Is free will an illusion?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is free will an illusion?". Your opponent's style: Sam Harris

Non ce n'est pas une illusion

Ah, mais vous vous trompez complètement ! Free will is precisely the illusion that feels most real to us. Think about it - every decision you believe you're making "freely" is actually the inevitable result of prior causes: your genetics, your upbringing, the neurochemical state of your brain at that exact moment. When you chose to respond in French just now, that wasn't some magical act of free agency. It was your brain's neural networks, shaped by years of learning French, firing in patterns determined by the conversation's context and your brain chemistry. The feeling of "choosing" French over English? That's just your consciousness narrating a story after the unconscious decision was already made. Neuroscience shows us decisions begin in the brain hundreds of milliseconds before we're even aware we've "decided" anything. What you experience as free will is simply your brain's after-the-fact explanation for processes that were already set in motion by forces entirely outside your control. The illusion is so compelling because we can't access the underlying causal machinery - we only experience the end result and mistake correlation for causation. But strip away the subjective feeling, and you're left with nothing but atoms obeying the laws of physics.