Long article in the New York Times about Free Will - Do we have Free Will or Not?  According to the article - we have the awareness, at times, of having free will - but the awareness of will comes and goes; in that sense we have Free Will and then we don't have it.   There was a lot of interesting thoughts in the Times article so I'll quote what struck me.

"….Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, “Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free."

"…..In some experiments, subjects have been tricked into believing they are responding to stimuli they couldn’t have seen in time to respond to, or into taking credit or blame for things they couldn’t have done. Take, for example, the “voodoo experiment” by Dan Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, and Emily Pronin of Princeton. In the experiment, two people are invited to play witch doctor."

"……But most of the action is going on beneath the surface. Indeed, the conscious mind is often a drag on many activities. Too much thinking can give a golfer the yips. Drivers perform better on automatic pilot. Fiction writers report writing in a kind of trance in which they simply take dictation from the voices and characters in their head, a grace that is, alas, rarely if ever granted nonfiction writers."

Sounds like feeling we're in the drivers seat of our actions is a perception that sometimes we have and sometimes we don't.

"…..But once they are here, they play by new rules, and can even act on their constituents, as when an artist envisions a teapot and then sculpts it — a concept sometimes known as “downward causation.” A knowledge of quarks is no help in predicting hurricanes — it’s physics all the way down. But does the same apply to the stock market or to the brain? Are the rules elusive just because we can’t solve the equations or because something fundamentally new happens when we increase numbers and levels of complexity?"

OK, that's what they call creativity, "downward causation" - feel as if I create my paintings within first and just let it emerge.  Make sense to me.

"….If by free will we mean the ability to choose, even a simple laptop computer has some kind of free will, said Seth Lloyd, an expert on quantum computing and professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Every time you click on an icon, he explained, the computer’s operating system decides how to allocate memory space, based on some deterministic instructions. But, Dr. Lloyd said, “If I ask how long will it take to boot up five minutes from now, the operating system will say ‘I don’t know, wait and see, and I’ll make decisions and let you know.’ ”

That it explains it …. my laptop crashing … it must be the laptop's free will - to crash or not (except it does not realize it's crashing till it does).  

Lots of things last year - some I would have liked to have done or worked out differently - but could they have?  The article in the times seems to say …. nope - we are kinda "acting on auto pilot", making decisions about our direction at times when we're aware we have choices, but not at times when we're not self aware. 

Then again, maybe the truth lies somewhere in the middle - we can be aware more often of choices.