Free Will

I guess I have never really understood philosophers' talk about will and volition. It was always as if some sort of mental harlequin ( Ryle's acrobatic clown ) was doing somersaults, made a two-point landing, exclaiming "Ta-Da!!" - at which point, the material body followed these mysterious instructions.

Drs. Libet & Feinstein, however.

And Dr. Libet's book:
Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness
Benjamin Libet.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0-674-01320-4.

and a review  http://www.the-aps.org/publications/tphys/2005html/FebTPhys/bookreview.htm

wherein we read:

...This raises again the age-old question of whether free will actually exists. Libet believes that it does. He raises the ingenious and provocative hypothesis that there is in the time lags between the onset of the unconscious cortical electrical activity, the conscious awareness of the intent to act, and the execution of the voluntary movement, adequate time for free will to intervene to restrain the completion of the act. In other words, free [will] operates not to initiate but to interrupt and prevent the completion of an action already initiated and underway unconsciously.

And this is pretty much the way I always thought of it, free will as sort of a hall monitor. It makes vastly more sense when one gets into ethics than the other way of looking at things.