefore does not execute will at this stage. But the key is that these things are something which I iterate over, at each moment dabbling in them and their adjacent reason-spaces, deciding if the thought is interesting, or valid, or worth executing, and this is the space where I express my volition. Finding myself in each moment, I ponder what is best for me, what is most desired by me, what I think is morally right in some purely abstract ethical framework developed in my lifetime, and more ideas of this nature. Finally, as Me, I have a decision-space which my conscious explores, the underlying constructs and relationships explained to me by subconscious capabilities granting me some internal knowledge-graph of the world which I get to simply web-walk across, occasionally test new portions of which I do not understand well, and in doing so, I find myself freely able to at each moment to take the great hose of subconscious ponderings and direct them in a way which meshes with my own feelings of interest, progress, pleasure, and other such things. These are the conscious decisions after all, how do I wish to feel? And so the space free will acts in is clearly small, it is not as if I freely wished to exist or to think about some random moment in time which my brain has found itself re-living, but it is very much as if I was the one to decide if the memory is worth pondering deeper, or if the action coming up is one I would like to perform based on these many thoughts executed immediately and without conscious invocation at each moment. In doing so, I decide where to move, why I'd do so, when I should stop, and other such simple decisions which ultimately leave myself able to guide gently into time the vessel I was born into and innately connected with.

So I struggle to understand what illusions I am under, when told this as a simple obvious assertion. Perhaps there is more to say from you at this point.

> In fact, it appears that everything is ultimately cause-and-effect

Maybe it's so, I don't deny this, of course neither you or I know. But the fact is that my consciousness steers and evolves in directions it ordains at one moment and challenges at every other, and in doing so I point my uncontrolled body vaguely, where it passes me back thoughts I did not particularly compel so in the end I can finally compel the entity of myself to do something I so decided.

Even if this is all cause-and-effect, I don't see how it makes consciousness an illusion so much as it just makes it deterministic.