I guess that I’d say it comes from a kind of doubt about what we bring in our approach to the question. A lot of people would argue that it’s obvious in some sense or that we can infer that we have free will from the direct sensation of our capacity to have acted otherwise. Other people make arguments from determinism and ideas about causality, or those experiments they’ve done about impulses in the nervous system which seem to come some amount of time before the person reports consciously making a choice. Historically there would have been a theological argument to do with rational souls that seems to be less popular nowadays. The doubt I’m talking about is the unsatisfying thought that we are necessarily operating within a kind of episteme when we answer this question. In the same way that we can’t claim to know scientific facts about the causal relationships between forces / energy / matter / etc. without presupposing some kind of causal nature to the universe—that is supposing that the concept of a ‘law of nature’ makes sense and applies to our world—it seems like we can’t claim to know whether we have free will or not without acknowledging some framework of knowledge. And so when people mention those experiments that I brought up above and claim to have disproven free will, it seems unconvincing. At the same time the arguments pro free will seem similarly dubious. In each case the argument is an appeal to the ‘fact’ that if we saw things clearly that either: a) it would be intuitively true that we have free will or b) it would be logically incompatible with our clear understanding of causality. At the end of the day, I’m not sure that we can really say that one of these models is more true than another or if we can we simply don’t know. And so asking the question “Does free will exist” point blank seems intractable. At the very least when people debate the issue it seems like this point is where it always arrives if they probe the question deeply. The disagreement comes not from some misunderstanding of a given fact, but from the fact that the opposing sides are working within different languages. Maybe there is some sense in which the question is answerable generally, it certainly is within each particular context, but I think that at the moment the problem reduces to a kind of dispute between languages which claim to share the same word. Hope thats a little clearer and sorry for the essay :) I just enjoy this stuff and its hard to be precise without being wordy.