[Triumph36]

It's not hard to move oneself out of that circularity: the 'decision' and logical processes employed are nothing more than neurons moving across synapses, etc. Therefore, while I 'think' I've made a 'decision', material in my brain has moved in a certain way so that that is so. Since all material moves in cause and effect relations (quantum events excepted, and even then it may just be because we cannot know those relations), and there is nothing in the universe that we can know except matter, the 'decision' must have been determined.

The difficulty for those who believe in free will is ascertaining exactly what in the brain could possibly act on itself to alter itself in a 'random' way. That is to say, how can free will have a material cause?

By the way, I'm not a believer in either one absolutely. Immanuel Kant proved rather convincingly that both determinism and freedom are true, therefore both are meaningless concepts based on illusions. I just see no advantage to a deterministic account: it takes away morality, the power to learn, etc. and gives us absolutely nothing we couldn't know under a free will explanation.