This is a big question, but I will just tell a story familiar to philosophers working in the area. A man is found guilty of a crime, and is allowed to give a brief speech before sentencing. He admits the crime, but claims not only to be a criminal but also a philosopher, and one who has convinced himself of the truth of determinism. Since everything he did was determined by causes before he was born, he could not have done otherwise but commit the crime. So surely he should not be punished. The judge, having listened carefully to all this, admits that she too has a sideline in philosophy, and that she too is a determinist. So she cannot help but punish him. When we consider the relationship between determinism and responsibility, we have a tendency not to be entirely constent. Thus we may think that we should not punish criminals nor feel anger towards them. But what is the force of this 'should' if we too are determined?

I don't think it does. I have the power to determine which toy my child will play with, say because I could remove all but one from the playpen, but I decide to leave lots of toys there and let my child choose. Having power doesn't mean excercising it, and if I hold back in this way I seem to allow for free will. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt has argued for an even stronger claim. Suppose that there is a powerful demon who has a plan for me, but waits to see what I choose and will only interfere if my choices goes against his plan. In the event, everything I choose happens to fit with his plan, so he never interferes. Frankfurt claims that here I am excercising my free will, even though it is false that I could have behaved differently. What counts is the absence of interference, not the absence of the power to interfere.

Rafael, this is an excellent question, and philosophers do not all answer it in the same way. My own view is that predictability in itself is not a special threat to free will. Suppose that I have free will. Now suppose that you know me so well that you can predict every move I will make. So long as you don't use that information to influence me, but just know it, I don't think that takes away my free will. You are not interfering. One of the things that makes this question difficult is that we have trouble seeing how free will is ever possible, prediction or not. The classic dilemma is this. Either everything has a cause or not. If everything does have a cause, then it looks like you have no free will, because the chain of causes leading to your actions began before you were born. And if not everything has a cause, if in particular some of your actions are uncaused, then that doesn't seem like free will either. It seems just like a random event. In short, either determinism is true or...

The answer to the first question seems to be that there is no contradiction. If there can be free will without omnipotence, then I don't see why there can't be free will with it. There could be an omnipotent creature who decides to leave us alone. The second question is harder, and it will depend on just how omniscience and foreknowledge are understood. But there are conceptions of God according to which God is outside time and surveys all of history. If this is coherenent (a big 'if', maybe), then it looks like there could be foreknowledge without a fixed future. Or would it not count as fore knowledge if God is outside time?

This is the ancient and excellent question of how weakness of the will is possible. Alas it seems all too common that we don't do B, which is what we most want to do, because something less important to us -- our desire for A -- gets in the way. On the other hand, if we freely choose to do A rather than B, doesn't that show that we really did want A more after all? Maybe the answer is that we did want A more, but we also wish we wanted B more. But that doesn't account for the feeling that we do sometimes really choose what we want less.

I don't know of any good reason to say that what we do with consciousness, as far as physical behavior is concerned, couldn't be done without it and just as well. But I would be glad to be given such a reason.

a. Many philosophers think that we can't even prove that free will is possible. b. It's impossible to choose not to choose, precisely because that would be a choice. (And by the way, even if everything we do is a choice, it doesn't follow that we can choose anything.)

It might be that every sane human being prefers their own happiness over their own misery; alas it doesn't follow from this that every sane human being always prefers other people's happiness over those people's misery. This comes to the crunch if promoting other people's happiness interferes with promoting my own happiness.

I'm not sure that philosophers are the best people to answer this question, but my own view is that it is more a matter of bio-rhythms than of counter-suggestibility. Even if your Mom did not nag you, you probably would want to stay up late and to sleep late.

If determinism is true then you are a direct result of events that preceded you, in the sense that everything about you is entailed by the laws of nature plus the state of the universe before you were born. If determinism is not true, as the most popular interpretation of modern physics suggests, then there is no such entailment; but even here it is not as if you are the result of anything else. Either way, the causes that made you, whether deterministic or probabilistic, are all among the events that preceded you.