Good exists - a Catholic comments

[The Grand Nudger]

Free will is a thing that people have asserted we possess, and, throughout time, accounts for this or that behavior.  We've learned that much that was attributed to free will, and even it's traditional "mechanism" are bunk.  Control is something a robot can do, and do even better with a control model.  Like our body model.  There are people who think that our consciousness is, itself, a control model.  Those people often do not believe in or assert any free will (quite the opposite).

Whether you me or the housecat have free will says nothing about control.  Control is possible, and actual, either way.

Can you maybe elaborate on that part?

Sure.  Consider an autonomous drone.  We don't generally contend that quadcopters have free will, but it's demonstrably true that they have control.  That they have a model of themselves, a model of their environment.  A means of superimposing the two and navigating between points by the operation of various physical mechanisms and digital subroutines.  In this, people are in the same boat.  Whether we have a free will is debatable.  We can be generous and say that maybe we do and maybe we don't - but we know that we have a body model, an environmental model.  We know that we can leverage all of our sensory data and control our limbs for-effect.  Control and selection are not the same thing as free will or choice.

We can demonstrate the existence and efficacy of the first set, and nothing about the second set being illusory will change that fact. It's like claiming that eating a snickers is an illusion if you can't walk on water. To make an even more direct statement, we don't consciously walk, but it's clear that we're in control of our legs (and alot else) in order to walk. What would you think if I said that, if free will is illusory, walking is an illusion?