Free will is part of the universe's drive toward entropy. When I was in high school it didn't make sense, as it doesn't, logically, by most any analysis. But now I think it makes a shadow of a sliver of a sense of sense.
Consciousness is not an illusion. If it's an illusion, who is being fooled?
What does it mean to fool an agent without original agency? Why would this entity need to be fooled to prove to it that it isn't what it isn't? By the subjective experience of consciousness and will, which must have evolved as a capacity and must exist in physics as a phenomenon, the universe gives us the means to avoid realizing the truth, which is that this subjective experience is false and we are glorified pinball machines. Why create a subjectivity only to fool it, when there needn't have been a subjectivity at all? And why did consciousness and the experience of active will evolve before any conception of determinism, as would seem extremely likely, given the apparent consciousness of animals?
That doesn't make any sense either, you know.
Let's assume that we are all computer code, and that the code crashes when it looks at itself and realizes that it's deterministic. If it's deterministic, then it doesn't have to do anything; it can just wait for fate to move it. Let's say that logical moment crashes the code, much like dividing by zero. Ok. Ok? The simplest solution here is to evolve ways to keep the code out of that pitfall. You don't need consciousness and an illusive feeling of free will for that. You don't need any feeling of feeling at all. You can just go right on running the code, with the modification that it isn't allowed to divide by zero—or become omphaloskeptic enough to falter.
The illusion of free will is an unnecessary solution.
Let's assume that we are all computer code, and that the code crashes when it looks at itself and realizes that it's deterministic. If it's deterministic, then it doesn't have to do anything; it can just wait for fate to move it. Let's say that logical moment crashes the code, much like dividing by zero. Ok. Ok? The simplest solution here is to evolve ways to keep the code out of that pitfall. You don't need consciousness and an illusive feeling of free will for that. You don't need any feeling of feeling at all. You can just go right on running the code, with the modification that it isn't allowed to divide by zero—or become omphaloskeptic enough to falter.
The illusion of free will is an unnecessary solution.
