Free Will, Agency, Self, Life

I will be starting a series on Free Will and Agency this week. It will have a structure something like (but not necessarily identical with) this outline:

1. Definitions.

2. Is the argument for Free Will circular?

3. Is the argument for Free Will an infinite regression?

4. Is the argument for Free Will grounded?

5. Delay, Delusion, Libet, and fMRI. Delusion as a premise in deduction.

6. The brain as a meat machine.

7. Free Will and Agency as subjects for empirical study; falsifiability as a criterion.

8. Determinism as slavery / automatonism, vs. Free Will as slavery to culture / environment.

9. Will and patterns.

10. Free Will vs. physics and determinism.

11. Free Will as pure behavior.

12. Partial Free Will.

13. Free Will as Essentialist axiom.

14. Pure Skepticism and Miscellaneous objections to Free Will, agency, self, and life arguments.

15. Who Owns You?

If Free Will and agency exist in the essence of being human, then that fact is fatal to both Philosophical Materialism and Atheism. In order to preserve the integrity of their belief system, Materialists and Atheists must somehow defeat the common concepts of Free Will and agency, not to mention self and life. When dealing with pure Atheism, their tendency is toward denialism without any material support. What is the evidentiary case against Free Will and agency? Can the deniers produce empirical evidence for their claims? What sort of evidence do they have? How clean and directly related to Free Will is it?

If the anti-Free Will case is purely one of logic, how coherent is it? If the anti-Free Will case is purely ideological, then why bother with it?

I hope for a robust participation in discussing these concepts.

UPDATE:
The numbering was corrected, 2-6-12