Is free will an illusion?

Does Free will Exits? The answers are lingering into two camps, yes or no. The hardest thing is not to come with the answer, but the reason behind. It easy to reside in the first camp, especially free will identical with the idea of freedom. If I do not have free-will, then I am not free so to speak and it is remarkably unthinkable concept! Thus, many come to say yes, not because they are not philosophically have grappled deep into the question but are terrified, if the answer turn to be the reverse. If i am not free, I am being determined, If I am determined then which direction of future I will be arrived at?

Contrary to what people allegedly believes, In his ground-breaking book, The Illusion of Free-Will, Sam Harris argues that we do not have free will. Free will does not exits at all. Perhaps, Harris is the one of the leading anti-free will proponent today. Harris argues that since free will was not our own making, then free will is an illusion. Most of the time, our choice is not base on conscious acts but as Harris mentioned, it is "unconsciously" in origin. He bring the evidence from Neuroscience to support his argument. Our awareness of our conscious actions are slower than the brain activity and neuron that produce acts. and preserve the information of the action as Harris says,

"The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain’s motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move."

As the result of this research, Harris conclude that we are tricked to think that actually we are free to do certain thing yet in fact, we are just wired and determined fully. All of our actions are caused per se by unconscious streams, and not come by our own making in other word, our acts already been made! In this case, one should examine libet's EEG's methodology before come to a definitive conclusion. Alfred E. Male critically asked, "Why should we think that a decision is made when the EEG rise begins rather than a few hundred milliseconds later?" Probably, there might not be an absolute correlation between brain activity and our responsive awareness in certain occasion, this case need to be justified further for the sake of the argument. 

Moreover, Is it true that only unconscious influence the conscious mind? Now take the simple case of self motivation. If we choose deliberately to tell our-self to be positive all the time, which we could then most of the time, unconsciously we will be more positive without we noticed at it, until some people tells us so about the positive vibe of ours. To believe that only unconscious  actions exits is to fallaciously come to a reductionist conclusion as if as all of the actions of serial killer and also medical doctor are similar, a "Freudian slip of tongue" kind of acts because basically, a person is not in full control of their own action.

Hence, anti free-will like Harris, will have difficulty on making the case for morality and practical ethic. To answer the implication of his thought, Harris argues that punishment for evil acts can be done not on the basis of the determinate actions but the intention behind, which in result eventually produces harm. The problem is, how we could measure and weight the "Intention" if the criminal claim the horrible act was intention-less or intended for a good cause? In this matter, the idea of judging the intention complicates the issue even further. To defend moral responsibility in anti-free will framework, some might appeal strongly to deterrence Theory that is to say, punishment is not because the agent inherently to be blamed but to prevent further bad actions in the future so, punishment is necessary. 

For instance, cutting hands to prevent stealing. Yet the punishment potentially appeal to be inhuman, unjust and not equal since as they claimed, the agent has no free will to commit the crime or to be blame at the first place and worst, how more if the punishment are directed to the innocent, to the crime he/or she did not commit. Although our actions are mostly caused by some unconscious source, it does not make our free will irrelevant. Free will does not mean an act without any boundaries or any absolute intervention, as far as classical definition of free will describes. It is true that we do not have absolute free will for all free will are constrained in some extend by so many factors, internally or externally. At the end, if we could think, ponder and weight which argument of the free will is the best, and then come to a conclusion I think it is a good enough evidence that we have a certain degree of free will. If free will is only an Illusion, in what sense we can says the discussion of free will itself is a meaningful discourse? Perhaps, the notion of the illusion of free will itself is an illusion.