Capacity of making decisions is the thing that differs those who dream from those who act. Every person makes thousands of various decisions every day. Most of them are so usual for us that we don't even pay attention to them. Every morning a person decides whether to drink a cup of coffee or a cup of tea for breakfast, to go on foot or by public transport, to put on a raincoat or take an umbrella. Such decisions come to us immediately, and we cannot say if they were either caused by some reason, or made subconsciously. But what we can say about problems that take us a lot of time to solve it?
Although modern neuroscience deny the phenomenon of free will, I totally agree with Hilary Bok. We still have a freedom of the will, even if our decisions have some kind of biological foundation. It reflects in the capacity to make one of several possible choices. People always have alternatives, however, they don't recognize it sometimes. When a man put on a blue shirt he don't necessarily notice that there is a white one next to the blue one. 'To be or nor to be' is the opening phrase of Hamlet's monologue in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, and it serves as an example of alternatives that people usually have.
Furthermore, choices that are taken under our control require responsibility for the results they can cause. As far as people don't like the feeling of being powerless, they prefer to know that they can follow own interests and aims because of capacity for self-governance. At the same time no one can deny that our freedom of the will is imprisoned in a cell of fears and phobias. But modern neuroscience gives us a key to this cell helping to understand the reason of the problem and to find a solution in order to overcome it.
References
1. Hilary Bok. (2007). The Implications of Advances in Neuroscience for Freedom of
the Will. Alan I. Faden. Neurotherapeutics: The Journal of the American Society for Experimental NeuroTherapeutics. (555-559). Springer Verlag.
