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.
I’m deterministic. So I believe that everything that is going to happen was always going to happen due to the laws of physics/math. Time is only linear from a 4th dimension perspective. Above that the past/present/future all appear as one ‘object’.
From my perspective our decisions are inseparable from our identify. It’s not that I am a being making decisions, it’s that my decisions are a part of my being.
Therefor in my mind there is literally no conflict between my ability to make choices and the fact that the outcomes are already determined.