I was having a conversation with the Big Fella the other day when the topic of free will came up. The Big Fella's view is that it's best to behave as if we have free will, though it may well be an illusion (he suspects the issue is indeterminable).
All he'd say, beyond that, is if you are going to attribute free will to humans then he can see no good reason not to attribute free will to all animals. The point he was making is that animals as a group are either fully determined systems or they're not, he doesn't see human consciousness (as distinct from "animal" consciousness) as having any impact on the issue - except in so far as it introduces a huge observer bias.
The Big Fella would probably be quite interested in this paper (Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds) just published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences but it's not freely available and $40 is too much to pay just to try and pique his interest. Still, here's part of the abstract:-
Over the last quarter century, the dominant tendency in comparative cognitive psychology has been to emphasize the similarities between human and nonhuman minds and to downplay the differences as “one of degree and not of kind” (Darwin 1871). In the present target article, we argue that Darwin was mistaken: the profound biological continuity between human and nonhuman animals masks an equally profound discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. To wit, there is a significant discontinuity in the degree to which human and nonhuman animals are able to approximate the higher-order, systematic, relational capabilities of a physical symbol system (PSS) (Newell 1980).There's a discussion on the paper just kicking off at Mixing Memory - it's on background and implications rather than detail so, if you're interested, it's worth a look even if you haven't read the paper.
There's more at Evolving Thoughts and Michael Pleyer at Shared Symbolic Storage also has some thoughts on the matter.
