Thank you. At this point, I'm pretty convinced that my other assertion is true: that humans don't even have the necessary tools to think about and discuss this

Thank you. At this point, I'm pretty convinced that my other assertion is true: that humans don't even have the necessary tools to think about and discuss this topic with any kind of rigor. We are pleasantly and politely talking past each other, which is pretty fun and interesting, but not conducive to substantive progress. In the end, I guess I'm saying that whether we have free will is effectively unknowable, that the underlying complexity is way too high for us to grok. Thus, there isn't a realistic difference between having it and not having it. It brings to mind an argument I had with a creationist a long time ago, that asserted that the universe was only a few thousand years old. I convinced him that it looked much older than that, and the response was that perhaps God made it, a few thousand years ago, look billions of years old. My response: "What's the difference between a universe that is billions of years old and a universe that, in every detail, only appears to be billions of years old, even if it is in fact much younger? If God made it look billions of years old, it's still very worthwhile to study and learn from it." I view the whole free will question in a similar way: whether we do or don't have it, it seems like we have it, and so studying it is worth while.