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Psychohistorian comments on Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease - Less Wrong
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I'm pretty sure this is wrong. A billiard-ball world would still contain reasons and morals.
Imagine a perfectly deterministic AI whose sole purpose in life is to push a button that increments a counter. The AI might reason as you did, notice its own determinism, and conclude that pushing the button is pointless because "it's all going to happen just as it happens no matter what". But this is the wrong conclusion to make. Wrong in a precisely definable sense: if we want that button pushed and are building an AI to do it, we don't want the AI to consider such reasoning correct.
Therefore, if you care about your own utility function (which you presumably do), this sort of reasoning is wrong for you too.
I was evidently unclear. When I say "billiard-ball determinism" I mean the caricature of determinism many people think of, the one in which free will is impossible because everything is "merely" physical. If no decision were "free," any evaluative statement is pointless. It would be like water deciding whether or not it is "right" to flow downhill - it doesn't matter what it thinks, it's going to happen.
I agree that this is not an accurate rendition of reality. I just find it amusing that people who do think it's an accurate rendition of reality still find the free-will debate relevant. If there is no free will in that sense, there is no point whatsoever to debating it, nor to discussing morality, because it's a done deal.