well, there's a few ways of looking @ the natural-law based (I
   tend towards information-based myself) - you say biochemical
   automatons - but if you think about something called
   self-organizing systems - they have all the apparances of
   free-will as they make decisions and think but they're almost
   impossible to decipher because the complexity of the biochemical
   "organism" (there are so many billions... of parts working
   simultaneously and in harmony with each other) far far surpasses
   the analysis of every computer on earth from now through the
   next thousand years (unless they get quantum computers going)."