> It's nonsensical to think a person created in the universe is separate from the universe. There are no great philosophers that believe in free will.

And yet compatibilism is a common philosophical belief ever since ancient times, supported throughout history by philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Thomas Aquinas, and Daniel Denett.

The essential idea is that what we understand by free will can exist even in a purely deterministic naturalistic universe - mostly, free will should be understood as the ability of any agent to act based on its motivations. So, for example, an artificial neural net is in some important sense free to act as it 'wills' to solve a problem, even though it is following its programming.

Compatibilism is defining free will differently than how most people think of free will. Free will is an illusion in the traditional sense and thinking of compatibilism changes everything but doesn't give free will in the traditional sense.

The agent cannot make decisions free of what the system has influenced. So, it still is nonsensical to think a person has free will in the traditional sense. People are not making their own decisions when they couldn't have been different from the result of the system they reside in. I do consider Schopenhauer a great philosopher but what most people think of free will isn't a possibility. Compatibilism isn't even worthwhile because it doesn't make determinism & free will compatible but instead just redefines free will to delude people into thinking traditional free will is a real thing.

It might not bring back the magical kind of idea where we assert our will over the physical world, true. But if people really believed in that, they would also believe in actual magic, or telekinesis (of course, quite a few do, but there's really no arguing with some people).

But the compatibilist free will has most of the characteristics that we associate with any kind of free will. For example, there is still value in arguments, as hearing one agent's argument can well be the cause of the other agent's change in behavior. By the same token, it still makes sense to hold agents responsible for their actions and punish them for their decisions, since the cause of their behavior is very much related to their 'person', the sum total of what they have experienced, learned, and have projected about the future through their own rationality.

In fact, it's hard to find anything in the compatibilist free will that contradicts intuitive notions of free will, except for the most religious of intuitions, unless you push it to the brink and try to ask questions where we don't have good intuitions anyway, usually by asking counterfactuals, or moving to the relationship between free will and consciousness.

There is also another kind of approach to this question, one I first heard from Noam Chomsky. His point was: if determinism were to contradict our most immediate experience (as discussed before, it may not), the one of deciding how to interact with the world, wouldn't it make more sense to say that we are missing something from our scientific understanding in this area, rather than insisting that the most common empirical observation we have is completely wrong?

My opinion is compatiblism (like it or not) does delude people into not understanding they have no control over how they came to be as a person, the wealth they accumulate, the relationships, the awful things that happened to them if they do, all these things were by fate, and that people deeply believe the "thought" of realizing free will is an illusion equates to an unpleasant existence or some nonsense of realizing consciousness is really fake (in a sense similar to the colour red changing to orange with yellow added).

I'm sure some people read about compatiblism and shortly later go back to believing the traditional free will nonsense. I don't think many people think about not having free will for much time at all. Thinking about determinism for awhile makes it hard to not understand predeterminism. Progresses into making it fairly easy to understand we're just part of a complex system and the system works from a collective mesh of subsystems being "us" to the smallest thing.

We're similar to the concept of robots. The universe wrote code for the instructions of us. Similar, we made the robots "code" and people don't consider the robots having free will from our "human code" functioning the operating robots. When people have their thought on robots, they think of determinism subconsciously and think "no.., the actions are really from us, who coded & setup the robots" while the residing of the robots has environment external forces interacting with the robots' outcomes.

I personally think the world is good but resembles evil and overtime becomes less resembling evil. I further think the universe repeats more likely than not ever repeat throughout infinity. A good majority of people don't realize they don't have free will; that's keeping evil resembling experiences around longer on earth from what I observe and while people are punished severely. They're never being told they had no free will required to have a better outcome or being given the time observing how their mentality came to be that resulted in the bad outcome.

Most people don't even experience what the punishments are from unfavourable: genetics, financial status, health condition, and whatever life variable factoring into conflicting with the system of society; outcomming in not living a mediocre or higher status life but an awful one.

So yes, I get freaked out when I even observe all the travesties in society, that likely would have more empathy if people understood "success isn't earned" but given to you at birth and like everything else that follows after birth. Awareness of how the universe at the moment of the creation, resulted in the future (sad or happy) outcomes from the summation of sequential forces upon everything and then thinking of the more privileged vs misfortunate situations in comparison.

