I looked up the wikipedia entry on "free will"

I know that wikipedia has its problems, but whatever.

I guess I fall in somewhere on "compatibilism".

It seems like other people apply free will to external as well as internal things. Like if humans have free will that means that they completely choose their external conditions. For example, they would say that if you believe in free will you think that peasants in the fourteenth century chose to live short brutal hard lives and chose to be oppressed by the church and nobility.

I don't think that people create their own external reality. That seems rather silly to me. Plus, if the peasants choose to be oppressed doesn't that mean that the people oppressing them have no free will and can't choose to not oppress the peasants, therefore destroying that whole argument?

I tend to think that's the argument of people who need to feel like they're in control of external things and were probably abused as kids. It seems to posit a world centered around the abused person in which the abusers are just shadowy actors who are controlled by the will of the abused.
Or it could also be the view of the abusers, who see themselves as being in thrall to their victim and feel unable to control their abusive behavior.

I think that external reality is pretty much chaos, formed by random chance as well as the actions and decisions of sentient beings. People don't will their houses to be bombed and their relatives to be killed. Nope, that was caused by a string of things reaching as far back as you want to go. Personally, I stop at the brain of the person who ordered the bombing to start and wonder what happened there. I also look at the people who support the bombing and wonder about the inside of their brains.

And I think that our internal reality does depend a great deal on our genes and brain functions. But I also think that within all that, we have some power over our own minds. But maybe that's something that develops over time. I've been reading a lot of developmental theories lately, and they all seem to have the same pattern. And in that pattern, it takes a while to get to the stage of being able to question your own prejudices and motivations and feelings. Many adult humans - perhaps the majority - never make it to that stage.

So maybe the people who support the bombing just don't have the cognitive and psychological tools to be able to realize that the people on the other side of the bombs are real and have their own families and friends and jobs and desires and loves and lives. Maybe the genes and chemical reactions that lead to what we term "free will" just aren't there.

And then when I look at the person who ordered it - well, that brain is a complete mess.

Maybe that answers my question about the Hummer. Maybe those people are at the conforming stage and don't have the cognitive tools to be able to recognize poisonous cultural messages and advertising or understand the links between their conspicious consumption and the misery of other living beings.

Maybe what we term free will is something that is emerging in humans as our society becomes more complex and we leave our days of hunting and foraging like any other species further and further behind.

So essentially - I guess I believe in a sort of free will that emerges on materialistic principles. It's not a soul or a divine spark. It's in our genes and brain chemistry. And I guess I think of it more as a capability to feel empathy for beings other than yourself or the group that you identify yourself with and to make ethical decisions about both actions and internal beliefs and thought systems based on that than as the capability to decide whether you stand up for 10 more seconds or go ahead and sit down on a chair.