free will

As I fall asleep I occasionally think about trippy things, this being one of them. So I believe in free will but willingly admit that I have no scientific basis for doing so. Everything (Newtonian physics, quantum physics, neuroscience, etc) bodes against it. What I was attempting to think about as I fell asleep (it wasn't working too well because I was so tired so that it kind of turned into a stoned conversation in my head- you know the "woah, dude, wouldn't it be awesome if there's infinite universes and we're just in this one?" "yeah, man, but how do I have a continuity of consciousness then?" "woah, dude, that chick walking down the street has hair like smoke!" "Smoke? You want to light some candles and look at the smoke?" etc. (Forgive my stereotype of people who smoke pot.) So my nighttime musings are kind of like that- one-track, easily distracted.

But I was thinking along a neuroscience track about free will. So it seems that action origination in neuroscience depends on sensory input. You "decide" to walk over to a chair because the image of the chair travels through the visual pathways to many different lobes in your brain and gets mixed up in the limbic system etc etc so finally something nudges your premotor system to act. Arguably it requires no free will at all- it just requires different chemical states in different parts of your brain and different physical makeups of your synapses so they are more or less likely to cause the cell to fire.

Free will, however, can be introduced into that sequence if at some point "the ghost in the machine" influences synaptic firing. I think the easiest way to work free-will into the formula is by thinking about consciousness (yay meta thought). People understand that there's a difference between snapping your eyes open in the morning because of an external stimulus (ie car honking) and opening eyes out of "volition" because one has woken up. The outcome is the same, but one is reflexive and one travels all over the brain. There is no place we can label "consciousness." So what creates it? What makes that difference? And the grandest question of all: when there is no sensory stimulus causing you to wake up, what makes the first neuron fire? Your eyes are closed, you're lying in bed, it's silent, you're not really aware of feeling the bed around you. All that's changed is that rhythmic spontaneous firing of your brain has morphed to a higher frequency. What little old neuron fires to cause a volitional action, and what makes it fire?

That's the part that really trips me and makes me just give up and fall asleep. I can't imagine how the neuron signifying a choice fires in the first place. It's kind of a chicken and egg thing.