Simon asked:

I recently got in a discussion with a friend who took the position that there was no such thing as free
will and human beings were merely electro-chemical reaction systems. He stated that this was known
thing from science.

We decided not to argue the state of science on this topic but instead I took the line of asking him
how he "knew" what he knew and that his knowledge need not be a reflection of reality.

I wonder if a "better" approach would be to argue somehow that humans have the illusion of free will
and an illusion of freewill for a self-aware being is the same thing as actual free-will. However I can't
find a reasonable argument to support this other than it feels right. Has this idea got legs?

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Your idea is promising. A similar line is taken by Thomas Nagel in 'The View from Nowhere' OUP
p126 ff. where he talks about our necessary 'blind spot' concerning the physical springs of our
actions. The problem is that assuming it can be shown that we must necessarily think of ourselves as
'free', that isn't the same as being free. It doesn't give us what we want. (Of course, one could raise
the philosophical question, Just what do we want from 'free will'?) Perhaps one way for you to
investigate this problem further would be to draw up a list of different examples of 'necessary
illusions'. When, if ever, is a proof that it is impossible - for whatever reason - not to believe in X
tantamount to a proof of X?

The line you actually took in your discussion has the serious drawback that it appears to assume that
we are not 'free' only because we are determined to act by our electro-chemical nature. If that
assumption were correct, then you would have every right to retort, 'Yes, but how do you know
determinism is true?' However, the assumption turns out to be incorrect. Assume that there is an
element of indeterminism in the physical processes that lead to human action. Instead of thinking of
myself as a calculating machine, I think of myself as a calculating machine with a randomising device
attached. That gives me no more right to 'take the credit' for actions I do than I had before. Whether I
choose to go right or left is a matter of the luck of the dice.

Geoffrey Klempner