I think that the thing that makes the issue sticky isn’t that believing in ghosts and believing in free will is fundamentally different, it’s that ghosts lie outside the common individuals experience while everyone has at some point or another probably believed that they have free will.

I’m saying that is what makes them fundamentally different. A ghost is an external phenomenon that we can gather objective evidence about and nothing in our experience intrinsically violates that evidence. By contrast, while we can gather objective evidence about people’s decision-making processes, and in the future may even be able to “see” ourselves making decisions in an MRI machine or its future equivalent, we’re still faced with the existential paradox of experiencing “free will” and having to “submit” to the illusion if that’s all we think it is. That paradoxical experience is a sticking point that makes the question of whether free will exists very different from that of whether ghosts exist.

I managed to recall and find one of the articles I read years ago on this subject that convinced me that the subject of free will was not as simple as I’d thought it was. I want to be clear: I’m still firmly in the determinist camp, but I now appreciate the complexity of the issue on a level that I don’t fault people who maintain a belief in free will on the same or even just similar grounds that I would someone who believed in any other superstition. In fact, I don’t think it’s even appropriate to call belief in free will a superstition; it’s a much more nuanced (at least in those who have bothered to give it the requisite amount of thought) philosophical stance that I happen to disagree with.