The forgoing makes me think the system of society would adapt to be more compassionate than the opposite incorrect belief of traditional free will. It's like when people thought it was better to think the world was flat. Delusion isn't better than realism. Eventually, leads me into thinking people can eventually be more likely to agree on universal healthcare and even futuristic things like universal income & homes.

So I think free will belief needs to be killed sooner than later. Even though whatever happens is what fate already decided on upon creation. So I'm somewhat hopeful people examine this topic.

I think your perspective on free will is somewhat closer to my own then I originally thought. I completely agree that outcomes in life are determined much, much more by the world than by any kind of personal responsibility. I think that there are plenty of people who believe even in magical free will (say, christian concepts of it) who actually understand this same thing, though you are right that there are many who don't.

However, I don't believe in full predetrminism, and you don't either. If you did, you would not think about improving the world, or convincing people of things - if you believe that the next speech by the president was determined at the time of the big bang, then thinking about change is meaningless, and none of us can help feel or not feel however we do.

However, if you believe in a world where the future has not happened yet and it evolves more like a complex computation, with room for changing program code by the program itself, perhaps even with some randomness thrown in, you get a fully naturalistic deterministic world where nevertheless you can try to influence things in some direction or another.

To articulate my own belief about this more clearly, I think the example of robots you gave is very good. I believe that even a robot with a simplistic machine learning algorithm can be meaningfully said to have a kind of free will, in that it can do a better or worse job at what it was designed to do based on the examples it is given and on accidents of its training process. Two such robots may well have different beliefs about the world (in a very basic sense)and they could even influence one another based on their experience (training set) and conclusions (parameters of their algorithm). This is how I believe humans and animals work as well - we have a pre-determined algorithm (vastly more complex), with different starting parameters between different people, we have a training set consisting of all of our lived experiences, and our algorithm can modify itself or its parameters during training, in pre-specified ways. This does end up meaning that some people end up with better models/algorithms than others, based on better starting conditions, or on more luck with experiences. And decision points in this algorithm are what I think represents our experience of free will.

> However, I don't believe in full predetrminism, and you don't either.

I actually do believe in complete predeterminism.

Example: everything you & I wrote was fated to happen and similar to our thoughts on the subject. Multiple persons I've conversed with (even hard determinists) will express similar opinions as you "well then your thoughts on improvement don't matter because if the universe is functioning under under predeterminism, well it was fated to improve if it happens" and then try to use that assertion as an argument in some way to make a rhetoric against my personal thoughts or the discussion.

I personally, enjoy reading about what you wrote to me and similar to myself writing about the subject. Otherwise I'll never learn something new on the topic. I don't care knowing it's all fated and same are my thoughts on thinking the world slowly improves without me having a real will separate from the system.

My thoughts continue to be, I'm a person that enjoys learning about this topic and that requires conversing about it. I think the understanding of free will being an illusion, will one day improve society exponentially faster than a universe that didn't result in people coming to realization sooner. The majority of people just need to function with understanding of the illusion to the point of understanding complete predetermination.

> However, if you believe in a world where the future has not happened yet and it evolves more like a complex computation, with room for changing program code by the program itself, perhaps even with some randomness thrown in, you get a fully naturalistic deterministic world where nevertheless you can try to influence things in some direction or another.

My idea is that the universe is more probable to repeat than not repeat. I do have wishful thinking and it makes me agnostic. I like to think if there is a higher power that people typically name as a God. Well, God cannot do the impossible like making traditional free will be real. So, I like to think that the universe repeats with adjustments made after it runs its course. I take a position close to Einstein, such as once the universe iteration starts, God doesn't interfere, and I acknowledge that belief is impossible to prove. I only assume my thought on that are more probable from the horrible things that happen to people and this is under the assumption a higher power wouldn't want suffering in the complex system created. So again I think after universe runs the course for humanity, it will repeat and there will be adjustments so things improve for the previous stories the humans experienced.

The forgoing will now provide you with different thoughts on what I previously wrote. The last part of what you're expressing is how our brains function and we could describe nature similar to what we define as evolution. But I wouldn't say that's free will. My idea is free will isn't a possibility even if I die, ..the universe eventually repeats, and I live again from the recursion but with new improvements making everyone have a happier story; created from an higher power understands my desires in the previous life I lived. That's not anymore free will because every universe iteration would be fated from the previous summation of forces.