Does free-will survive if the brain just follows physical laws?

[veritas.io]

Neuroscience keeps turning up findings that make the ordinary picture of free will look shakier than it feels from the inside. Brain activity associated with a decision has been detected measurably before subjects report consciously deciding, which some researchers read as evidence that the brain settles on an action before the conscious mind catches up and experiences itself as choosing. If that is right, the felt sense of deliberating and choosing might be more like a narrator reporting on a decision after the fact than a cause actually making it happen.

Hard determinists take this seriously and conclude free will, at least in the sense of being able to have genuinely done otherwise given the exact same prior state of the universe, simply does not exist. Every choice is the deterministic or at best probabilistic output of prior physical causes stretching back indefinitely, and the feeling of freedom is just what that causal process happens to feel like from inside the system generating it.

Compatibilists push back, not by denying determinism, but by arguing that the version of free will actually worth wanting was never about defying physics in the first place. What matters, they argue, is whether your actions flow from your own reasoning, values and desires rather than from external coercion or compulsion. On that definition, a person choosing according to their own considered values is free even if that entire process was itself physically determined, because freedom was always about the source of the action rather than about somehow escaping causation altogether.

Libertarian free will, the view that we can genuinely act as an uncaused first cause, has the hardest time finding room in a physical universe, since even genuine quantum randomness would just make choices undetermined rather than freely willed, replacing rigid causation with pure chance rather than delivering the kind of authorship most people actually want when they talk about being free.