Actually, nothing I said precludes a thing from being a cause of itself (though I would, from other considerations, argue that nothing can be sufficient cause of itself), and conversely, some thing being a cause of itself does not eliminate the requirement of every thing being causally determined.
Basically, what it seems you’re saying, then, is that since both the river determines the path of the riverbed, and the riverbed determines the path of the river, the path of the river is free; well, I disagree – causal interrelatedness does not provide grounds for freedom (as I hope the river example makes clear immediately).
But I do get to start with consistency, without which any position is self-defeating – and something both requiring freedom and directedness (as is necessary for will), which are synonyms for ‘not being determined’ and ‘being determined’, is simply inconsistent.
Show a way in which anything can be understood that doesn’t rely on cause and effect.
The reason I don’t start of this way is that it doesn’t need something as strict as determinism to rebut the idea of free will; it merely needs the notion that logical deductions are possible, i.e. that there exists a formal system whose deducible theorems represent true propositions about reality. This is, I believe, the weakest sense in which one is able to come to any meaningful conclusions about the world; reject this, and I have trouble seeing how you could ever assert anything with confidence (i.e. how you’d know that any of your assertions apply to reality by anything but pure chance).
If the choice of the consciousness is a state thereof, that implies the necessity of a choice of this state. If it isn’t, the state is undetermined.
I haven’t said that the reason for your decision can’t be part of your state at one point or another; I’m not sure if it can be wholly determined by that state (for if there were an action that is wholly determined by your own internal state, it would seem that it is possible that there is an action that (sufficiently) causes itself to occur, which causes itself to occur, etc. – but there, one eventually runs afoul of simple thermodynamics), but it can certainly be influenced by it. But I have said that your own state – however fuzzily you want to define ‘you’ – is in itself at best either free or wilful, but never both.
Eh, it’s not all that important, really. More or less something like a time-travel paradox, just without the troublesome time-travel. As a matter of interest, if a time-traveller appeared to you, told you what you’d do tomorrow, and you’d find yourself doing exactly those things absent any manifest feelings of coercion, would you then consider your actions to be free?
And I’m saying that I’ve got no idea what ‘for [me] to be conscious, * need to possess volition’ could conceivably mean in such a way that it would actually follow. (And to a lesser extent, also what to be conscious means in the absence of being conscious of something.)
Nevermind exterior, interior, and whatever flavours of reductionism to holism you’d like to prefer – given the state of the universe at some point (seen from some inertial frame in spacetime, if we want to attempt some objectivity), could you or couldn’t you decide differently from the way you end up deciding?
So is a case like the aforementioned river, which carves its own bed, yet is directed by that very bed, a case of an exercise of freedom?