AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Smart people know better than to waste time on unsolvable and unproductive questions like free will.
Philosophers have been pondering this question for thousands of years and not made any progress. That would suggest that the question is ill-posed, a product of some fundamental problem with our thinking. We seem to be faced with two absolutely incompatible alternative visions of reality, neither of which actually works (in that, neither can make sense of the real world ) yet both seem undeniable true in some sense. What if neither position is really true, and the apparent need to choose between them an illusion?
In this case, the ultimate culprit is probably something like mind-body dualism. Minds are agents that do things, bodies are made of physical matter subject to physical causality, and never the twain shall meet -- in our lame and broken ontology. This metaphysical split does indeed seem to be baked into our thinking, but that doesn't make it true or necessary. Realizing that it is fake is quite liberating. It also solves the free will problem, which is a consequence of stipulating these two interpenetrating but radically different worlds, one operating according to material law, the other according to the laws of thought.
Cybernetics and AI and science in general were supposed to have gotten rid of this particular error. Thanks to these adv ances, we don't have to be mystified by the relationship between mind and matter, we know how they are related, or at least, have models for how they could be related. We might not know all the details of how the mind performs its function, but we can at least imagine what such knowledge might be like.
If you think the question is stupid for Marxist or Buddhist reasons
Your theory of agency is way more sophisticated than the implicit individualism of free will. Marxists sniff at bourgeoise individualism; Buddhists are skeptical of the reality and centrality of the ego.
And both have solutions to fretting about whether you have free will. Marxists advocate political praxis, in which your unimportant individual self becomes part of the force of real social agency. There is something quasi-religious about this communion. Alas I am not of the faith.
Buddhists take almost the opposite approach, of disengagement, observation, and deconstruction of the self
as always when I talk about Buddhism, I feel like I am oversimplifying, and certainly Buddhism doesn't always imply political disengagement
. Buddhism also offers The Middle Way to break out of dead dichotomies, and the free will question is obviously one of those. Determinism is a kind of nihilism in regards to the self, whereas naive free will is an eternalism.