You say you don’t, but your previous comments constantly differentiate between “a person” and concepts like “their programming” and so I ask you: where’s that line? If you’re not drawing it on a mental physical divide then why are you constantly referring to situations as if an immaterial mind is being made unfree by its connection to a physical body? You have refused to address this any time I’ve pointed it out and just double down on this “we are trapped” narrative as if I’m supposed to have some existential epiphany and realize I’ve actually been deluding myself this whole time.

An unintelligent robot like you’re describing doesn’t have consciousness or a sense of self, or even the capability to recursively alter its own criteria on a meta-level via self-reflection and imagined circumstance, so now we are not “basically robots”The robot’s programming isn’t part of its identity because it doesn’t have one. It doesn’t even have will, so forget about free will.

I’m out.

It really just sounds like you’re subscribing to dualism, so we’re not having the argument we think we are.

Even if we only do stuff to avoid bad brain chemicals, which I don’t think is true, those bad brain chemicals are just as much a part of us as the part that will subjectively experience the negative affect brought on by them, so it can’t be coercive. You can’t coerce yourself, that’s just you being you.

As for the chemicals themselves, take the example of people who break drug addiction habits and stop using. They definitely aren’t getting more pleasurable brain chemicals as a result, at least not for a loooong time.

I'm just not buying the assertion that the gun you're describing isn't just part of you. You're not a ghost in a shell, you are the ghost and the shell. I didn't even ask what the gun was, I asked what "you" were, but the answer is the same so I agree with you there.

"Voluntary" is also a much higher bar than "chosen" so I don't just go ahead draw the same line from A to B there at all.

You could stand to dial down the smugness by like 40% at least.

I do stuff because I choose to.

Where’s this “you” with the gun to its head? Your argument implies that there’s something like a soul that is unfortunately tethered to a physical body and thus imprisoned by causality. It’s all just you. The body, the tethers, and the thing that feels like a soul.

You’re describing consciousness as something akin to being strapped into a rollercoaster and then pushed and pulled along the track that was built for “you” by your genetics, as if you’re somehow external to them. You seem to suggest that “autonomy” would require the ability to act without a physical body, because you presuppose that deterministic physical laws make physical action impossible to undertake without being wholly controlled by them.

I think you’re insisting on the wrong definition of the self. You aren’t bound by your instincts, they are part of you. Anything internal to you that influences your criteria is simply more you, and not something that gets in your way of making your own choice.

I’m not asking you to pretend any more than is necessary to defeat solipsism. If you can accept that you just have to believe that other minds exists, then it shouldn’t be hard to accept that they (and you) have criteria that are meaningfully applied to their circumstances in what has to be called a choice.

What IS free will if not that? Can you describe what a being with free will would be like?

What do you want from a "free" choice besides the opportunity to apply your criteria to a circumstance and subsequently act in a manner to best satisfy that criteria? The inevitability of the outcome of our choices arises from the fact that we can only have one over-arching set of criteria (including criteria about what subsets of criteria to use) and we can only have awareness of one over-arching set of circumstances. So, the only thing "free will" would enable you to do is to act against the interests of the criteria you applied to the circumstance, but what good is that?

Saying that someone only "felt" like they could have acted otherwise doesn't invalidate their application of their criteria to their circumstance. If I COULD order anything off of the menu (at least in the sense that if I said the right words to the waiter then any of the food items would be prepared for me), then fact that I will inevitably get my favorite dish on my birthday, or the healthy dish when I'm on a diet, or the expensive dish when I'm trying to impress a client, shouldn't matter to how we conceptualize my order. If it's MY criteria being applied, that's MY agency, and what comes about is surely at least partially MY fault; inevitable or not.

If anything, trying to get a layperson to "understand that no matter what a person has done they could not have chosen differently" is doing them a huge disservice in terms of encouraging accountability and mindfulness.

So what's the point of denying the existence of free will? To be technically correct about the relationship of cause and effect but in doing so wholly misrepresent the fundamental way that we actually experience reality as subjective participants within it? Fine then, I don't have "free will," but I absolutely have the only kind of "will" that matters as long as I get to apply my criteria my circumstances.