? You must reading some tone/implication into my comment that was not intended. I'm sorry you felt condescended to, just sharing an interesting personal connection I have to this very specific question and responding to the claim that we might be able to think of free will as self-evident or axiomatic.

Your initial claim was that "perhaps the best argument for free will is the fact that we all seem to experience it," which makes sense. All I was saying is that, for most people, even when they don't spend much time with the topic, it's surprisingly easy for their subjective experience of free will to fall away.

That our "baseline" subjective experience seems to be one of experiencing free will is certainly true, and there are really interesting & open potential cultural/social/evolutionary reasons for that, but generally we wouldn't accept a claim on axiomatic principles if it had the property of seeming to exist or fall away with the relative ease that the experience of free will does.

Again, not making any claims about what you do or don't believe, just responding to the comment that accepting free will as axiomatic or self-evident might make sense with some reasons why it might not make sense.

The issue is that the sense in which it's "self-evident" falls away very quickly, for many people, with even a little bit of concentrated/guided introspection.

I got a chance during undergrad to spend quite a bit of time on research which surveyed non-philosophy participants on their thoughts/feelings regarding free will/self issues. It's the "illusion of free will is itself an illusion" idea; it's difficult, because the whole topic is so conceptually muddy and there are so many concepts which overlap definitionally with day-to-day use, but, overwhelmingly, when you get people thinking clearly about the idea and sharpen some of the conceptual edges they come away with pretty clear incompatibilist intuitions that they do not actually have free will.

I can dig up some of the research to link if you're interested, but with even just a little bit of conceptual clean-up most non-philosophy people become pretty quickly disillusioned about their free will.