What does free will mean in this situation? It’s still your brain making the decision, whether it’s conscious or not. It seems to me that if you have a materia

What does free will mean in this situation? It’s still your brain making the decision, whether it’s conscious or not. It seems to me that if you have a materialist theory of consciousness that there have to be unconscious essentially mechanical processes underlying it. But as long as those processes are contained within the being making the decision, it seems to me that it should still be considered ‘free will’. Now, perhaps there is some level of determination there that makes the traditional idea of free will hard to maintain, but I’m not sure we have to toss the concept out entirely. I’ve always largely considered it a convenient fiction useful for legal and ethical discussions. If you’re designing a legal system, I don’t think you care as much about the first causes of human action compared to whether the action was done by a particular human being without being forced to do it by some external actor.