I love Alan Watts too. In any case, I need to insert the necessary reference to recently passed John Conway's Free Will Theorem. I recommend every one to watch his 6-lecture long presentation on this, available on YouTube and underappreciated given the number of views, where he captivatingly describes his proof that, if we have free will, so do elementary particles. This is a purely mathematics- and physics-based proof which I understand is fully accepted by the scientific community, and while it, of course, does not provide an explanation of the underlying cause, it provides the best possible description obtained by scientific methodology so far.

I like to think that, somehow, Alan Watts and John Conway were digging the same tunnel, just starting from the two endpoints, and bound to meet at some point in the future. We just need a few more diggers of that stature (tall order, I know).