Without some place in the sequence of events that isn't deterministic, I don't see how you can separate your current state from external forces. That is, if your decisions are a deterministic product of your current state and your current state is a deterministic product of other states before it (including states that existed before you did, such as your parents) then I don't see that as "the lack of external forces controlling my decisions and actions".
> How are you defining it such that it must be non-deterministic and distinct from randomness? I don't really understand what that means. Assuming there's a single shared reality, what's the source of the non-determinism? Even if you say that's the free will itself, you'd be asserting that our "wills" are somehow capable of randomness.
Part of the difficulty with talking about free will is that there isn't a clear definition of what it is. However, I do think I can say what it isn't--I think most people don't consider randomness or determinism to be free will. But I also think that it would be nigh impossible to distinguish randomness from free will without a clearer definition of free will.
The fallout of this belief is that I think we could disprove free will if we could prove determinism (but, I don't think we can prove determinism currently). But I don't think we can prove free will, even if we could disprove determinism (I don't think we can do that either). In order to prove free will we would have to disprove both determinism and randomness.