I think you're confusing yourself by asking the wrong question.  Could a thing called "free will" be an emergent property?  Sure.  Emergent properties exist, and there could be one that we decided to call "Free Will."  But that's really just stating the obvious.

Rather than go at it from that angle, I think you should ask, "What would free will be if it were an emergent property?"

What I think you'll find is that describing such a property will prove remarkably difficult, if not impossible.  What most of us think of when we conceptualize "Free Will" is second order awareness of our options.  That is, we can think about thinking about our options.  We can analyze how we move from point A to point B and arrive at a decision.  While this is certainly a neat talent, it doesn't really have much to do with any genuine freedom from our subconscious "algorithm."  It's that very algorithm, which happens quite beyond our control, that gives us the ability to analyze our thoughts, and we can neither turn it off and on nor change it.  

So... just for shits and giggles, can you describe what an emergent, "free" ability would look like?

Have you ever tried asking the question the other way?  How can one have options and be aware of them, and NOT still ultimately be a slave to some kind of back end algorithm?  Awareness is awareness.  It doesn't imply or necessarily lead to freedom from algorithms.  It's just awareness.

Why?

I take it I'm supposed to be insulted?  I've written at great length about free will.  It's in the RRS author's section.  The crux of my argument is not that humans don't make choices, or that second order thought doesn't make our choices different in kind from an ant's choices.  It's that the concept of Free Will is incoherent, and that ultimately, every choice we make boils down to an extremely simple algorithm:  We choose what we believe is the best thing for us to choose.

If you think about that for a second, you realize why the freewill concept is nonsense.  What determines our appraisal of the best choice?  Two things, and two things only:  The totality of our perceptions and the algorithm which we can call our "thought processes."

We have no control over our perceptions.  Our brain reaches decisions before we become aware of the decisions.  (You've read this research, I'm sure.)  So... there's literally no time in which this magical free will could exert itself.  Once we enter a state of belief, we're there, and we can't defy time to go back and change it.

It's really very simple.  We just have this bizarre notion that awareness of awareness somehow frees us from basic neurology.

Did you ever notice the whole free will thing is just a lead-in to a religious guilt trip? It is a cheap argument that sounds like deep thought that always leads to a required free choice to do as the sky pilot says.

Free will they say. What other kinds of will are there? Please name them. As there is only one kind what other purpose the redundant "free" kind save to affix guilt for failure to obey the sky pilot?

It isn't really fair to hold all the medicine men guilty as they are no brighter than anyone else. What other group could spend centuries debating free will v predestination knowing full well there is no possible way to test either view?

On the secular side we have the question of whether individuals make a difference or there is a tide in the affairs of men that sweeps to its own shores despite what men can do. It is a question without a moral component. For the Greeks it was a theme of a hero. The question was if a person was strong enough not that he chose to be a hero. Priests can't damn people to hell for not being born with the right stuff. So comes the fantasy everyone can be a hero by obeying the guy with the beanie or the funny collar.

How would you define this subconscious algorithm? Does it have any properties usefull for anything? Any 100% certain parameters we can work with, so that we know that the algorithm can't be changed?

Could it be that the totality of our mind's thought processing mechanism includes methods for changing the base algorithm, methods which in themselves are not deterministic, like a chaotic system rather than a complex one? A system that makes new base rules and abolishes old ones as it goes?

In essence, could it be that the "algorithm" is that there is no algorithm?

You left out, either in error or in brevity, the fact that human bodies operate in such a harmony within themselves and with millions of other humans that a comparison with any other animal quickly becomes invalid, if and when the "right minds" are brought to such a discussion. The human body is also highly resistant to outside invasions, either through choice or nature, and humans are easily the most dangerous and unique organism on the planet....

Every organism on the planet is unique.  (Well, I guess you could make a case for identical twins being genetically non-unique.)  But yeah, the "uniqueness" of humans is often part of very human-centric thinking.  Sharks are also extraordinarily dangerous and unique.  There aren't many more efficient killers alive, and frankly, all they do is eat and reproduce.

And what about viruses?  They have one and only one purpose -- to reproduce -- and they do it by fucking up their hosts.  Humans at least do nice things for other animals.  I fed my cat and petted him for a while just this very morning.

True, but the question I think he was asking is whether or not human decision making could be chaotic, and essentially "coin flips."

I don't see any evidence of that.  Granted, there's a lot we still don't know about how brains work, but the outcomes we see give every indication of resulting from non-chaotic processes.  

There's also an issue of definition and language.  I think I wrote earlier that the human decision making algorithm could be summed up simply as "I believe I ought to do what I believe is best."

