The problem of 'free will' in philosophy is not about your ordinary notion of 'free', which has to do with your political, personal, cultural, etc. freedom. It is a metaphysical thesis. The problem stems from the contradiction of two views that most of us find very plausible, but they also seem incompatible. The first view is that as material beings in this universe whatever happens to us is determined by natures causal processes. The other is that we are human agents who can decide what they do - and we usually think of decision as the power to determine what to do.
The clash is this: if we are determined by previously occurred physical/chemical/
/biological/take-your-favorite-natural-scientific-level-of-explanation causes then there is no more room to determine anything.
Philosophers in general aren't committed to a soul which would exist independently of the body and therefore wouldn't be affected by natural causes. But there are some who do. Someone holding such a view would be a libertarian and a dualist.
There are also another group of libertarians among professional philosophers, who don't think we have any part which exists independently of our bodies, but our biological working is so special that it gives rise to higher order processes and capacities, one of which is the ability to reason and decide. Some people try to give evolutionary accounts of how this might have developed, how it might work. There is lots of sophisticated work done on such theories in collaboration with cognitive psychologists. These people are libertarians and naturalists.
But in fact, most philosopher think the opposite: that we are beings whose behavior is determined causally. These people can be divided into two groups: compatibilists and determinists.
Compatibilists think something like this: there is no free will in the classical sense. But the thought that there is, is so deeply embedded in our social practices (law, schooling, choosing your job, spouse, house, etc.) that there are practices that make use of the idea. Accordingly, we have to understand these practices. So, we have to figure out how we think of morality, of action, of being free and how this relates to our attributions of responsibility. There seems to be a system to it, so there might as well be some implicit criteria controlling this behavior that can be uncovered.
Determinists are usually skeptics about any form of making sense of being free (be that a full-blooded or a practice-based sense). They try to explain why we think that we are free, or how we should conceive of our behavior and morals if there really is no freedom.
So, when scientists, neurologists or psychologists announce again that they have discovered there is no freedom don't get scared. Many of us knew long ago what they 'discovered', in fact knew more and did more constructive work than they did. And even most of the experiments carried out so far to disprove the possibility of the libertarian philosophers being right suffer from serious flaws. On this see A. R. Mele's easy to understand book which is a serious study of the experimental data on free will since Libet's experiments up to about 2008.
I personally think that despite most experiments being flawed and quite short-sighted, there isn't much chance to prove libertarian views right. If I would have to place my bets I would argue that all behavior has underlying biological processes that realize it, and which are determined. But I also think that there is a very interesting social practice related to our evolution, our emotions, our cultural development and our higher order abilities, and the notion of free will is a component in this practice.
If you want more goodness from heavy weight clever philosophers go read a bit on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and on Flickers of Freedom. And please, oh please, do not buy the books of the Sam Harris style amateurs, who are struck by realizing the possibility of determinism! They did not prove anything new. Just realized a very-very old point of philosophy and write about it in an amateurish way. Of course this is not to say that they are not clever people or excellent researchers in their own field. Neither am I claiming that they are bad people who want to harm anyone. They are just ignorant of a lot of important work having been done in a field that they don't know much about.
It seems today every fifth neurologist feels bound to write a book about free will. They thereby make their more clever and subtle colleagues appear in a bad light as well. Also, if you are interested in good research done on actions on how behaviors and actions are caused on the neural level there is lots of amazing stuff about it, for example here.
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