Rupam Mahmood
The sense of having free will often emerges from counterfactual thinking driven by an error. When we do something and are not fully satisfied with the received outcome, we start thinking of other possible actions we could have chosen—the thought of what else could have been done registers in our consciousness. The regularity and semi-permanence of our world allow us to try out some of those other possibilities next time, which makes us think that we could have done better in the past. That is, we have free will. Free will is really the awareness of better possibilities and the confidence in having better outcomes when trying those possibilities out.
The purpose
Evolution primed us to believe in having free will. The primary function of this belief might have been to make us strive for betterment. Believing that we could have done better is a good thing because it makes us do good things better next time.
The Paradox
The paradox of free will is it makes us believe that we could have done better in the past. However, our understanding of the materialistic world suggests that we cannot expect that, given the same situation and the knowledge, or lack thereof, we had at that moment.
The resolution
We can resolve the paradox of free will by slightly amending what we mean by having it. What we really mean by having free will is that we can get a more desirable outcome by acting in a better way if we face the same situation again next time but also have the new insight gained after the last time. It is still true that we couldn’t have done better in the past because we didn’t have the insight last time that we have now.
There is no paradox in the amended view of free will. In this view, we are holding a reasonable belief about the future instead of having an unverifiable counterfactual belief about the past. Therefore, this amended view is compatible with our materialistic understanding of the world.