Having never heard a convincing argument against that simple formula, I can go on to extrapolate the following:  Even if there are non-deterministic elements to human decision making, if the final decision can be viewed as "that which seems like the best choice," then we're no closer to finding genuinely free will.  Our "mental circuitry" processes data before we are conscious of it happening.  By the time we have a thought, the thought has already been formed.  It exists in time.  We can no longer change the existence of that thought than we can reverse time.  Furthermore, while we are experiencing that thought, the unconscious machinery in our heads is churning out our next thought -- of which we are currently unaware.

In other words, what feels like a "real time" experience to us is really a little bit like the delay on a HD television broadcast.  It's all coming to our conscious brain slightly after it happens at the source.

Then there's the question of whether or not we can consciously alter the subconscious process, but this is a red herring.  If we have decided that we want to change the subconscious process, our brain decided that before we became aware of the decision and we are just as helpless to alter our belief about that than if we didn't want to alter the process.

Exactly the same argument can be applied to the perception of deterministic nature of our decision making - its just a perception. Of course, for you to even consider it as such, I must present you with an example that makes non-deterministic decision making likely, otherwise you will just give me a it's-turtles-all-the-way-down type of answer. Apart from it being a possibility introduced by Niels Bohr, I will try to think of an example. It will not arrive today, I'm afraid.

That is all well and good, but a process that decides to change itself might not be a) in charge of the change b) ever able to reverse the change, effectively removing all semblance to an algorithm or anything constant, save a single attribute: its changeable.

There is no line of experimentation that has as yet invalidated Bohr model derived from quantum mechanics. In the case it is correct, our decision making depends on a mess of locally decided states of particles at the moment of measurement, to the extent that decision making is a physical phenomena the way we understand it. This can not be even talked about as being deterministic or not - it is just nuts.

The line of argumentation you talk about is not at all independent of perception. We happen to see the side the dice usually land on, like the normal distribution of the sum of two 6-sided dice. We conclude the algorithm deals with the number 7 a lot, all the while nothing in the physical system of the two dice has number 7 actually written on it and determinism is only theoretical. We can not think outside the frame, so accepting non-determinism is about as likely as accepting that universe is finite.

Like I said in the part you quoted from a previous post: to offset the turtles-all-the-way-down line of thought in a firm believer, I will have to come up with or find a positively briliant example. I can't do it today (or possibly ever), so I will have to leave it open for the moment.

Yup, Copenhagen interpretation, sry for speedtyping.

Now, if we were discussing whether I can go through a wall or not, this point would be valid. However, we are discussing the fundamentals of freedom of thought/decision, which means that we are discussing the fundamentals, not statistics.

Seen in this light, your objection has a practical hue. Practically the perceptual determinism of decision making is important, judging by the statements and accomplishments of Goebbels and his contemporary imitators. In this light it is especially important for us to keep an open door for a potential freedom of thought/decision and continuously ask quastions that challenge our science. I say science and not understanding, because today science is not always a challenge to our understanding, but also a not-always-justified and often a directly damaging and limiting factor to it. We need "better science", as it were. If you want to discuss this, please not here. I am just explainging the way I see things, which will be interesting for the conclusion of this post.

But back to fundamentals. Statistically decision making looks deterministic to us, since it is not separate from other physical phenomena, which incidentally also look deterministic to us. This can mean two things: either we lack understanding of certain things, or reality really is deterministic. Can you imagine how a physical phenomena would look like if it looked non-deterministic? Can you imagine what's beyond the finite universe, effectively imagine nothing? The opposite is just as eazy: can you imagine an infinite universe? I think someone in a post above actually mentioned not being able to define this "freedom" thing; think it was the humpty dumpty guy.

This makes a pretty good case for our lack of understanding and says nothing about the determinism of things. How come? Well, there are no more options for universe, right? We cannot accept it infinite or limited, but it still exists.

So, how does this relate to determinism? Well, it's basically the same dilemma - either everything is deterministic and we have an infinite recursion of causes, or it's not and we lack understanding of things Copenhagen interpretation or the theory of complexity touch on. Something is "wrong" with us when we come to fundamentals, at least for the moment.

Which side of the discussion you fall on usually depends on your instinct and interest, rather than being conclusively convinced by "facts". Most people on this forum have an instinct to contradict holy scripture at every turn. I have the instinct that I explained in the second paragraph of this post. Naturally, we all see our own instinct as the most important one.

I've been arguing that for the past few days on Atheist Nexus on two threads. Pretty happy with how it's going, despite the guy doing the "I think I understand, makes sense, but I still don't quite get it, shit I'm back where I started" dance. I've clarified several thoughts I've been working on for a while, and tied several different threads together:

http://www.atheistnexus.org/forum/topics/imagination-dreams-illusions

http://www.atheistnexus.org/forum/topics/if-you-see-a-difference-then