I’ve always been off-put when someone says, “free will is a delusion/illusion”. There seems to be a hinting that one’s feelings or experiences are in some way wrong. Here’s one way to think you have fundamental free will without being ‘deluded’ → “I can imagine a system where agents have an ontologically basic ‘decision’ option, and it seems like that system would produce experiences that match up with what I experience, therefore I live in a system with fundamental free-will”. Here, it’s not that you are trapped in an illusion, it’s just that you came to a wrong conclusion based on your experience data.
What I think now is → “My experiences seem consistent with a fundamental free-will universe, and with a deterministic physics universe, and given that the free-will universe doesn’t seem super coherent, I’m going to guess I live in the deterministic physics universe.” There’s probably no sub-circuit in your brain specifically dedicated to fabricating the “experience of free-will”.
I’ve always been off-put when someone says, “free will is a delusion/illusion”. There seems to be a hinting that one’s feelings or experiences are in some way wrong. Here’s one way to think you have fundamental free will without being ‘deluded’ → “I can imagine a system where agents have an ontologically basic ‘decision’ option, and it seems like that system would produce experiences that match up with what I experience, therefore I live in a system with fundamental free-will”. Here, it’s not that you are trapped in an illusion, it’s just that you came to a wrong conclusion based on your experience data.
What I think now is → “My experiences seem consistent with a fundamental free-will universe, and with a deterministic physics universe, and given that the free-will universe doesn’t seem super coherent, I’m going to guess I live in the deterministic physics universe.” There’s probably no sub-circuit in your brain specifically dedicated to fabricating the “experience of free-will”.