I have a friend who’s convinced that there’s no such thing as free-will. We go back and forth on this frequently. Thinking about LLMs and how companies are investing billions in predicting what we want before we buy it or using LLMs to remove choice from us suggests to me that not only is free-will real, but is such a threat to things like capitalism that it is being actively fought against.
People who think about free will vs determinism are thinking in the wrong terms. Our brains evolved, they weren’t created by mixing abstract concepts.
We evolved to have some ability to observe and predict problems and find ways to solve or avoid predicted problems.
The prediction part is actually the lesser part. It’s the solving that’s doing most of the heavy lifting. That’s the larger part of what we consider intelligent choice.