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.
Yeah, perhaps the real question is: What’s the definition of free will?
If you make your decision purely based on outside influences, then that’s not free will, that’s determinism.
So, you’d have to integrate something into your decision process that’s independent from outside influence. But something which is independent from the outside, that is either some constant (e.g. you always tend to say yes) or it’s effectively random.
Neither of those sound like free will to me…