In order to author your decisions, you'd first have to author the decision to author your decision, and so on. So you would need to decide what your next thought is going to be before your think it, as well as deciding what that thought was going to be. Clearly, that's nothing like how our minds work.
If you remain unconvinced, try meditating for like 5 minutes. That is, focus on nothing but your breath for as long as possible. You could not avoid having other thoughts pop into your head even if your life depended on it.
I don't think that one follows from the other: I sometimes have violent thoughts when I'm angry at someone, but I'm never actually violent. (Another example would be the popular quip that average men think of sex N times per unit of time, with N being much larger than how often they actually have sex.) This suggests that there is at least one more step between having a thought and acting on it, that your argument is not considering.
My argument wasn't considering the difference between having a thought and acting on it because I did not think it was an important distinction.
Whatever mechanism there is that makes you act on some thoughts but not on others, that mechanism is itself subject to the same mystery as thoughts are. What I mean is, you would have to make the decision to make the decision to act, but not before having made the decision to make that decision, and so on. What we in fact experience is no such regression of decisions, but instead merely the sensation of the thought, possibly followed by the sensation of acting.
That you identify yourself as the voluntary thinker of your thoughts and actor of your actions is a beneficial psychological feature surely, it's the difference between someone suffering from schizophrenia and someone not, but that feeling is necessarily an illusion because of the reasons I have explained.
> If you remain unconvinced, try meditating for like 5 minutes. That is, focus on nothing but your breath for as long as possible. You could not avoid having other thoughts pop into your head even if your life depended on it.
The secret is not avoiding thoughts, but having the same thought (a blank canvas, a black void, your breathing, etc.) for five minutes.
No, that's just a word game. In order for me to get up from bed, I have to want to get up from bed, then I have to want to want to get up from bed, then I have to want to want to want to get up from bed. You can make anything absurd with that.
The question of free will is whether I want to get up from bed, or I have to get up from bed. It doesn't matter how the mind works, it matters whether or not the choice is freely taken or is coerced.
Describe the subjective process by which you decided whether to get up. Probably you just felt like it, or were coerced by your bladder. If you had a reason, then your actions are a product of that reason, which itself is part of a casual chain of past circumstances that you can't control now. If you didn't have a reason, then your decision to get up or stay was random, and that's not free either.
If you remain unconvinced, try meditating for like 5 minutes. That is, focus on nothing but your breath for as long as possible. You could not avoid having other thoughts pop into your head even if your life depended on it.