What does it mean to have freewill?
Having freewill means that you choose that path you go down in life, you make hundreds of choices a day and each choice has a different outcome, the act of choosing to go in one direction rather than another is practicing freewill. You make a choice which leads to another choice and so on and at each crossroad it is down to you to make a choice.
Having free will means that you are in charge of your own life, you are able to control what you do and who you are. If you are walking down the street and someone is about to walk past you, you choose to walk past them or to stop and ask them a question; and the fact you can do this surely proves the fact that humans have freewill, does it not?
Consciousness
Are we conscious beings? And do you need to be conscious to have freewill.
To be conscious is to be aware of your surroundings along with being aware that you can and will have impact on your surroundings.
"The awake person is not at odds with the world. He is a part of it, but not attached to the outcome. Instead of being an automatic response mechanism, responding to the world based on unconscious rules, beliefs, fears, and limitations, he is able to consciously evaluate each situation, in the moment, and instantly and instinctively know exactly what to do and how to respond in order to gain the most resourceful outcome, both for himself and for others".
From this you may agree that humans are conscious as we are aware of who and what we are, however it isn't really that simple as thinking you are conscious without actually being conscious is completely possible.
For example a person could build a robot and program out every action the robot will ever do, and include code that makes the robot return home if moved of course, then the programmer could add code so the robot thinks it is making choices and believes it is aware of these choices. The robot would then think it is conscious along with thinking it has freewill, when in reality it has neither and is just doing exactly what it was programmed to do, and it would be hard to prove any different if the case is the same for humans.
In the case of humans we are essentially biological machines and we contain code the same as a computer just in the form of our DNA so we could very possibly be the same as the robot that thinks it has freewill and consciousness.
Deterministic approach.
The idea of determinism is the idea that every outcome there ever has been and ever will be is already laid out. If you look at life as a whole from a completely mathematical and scientific point of view you are able to work out every outcome in every situation no matter the scale or where this event is happening.
Of course at this point in time people don't have the technology and understanding of the universe to a high enough degree to actually work things like this out. However it is saying that if you were able to, through a lot of maths, work out how one atom interacts with another you can follow that chain of reactions infinitely and work out the outcome of anything.
For example; you would say if I walk up to a random person in the street and say "I have a problem with you, fight me, right now", you wouldn't know exactly how they would react. You would assume they would either be rather shocked or except the challenge and fight me. However of you look at every event in that person's life along with their specific personality traits you would be able to predict, quite accurately, the outcome of how they would react.
To an even further extent if you could look even further back into everything that has ever happened leading up to this person in the streets existence, atom by atom, you would be able to say exactly how they would react because one atom will always react with another atom in the way you expect, if you know what type atoms you are dealing with. So in this scenario you know every atom involved in this exchange and from this how it will react with its surrounding atoms.
Also if you are to rewind this situation so I approach said person in the street in the exact same way the outcome will always be the same because we know how every atom will react with each other, you can run the scenario and infinite number of time and the outcome will always be the same.
So if you look at things from this perspective it means that we really don't have any freewill because every reaction going on around us can be calculated and from this you can say there is only one outcome to every situation. You can work out that outcome and all future outcomes by simply following the chain of reactions.
One atom moves which makes the one next to it move and the one next to that and if you see how one atom interacts with another and eventually work out how every atom will react with the next you can work out any outcome.
How determinism fits with freewill and consciousness
This would mean that people don't have freewill at all as everything in the future is really just waiting to happen, for example; If I said right now I am going to stop writing this and I am going to go and run until I can no longer run to prove that you can have random actions that you choose. When in actuality that action is not random at all but rather was always going to happen and you could have worked out it was going to happen by following the chain of events.
So from a deterministic approach of looking at the world people think they have freewill and will likely continue to, however we really don't as every outcome is essentially already determined.
The deterministic approach also raises a few questions about consciousness. You can be aware that you are conscious and that you are alive on this planet and that everything around you is real, however you are also aware that you don't have freewill and your path is laid out.
Though that doesn't have to take away from life and make it so you don't need to try "because what will be will be". It just means that if you "choose" to give up at the point you do, you were always going to and if you "choose" to start trying to improve yourself you always were going to at that point.
I definitely think that it is a very strange idea to think that as humans we don't have freewill we just think we do, it also means we might be conscious but at the same time we might not actually be. Although that is very hard to actual say because through the deterministic approach actually being conscious and just thinking you are doesn't really make a huge difference to how things work.
TLDR:
So to summarize in as short away possible the deterministic approach looks at the outcomes of every event and says that what happened was always going to happen and in the way it did, because one atom moving will always make another move and from watching how one makes another move you can work out how the other will move and so on. Also as we know how different chemicals react and that they always will react in the same way.
So you can accurately predict every decision a person will make because there actions are just another part of a long chain of actions and reactions, which in-turn means that you don't really have freewill because every action you make you were always going to make as you are made of atoms at the end of the day. However you may or may not actually be a conscious being it doesn't matter that much
Comment and all that, I did my best to explain the idea, if I am wrong about anything please let me know and I hope I explained things well enough :)