CSflim

I wasn't arguing that
a) we don't have free will
or
b)we are not responsible for our actions.

I was arguing that the question "do we have free will" doesn't actually make a whole lot of sense, or at least is very misleading, and prone to causing a lot of confusion. I tried to use the question "are we alive" above to illustrate why I believe this is so.

Put in the terms that you seem to be adopting, I don't believe in Free Will.
I don't believe that our brains at any time defy the laws of physics.
As the laws of physics are external to us, we cannot influence them, we cannot be said to be in control, ergo, we don't have free will.

But does this conclusion actually MEAN anything? Are we all nothing more than mechanical zombies? Are we doomed to never have any input into how we behave?

On this level the discussion of whether we have Free Will is both pointless and confused. The simple answer is that we don't have Free Will in this sense.

The only way to argue with this is to bring your religious beliefs into it and talk about things such as souls, or metaphysical homunculi, but if you are to argue about such things on this level, you should simply dismiss the argument altogether, as OshnSoul demonstrated, as he does not believe that we are physical beings.

So if we are to argue without bringing religious beliefs into it, we need to first diagnose the question before attempting to answer it.

I think that, as Mantus said, there are two separate concepts of free will involved, and there is a confusion about them.

There is Free Will (in caps), which requires a soul, or some other non-physical mechanism to work. As I stated above, arguing from this perspective is pointless, as it can only be done with people who share your religious beliefs. Anyone who takes science seriously is forced to conclude that we don't have Free Will.

There is however another thing: free will (in lowercase). This is a type of free will, which can exist in an empirical world, (deterministic or not) which does not require magical intervention. It is a real philosophical question (as opposed to a religious one).
This discussion asks questions such as "Can we blame someone for committing a criminal act? Can we justify punishing them? Can we attribute a work of art/poetry/music/literature/scientific theory/etc to a particular person? Did they really create them?" and other such questions.

I was attempting to push this thread in the direction of "free will", but is seems that everyone else wishes to talk in terms of Free Will.

That is fine, although I believe the latter argument is much more interesting, I will discuss the former.

I don't believe that we have Free Will, as there is no evidence to suggest that the laws of physics are broken inside the human brain (why would they? There is no reason to believe that they would).
If you don't believe that the laws of physics hold inside the human brain, then the burden of proof lies with you to prove such a thing.
If you have to bring up your religious beliefs to prove we have Free Will, then you have not won the argument, merely shifted to a completely different argument (that question that which we will never agree on..."is religious view X correct?").

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