The idea is that if you’re a bag of chemicals then any decision you make is entirely predetermined based on your current state and the stimulus you receive (pot

The idea is that if you’re a bag of chemicals then any decision you make is entirely predetermined based on your current state and the stimulus you receive (potentially modulo some quantum randomness and plenty of chaos). If the decision is totally predictable and predetermined then it stops looking like free will, from a certain point of view. But it’s really just a question of the semantics of “free will”. Trying to work out whether you could choose differently to your predetermined choice just isn’t a meaningful concept. Imagine you have a deterministic program which returns true or false based on some inputs. If it is modified to return the opposite of what it previously returned, it is no less deterministic.