Rescher's Free Will: A Philosophical Reappraisal [0] argues for a compatibilist view on the question of free will. He very carefully presents his argument to reconcile the internal subjective experience of deliberate free decision and action within the current objective scientific view that the universe is deterministic. The pages span various arguments for and limitations to free will that asserts that humans are ration beings that make "choices". But despite the quantity, depth and breadth of the arguments presented, he demurs that the book "does not lay claim to the status of a categorical proof." [1] He alludes to the ramifications at the end with regards to ethics and how we should understand ourselves.
The sort of free will envisioned by Rescher is very limited in comparison to the oft imagined "can try anything at any time" sort of freedom. He limits this freedom to choose otherwise only "if something-or-other and [sic; had?] been different." [2] He rejects that agents have the possibility to choose differently if it were possible to somehow re-play the choice made as showing that the agent is not rational. However, the determinism must not by-pass the agent either, the agent's internal deliberation and resulting decision are necessarily in the stream of causality, but these have a different quality than natural phenomena. In contrast, a hard line materialist view can be summarized as "an illusion. The experience we have of deliberating before some important decision is a mere bit of electrical chatter that our brains generate, the effect of which is to obscure from us the fact that our decision was cast before we were even aware of it." [3] Thus, although Rescher does not postulate some supernatural decider such as a mind, the subjective experience of deciding is nonetheless elevated above other natural phenomena.
Overall, Rescher argues ardently on the question and common objections to the compatibilist position from both advocates of determinism and free will. These are technical in nature and for someone leaning in the general direction, I suspect, quite convincing. Even if one leans away, there is much here worth mulling over. Overall, it seems that there is a dichotomy between subjective experience and objective reality. Perhaps it can be thought of as akin to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle where position and momentum of a particle cannot be known to a high degree of precision at the same time. One can address the question from the perspective of materialistic science or by analyzing the subjective experience, but doing so from both at the same time leads to unresolvable paradoxes.
Suppose you and I are playing billiards. The playing table, suitably situated in the pub down the road such that relativistic and quantum level effects are negligible, is deterministically defined through Newtonian mechanics. As each player takes a turn, the shot one will take, while affected by the situation on the table, is not predetermined by that situation, but rather determined by the player's deliberation. One can discuss the forces, momenta and positions of the balls and predict the result of the shot taken, or one can discuss the motivations and strategy of what shot should be taken, but not at the same time. The key feature is that different rules apply depending whether you are analyzing the movement of the balls or deliberation of the thoughts. But you cannot find a single set of rules to analyze both at the same time. Well, it's a thought.
[0] Rescher, Nicholas. Free Will: A Philosophical Reappraisal. United Kingdom, Transaction Publishers, 2009. Note: this version did seem to have a higher quantity of typographical errors than other books I have read.
[1] Rescher, p. 162
[2] ibid, p. 50.
[3] Crawford, Matthew B.. The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. United States, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
