I enjoyed Gazzaniga's book and would recommend it, but I, like Jerry Coyne, was unmoved by his compatibilist hedgings. Naive 'free will' is one of those old ideas that we made up and began to take for granted, and now we have to all sorts of heavy lifting to undo it. For me, it is far more parsimonious to accept that in light of a deterministic universe, libertarian notions of 'choice' (or any type of free will based on dualist ideas) are incompatible with our understanding of the nature of reality.
I could be wrong, of course, but whenever I see free will being redefined it strikes me as an attempt to hold on to some old idea for no other reason than that it was here FIRST! In this way, it is very much like what Sophisticated Theologians do when they distance themselves from what their revealed holy texts actually say and move toward some new definition of faith or god(s) that can coexist with a modern understanding of the world. The average believer seldom grapples with these heavy intellectual problems and are content to have their immature and unsophisticated view of their faith go unchallenged.
This constant revision should be a clue as to how desperate some are to cling to old ideas in light of new information. At some point, it may be useful to throw it all out and start working from scratch on new explanations rather than trying to square leftovers from more ignorant times with our newfangled enlightened ones.
It has gotten to the point where one must try very hard to see 'freedom' where it probably doesn't exist. And when our intuitive impression of what it means to be a free agent doesn't comport with reality, why not just change or reimagine the definition of said freedom or agency? It all smacks of wishful thinking and moving goal posts. This, again, is very reminiscent of how people work to reduce dissonance with respect to holding onto certain idiosyncratic religious beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Why can't we just shake it off and start constructing arguments from the ground up instead of building on top of what are almost certainly unsound intellectual foundations?
In case my ramblings were unclear, it may serve to quote Coyne at length here:
One of the most obvious resemblances of theology to compatibilism is the continual redefinition of “free will” so that (like God) it’s always preserved despite scientific advances. When Libet and Soon et al. showed that they could predict a person’s behavior several seconds in advance of that person’s conscious decision, the compatibilists rushed to save their definition, declaring that these experiments are completely irrelevant to the notion of free will. They’re not. For if free will means anything, it means that our choices are coincident with our consciousness of making them (to libertarians, our consciousness makes those choices, and we could have chosen otherwise). There is no scientific experiment, no finding from neuroscience, that will make the compatibilists give up their efforts, for they will simply continue to redefine free will in a way that humans will always have it. That resistance to evidence is another way compatibilism resembles Sophisticated Theology.™
