If we didn’t have free will, what would it feel like?
What sorts of feelings-like would give us the impression of not having free will?
Of course the answer to the first might turn out to be “exactly like we feel now, since in fact we don’t have free will” or “exactly like we feel now, since having or not having free will, as such, makes no difference to what it’s like to be us”.
I only care about answerable questions, and the first one isn’t without first defining free will. The second one is about subjective experiences, and so is perfectly answerable.
Your question seems ambiguous between these two:
If we didn’t have free will, what would it feel like?
What sorts of feelings-like would give us the impression of not having free will?
Of course the answer to the first might turn out to be “exactly like we feel now, since in fact we don’t have free will” or “exactly like we feel now, since having or not having free will, as such, makes no difference to what it’s like to be us”.
I only care about answerable questions, and the first one isn’t without first defining free will. The second one is about subjective experiences, and so is perfectly answerable.
Understood and (on the whole) agreed. But I think the question, as phrased, is liable to suggest the first at least as much as the second.
Datapoint: I first interpreted it as #1, as gjm suggests.
(And I failed to notice my confusion when the example answers didn’t seem to match up well with the question. That irritates me.)