"There is a school of contemporary philosophy (or is it cognitive science?)
which argues that consciousness is not real, that it is an "epiphenomenon". I don't really believe this, in fact, I'm not very sure what it even means, but I gather that it suggests that we are essentially deterministic beings, robots if you will, driven solely by external forces and internal states. According to this view, the subjective condition of consciousness, which we all seem to recognize as part of our personalities, plays no role in our behavior or in free will. We are just fooled into believing it does.To paraphrase Descartes: we think we think, therefore, we think we are."

Its more out of Philosophy of Mind or Epistemology. Cognitive Science wouldn't even bother with that question. As it is, I find it a re-hash of Liebnitzian 'monads', just applied to mental phenomenon. Its just another attempt at answering the Free Will paradox by just giving up and refuting Free Will as a concept and unpacking the results. Just like Liebnitzian Monads, the results are not particularily viable nor apparently consistent with day-to-day phenomenon.

For me, the Free Will paradox is just a result of poorly defined terms, concepts and questions. In the end, I think we'll find that we're not quite Agents with classicly defined Free Will, nor are we classicly-defined Automata behaving like Turing Machines or Worse, billiard balls. I think basic discoveries in Computability, Indeterminism, Quantum Mechanics, causation etc all seem to indicate that that our notions of determinism and Free Will are both somewhat frail and bounded to certain contexts (Pool Tables, Newtonian Dynamics and Trashy Religious Discourse), and invalid for most reasoned analysis of real phenomenon. IE- its not an either/or type of thing- its simply the wrong question in the wrong context.

I expect over the next few hundred years Philosophy will churn away and either re-define or finally throw away both the classical terms of Free Will, Determinism and the dichotomous question itself. In fact, I think a lot of real methodological-based formal Philosophy already has and is.

DL