This, I think, is a major part of it, that it doesn't seem you've accounted for:
The "free will" debate is a confusion because, to answer the question on the grounds of the libertarians is to already cede their position. The question they ask: "Can I make choices, or does physics determine what I do?"
Implicit in that question is a definition of the self that already assumes dualism. The questions treats the self as a ghost in the machine, or a philosophy student of perfect emptiness. The libertarians imagine that we should be able to make decisions not only apart from physics, but apart from anything. They are treating the mind as a blank slate that should be able to take in information and output consequences based on nothing whatsoever.
If, instead, you apply the patternist theory of mind, you start with the self as "an ongoing collection of memories and personality traits." (Simplified, of course.) From that point, you can reduce the question to a reductio ad absurdum. Say that one of my personality traits is a love and compassion for animals, and we're asking the question, "Do I have the free will to run over this squirrel?" Replace "physics" with "personality": Can I make the choice to run over this squirrel, or does my personality decide what I do?
THAT doesn't seem so confusing to us. OF COURSE your personality and memories decide your actions. If you decided to run over the squirrel out of deathlust, you would probably think you've gone temporarily insane or somesuch. You would probably feel as if it wasn't really you who decided to kill the squirrel. It's possible for it to happen, but only if events out of your control come in and zap your mind with the temporary crazies. It is perfectly normal for your decisions to be decided by things that you cannot directly control yourself, and nobody seems to have a problem with this.
The case is no different for physics.
I'd start with that. From there, the explanation of why people get think they have libertarian free will should make more sense. We can imagine ourselves killing the squirrel, which leads us to believe we have libertarian free will. But that is irrelevant: someone who actually chose to kill the squirrel would be a different set of memories and personality traits, and it should not be controversial that they would also be a somewhat different physical makeup.
The "free will" debate is a confusion because, to answer the question on the grounds of the libertarians is to already cede their position. The question they ask: "Can I make choices, or does physics determine what I do?"
Implicit in that question is a definition of the self that already assumes dualism. The questions treats the self as a ghost in the machine, or a philosophy student of perfect emptiness.
The concern of libertaarians is actually that external events determine what they do. They don't mind their actions being caused by...
I'm participating in a university course on free will. On the online forum, someone asked me to summarise Eliezer's solution to the free will problem, and I did it like this. Is it accurate in this form? How should I change it?
“I'll try to summarise Yudkowsky's argument.
As Anneke pointed out, it's kinda difficult to decide what the concept of free will means. How would particles or humans behave differently if they had free will compared to if they didn't? It doesn't seem like our argument is about what we actually expect to see happening.
This is similar to arguing about whether a tree falling in a deserted forest makes any noise. If two people are arguing about this, they probably agree that if we put a microphone in the forest, it would pick up vibrations. And they also agree that no-one is having the sense experience of hearing the tree fall. So they're arguing over what 'sound' means. Yudkowsky proposes a psychological reason why people may have that particular confusion, based on how human brains work.
So with respect to free will, we can instead ask the question, “Why would humans feel like they have free will?” If we can answer this well enough, then hopefully we can dissolve the original question.
It feels like I choose between some of my possible futures. I can imagine waking up tomorrow and going to my Engineering lecture, or staying in my room and using Facebook. Both of those imaginings feel equally 'possible'.
Humans execute a decision making algorithm which is fairly similar to the following one.
List all your possible actions. For my lecture example, that was “Go to lecture” and “Stay home.”
Predict the state of the universe after pretending that you will take each possible action. We end up with “Buck has learnt stuff but not Facebooked” and “Buck has not learnt stuff but has Facebooked.”
Decide which is your favourite outcome. In this case, I'd rather have learnt stuff. So that's option 2.
Execute the action associated with the best outcome. In this case, I'd go to my lecture.
Note that the above algorithm can be made more complex and powerful, for example by incorporating probability and quantifying your preferences as a utility function.
As humans, our brains need the capacity to pretend that we could choose different things, so that we can imagine the outcomes, and pick effectively. The way our brain implements this is by considering those possible worlds which we could reach through our choices, and by treating them as possible.
So now we have a fairly convincing explanation of why it would feel like we have free will, or the ability to choose between various actions: it's how our decision making algorithm feels from the inside.”