Free will is an obvious idea for a self aware consciousness to adhere to. The purpose of consciousness is to keep its organism viable. It does that by collectin

Free will is an obvious idea for a self aware consciousness to adhere to. The purpose of consciousness is to keep its organism viable. It does that by collecting an essence of past and from that predict an essence of the future. This expectation of the immediate future is then corrected according to actual perceptions and transformed into appropriate actions. The full past is abstracted into an essence state, lots of information is lost to elsewhere, so there is no way to determine what details of the past went into forming the precise state from which the brain makes its actions. Of course it has to feel like at least some of our choices emerges from nowhere. But the only way to know if a brains thoughts are really free is to replay its entire brain state building past in every minute detail and look for alternative actions. An impossible experiment.