re: Does free will exist?

I wanted to get in before this turned into a crappy religious thread, but I do not believe that free will truly exists at least not at the level most people believe.

Just try to estimate how much of your life and decisions are truly the result of your choice? I would generously estimate that 95% or so of our life is completely out of our control. We have no say in things such as when we were born, where we were born, who we were born to, how many chromosomes we have, what mental capacities or deficiencies we may have, etc. If you were born in the mountains of eastern China to the Hmong people, for instance, you would have a totally different reality than you do now which would completely affect and change your choices. Not to mention if you were born in a completely different era.

Now, all of that and free will aren’t mutually exclusive, but it highlights how little we control and ultimately how much other things affect our “free will” choices. And all of this isn’t getting into the basic biology aspect about how pure evolutionary theory leads one towards agreeing with the idea that everything we do is just the result of randomly firing neurons in the brain (not wanting to debate this but just saying it simply without getting into things like consciousness and such).

So I believe we probably have a choice to a certain extent, but is it really free is the question. Anyone who just accepts flatly that there is a truly free will I think is being intellectually dishonest especially considering how different all their choices would be with one extra chromosome or if they were born into an area like North Korea. My 2 cents.