Nice post
@Skorpio.
I'll just add a little less politely - anyone who doesn't believe that free will is an illusion, could you please try to define the mechanism of choice as anything other than a computational process based on one's experiences in life, and innate tendencies? (Innate tendencies, obviously, are not freely chosen.) I have never once seen anyone manage to do this.
Also - it should be obvious that the illusory nature of free will has pretty much zero consequence whatsoever as far as how we should live our lives. Whether or not the mechanism of choice is in fact a deterministic one (randomness being involved or not - something can be random and still deterministic, and a random choice is not a "free" one, by most people's definition, in any case), we still have to go through the motions. We still have to make choices. It's not an illusion that we can escape, and thus, every other connected but equally illusory aspect of the self remains just as relevant as it ever was. We are living within the illusion - it doesn't matter if it's an illusion.
The only area in which recognition of the illusion of free will can make a difference is in helping one to accept the inevitability of mistakes made in the past, and the causative factors that lead to these choices. But this requires a nuanced approach, it's not enough to simply dismiss any past error of judgement as something that was going to happen anyway (even if it is true) because then we would never learn to make better choices in the future. In fact, I'd argue that
too much recognition of the illusory nature of free will is
usually, or at least, quite often
not a good thing, as it can quite easily lead to a far too fatalistic approach to life. But the decision to react to this aspect of reality in this way
is itself a choice that we all must choose to make. Illusion or not - we cannot escape it. Discussions about whether free will is illusory or not have academic value and value in helping people come to terms with choices they -
and only they (OK, sometimes others, but again, that is a very nuanced discussion) have made - they have, probably, close to zero value in being any kind of guide for
how one should live in the future.