I can cite 2 papers that discuss this issue. The first, Towards a scientific concept of free will as a biological trait: spontaneous actions and decision-making in invertebrates, is from December 2010 and documents the use of randomness in the brains of fruit flies as an aid in escaping predators. A very brief excerpt:
Together with Hume, most would probably subscribe to the notion that ‘tis impossible to admit of any medium betwixt chance and an absolute necessity’ [75]. For example, Steven Pinker (1997, p. 54) concurs that ‘A random event does not fit the concept of free will any more than a lawful one does, and could not serve as the long-sought locus of moral responsibility’ [76]. However, to consider chance and lawfulness as the two mutually exclusive sides of our reality is only one way to look at the issue. The unstable nonlinearity, which makes brains exquisitely sensitive to small perturbations, may be the behavioural correlate of amplification mechanisms such as those described for the barrel cortex [74]. This nonlinear signature eliminates the two alternatives, which both would run counter to free will, namely complete (or quantum) randomness and pure, Laplacian determinism. These represent opposite and extreme endpoints in discussions of brain functioning, which hamper the scientific discussion of free will. Instead, much like evolution itself, a scientific concept of free will comes to lie between chance and necessity, with mechanisms incorporating both randomness and lawfulness. The Humean dichotomy of chance and necessity is invalid for complex processes such as evolution or brain functioning. Such phenomena incorporate multiple components that are both lawful and indeterminate. This breakdown of the determinism/indeterminism dichotomy has long been appreciated in evolution and it is surprising to observe the lack of such an appreciation with regard to brain function among some thinkers of today (e.g. [2]). Stochasticity is not a nuisance, or a side effect of our reality. Evolution has shaped our brains to implement ‘stochasticity’ in a controlled way, injecting variability ‘at will’. Without such an implementation, we would not exist.
The second is from July 2019,
Neurocognitive free will, and discusses neural processes that appear to be at least partially random and can participate in free will decisions by passing somewhat randomly selected remembered events, one-by-one, to conscious processing to aid in decision making. An excerpt:
Whether or not we describe a system as ‘random’ often depends on whether we see it as arising from deterministic (pseudo-random) or indeterministic sources. Neurocognitive free will offers inroads for each of these sources. There is a finite precision on cognitive abilities, which is a result of a trade-off between computational accuracy and the metabolic cost of information processing (e.g. [52]). This can lead to sensory noise when information from external stimuli is transformed into a neural representation [53,54]. At smaller scales, neural precision is limited by channel noise—the random opening and closing of ion channels—and synaptic noise—derived from probabilistic vesicle release and the random motion of ligand-gated ion channels [55].
The above mentioned compatibilist sources of noise are consistent with a deterministic universe and may be all that cognition has access to when it turns up the noise. Nonetheless, a complete discussion of neurocognitive free will cannot yet discount the possibility that neural systems amplify quantum indeterminism [14,56,57]. Neural systems are commonly characterized as having a sensitive dependence on initial conditions of arbitrarily small size [58,59]. If ‘arbitrarily small’ includes quantum level influences (see [57,60,61]), then two brains wired such that they would forever remain identical in a deterministic universe could eventually diverge in an indeterministic universe.
Perhaps ironically, neurocognitive free will localizes the volumes that have been written comparing compatibilist and libertarian free will to this rather subtle distinction of where the noise comes from. This may not matter for adaptive purposes [62]. Unless my adversary has the omniscience of Laplace's demon—who can perfectly predict all deterministic futures—then the ability to amplify quantum noise is not ultimately necessary to outwit adversaries or explore, but it may nonetheless satisfy architectural constraints on building minds like ours.
I don't believe anyone knows the answer as to whether or not we have free will. But we all expend a tremendous amount of energy everyday making conscious decisions. It's difficult to see how that energy expenditure on an illusion leads to a selective advantage over a purely non-conscious, deterministic process. People also think that randomness can't be an element of free will. The cited papers make a strong case that it can be.
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. A comparison is made with a golfer, who may swing a club several times before striking the ball. The action simply gets a rubber stamp of approval at the last millisecond."
