The problem goes even deeper than this. It's not merely a false dichotomy but a false continuum. The implication is that minds are machines, and that as machines they may be, at one extreme, deterministic (like a software program that doesn't use `rand()`) or, at the other extreme, non-deterministic (like a software program that does), or, somewhere in the middle, "chaotic" (like a software program that doesn't use randomization but is sufficiently complex to produce results that seem magical).

But surely we believe in "free will" not because we observe it in a lab but because we experience it directly. Pick up a menu at a restaurant. Sure there is mechanistic cause and effect going on in your selection—memories, sights, smells—but there is also the direct experience of choosing. Whatever free will is, it has to do with this experience of bringing a cause into the universe essential ex nihilo, from within yourself.

Science is always compelled to dismiss these individual and personal experiences and perceptions, and as science rightly so. But as people we can take them into account. And so we should. To dismiss the sense of "I" that makes us, in fact, people is to cast away perhaps the most important part of our world. We retain a sense of choice, of free will, not because it's a compelling illusion but because it is in fact in large part what we are and what we recognize others to be. Be careful with that word "illusion": you can call something an illusion, but you then have to account for where the illusion came from and why it functions so powerfully. I'd say that free will is not an illusion so much as a thing that science deals badly with and is therefore tempted to dismiss. Well, dismiss free will from the laboratory, sure, but don't pretend we aren't free-willing things or you'll be left with nothing but a lab, populated by not-quite-people.

> but there is also the direct experience of choosing. Whatever free will is, it has to do with this experience of bringing a cause into the universe essential ex nihilo, from within yourself.

Is this sort of what is meant with 'qualia'? I could never quite wrap my head around what that concept means, in what context, and what its value is.

Yes I think that's more or less it. You can describe the entire mechanism of how an eye, optic nerve, and brain system sees the color green. In an ideal world you could explain that mechanism in absolutely detail, down to the molecule, down to the particle. Yet even if you did you would have said nothing about the most important thing about seeing the color green, which is the actual experience of doing so. That experience is what they call qualia. You can have the experience without actually seeing anything—you can dream it or imagine it, for example—which suggests that the experiencing is more fundamental, maybe more "real" in some sense, than the mechanism. Yet modern people, particularly of a scientific bent, have a dangerous tendency to emphasize the mechanism over the experience, even to the extent of denying the experience, and with it, the "person" part of people.