If there is no supernatural, if matter and the laws of physics are all that exist, then all you can be is matter that obeys the laws of physics. You have particles that obey the quantum laws, making up atoms that obey the laws of atomic physics, making up molecules that obey the laws of chemistry, making up neurons that obey the laws of neurology. There is nowhere in that stack for free will - it's all determinism plus noise.
The only way free will is possible is if there is more than the pure materialist position says there is.
Every time this comes up, I want to tell people they're in the lucky 10000 [1], because I get to tell them about Chaos Theory.
For a while Chaos theory was very popular. But this died down a just a little bit because who is happy with a theory that says you can't know things even in a perfectly deterministic universe? It's still a very useful and important thing to know about though.
Chaos is just an arbitrary level of complexity on a deterministic/random system. It doesn't come into play here because a chaotic system is still just a stack of deterministic/random micro actions.
I can write a computer program that produces a chaotic output. However, nowhere in the computer or program will you find any free will.
Well, if I take a Mercedes apart, nowhere in any part of the car will I find the ability to comfortably cruise at 160 km/h on the autobahn. Not in the engine (it just makes funny noises), not in the suspension (it's just a bit springy when compressed) , and not in the tires (which just bounce up and down and roll off if you throw them).
Only when I put all the parts of the car together in the right order and in the right places does that property emerge.
...which is an entirely deterministic output of the design of the car. Literally the reason why the car was made the way it was.
I'm failing to see your point here, but it seems you are alluding to the idea that chaos theory produces a black box of complexity, and therefore free will exists there. Which isn't really an explanation so much as an exercise in moving goal posts into unlit corridors of knowledge.
Which doesn't even make sense because chaos theory is a theory that deals with system evolution when incomplete knowledge is known about the systems starting conditions. No where in chaos theory is there talk of supernatural phenomena. It's purely a theory of practical constraints, no physical ones.
The Mercedes example is just strictly in response to the idea that property X of a system must somehow (already) be present in one of its sub-components. It doesn't.
So a concept like free will could exhibit itself in the output of -say- a turing machine, (or turing-like entity, like a DNA strand - think tape and multiple read heads), even if none of the components has that property.
I do actually think that certain [deterministically] chaotic systems have a lot of the properties we associate with free will (the ability to make some sort of sensible choices that still seem 'random'); so I tend to see them as very similar concepts. You might have a different definition though!
(To compress an insanely long story into a pithy but awesome oneliner)
Expanding slightly: You being [deterministically] chaotic in nature pretty much gives you all the properties of having free will afaict imvho. It covers both the ability to act with a will as well as the fact that your behavior is not practically predictable. I can live with that!
If there is no supernatural, if matter and the laws of physics are all that exist, then all you can be is matter that obeys the laws of physics. You have particles that obey the quantum laws, making up atoms that obey the laws of atomic physics, making up molecules that obey the laws of chemistry, making up neurons that obey the laws of neurology. There is nowhere in that stack for free will - it's all determinism plus noise.
The only way free will is possible is if there is more than the pure materialist position says there is.