Ask HN: How can you be rational and still believe in free will?

-You experience events.

-You seem to have control over some events, and other events seem to be outside of your control.

-The process that determines this feeling of control is chemical, and has nothing to do with whether or not you actually do have any control.

In other words, even though control is entirely an illusion, it is the illusion that defines our existence. Understanding it is NOT useless - most people who you would describe as "assholes" are just people with control issues.

An analogy would be rolling a dice with your hand onto a table. Is this random? A physicist could say, "no", how you roll it, what the speed it's going, how hard the table is, etc, etc, determine exactly what number will come up. But we don't know all that. To the context of our experience, that dice roll is random.

Similarly, everything we think or do is predetermined by the current state of the universe and our own nature, but to us, we are making choices. In the context of our human experience, we do have free will. Just like it could be theoretically possible to predict the dice roll, it is theoretically possible to predict any persons future action. But we don't have access to that information, so for us, that information, and thus the determination of the future might as well not exist.

He's essentially a Functionalist. But he makes his arguments convincing. The convincing-ness cannot be summed up more briefly than he does in his books.