How is free will not the same as choice? A lack of free will is an inability to exert agency through choosing. Determinism removes the possibility of choosing.
If you have no free will, you can't express yourself... nothing you do will be the product of your desires. Weren't you free to choose the words you wrote in your reply?
You're being quite naive, not understanding what the issue is.
Of course everything you do will be a product of what "you" "decide" to do. In that, completely naive & day-to-day, sense of the phrase, "you" do have "free will".
But how did that "decision" come to be? Was there a cause for it to happen? If so, what caused it? If it was caused by deterministic laws of physics, then that doesn't sound much like "free will". If it was random, it doesn't sound like "free will" either. What is "free will" and how does it start electrochemical reactions in your brain which will result in a movement of your hand? What is "you", which posseses "free will"?
It's all about definition here I guess. I would say choice is the illusion itself.
I chose the words I did, but the "how" is all an answer of essentially very complicated physics, chemistry, biology, and everything I've experienced in my life.
>"If you have no free will, you can't express yourself... nothing you do will be the product of your desires."
This is absolutely false. My desires are still a part of what drives me. I express myself every day in countless ways. The distinction is that I didn't have free will - it was always going to happen, in the way it happened. My consciousness does not understand how it came to that though, so it sees it as choices I made. It's just a bunch of molecules reacting to each other. That doesn't say anything of what the reactions mean or make what I do or feel any less important.
> If you have no free will, you can't express yourself... nothing you do will be the product of your desires. Weren't you free to choose the words you wrote in your reply?
My words are "my" choice and indeed the product of my desires, but that me and those desires are nothing more or less than the product of various mundane processes. I could never have been anything other than myself, and as such I could never have chosen any words other than these. (And if my choice of words was not determined then that just means they were random, which doesn't seem to make them any more an exercise of agency or free will - fundamental particles are able to behave just as randomly as we are).
I am a coherent existence because the causal relations from one thing to another really do go through a nexus that can be identified as me, but there's no free will there - what would it even mean to have free will?
> A lack of free will is an inability to exert agency through choosing.
Not at all. A computer program can easily do such things as choose items from a list, and thus create the appearance of agency to an outside observer. But that doesn't mean that it exhibits free will.
> Weren't you free to choose the words you wrote in your reply?
I was thinking the same. If we have no free will, what made us think that we don't have free will? Because we don't have free will, the thought on "not having free will" should probably the outcome of the past actions, which we didn't have choice on that either. Is it inevitable for many people to think so? Why not the rest?
If you have no free will, you can't express yourself... nothing you do will be the product of your desires. Weren't you free to choose the words you wrote in your reply?