tl;dr: The struggle over the existence of free will is less about whether it exists, but how we conduct ourselves in its absence. Therefore, the right question isn't does free will exist?; but how do we live a good life without it?

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For a long time I find the question does free will exist? vaguely annoying. In part because I find it unhelpful from a lifehacking utilitarian perspective.

I submit to ignorance on this topic in that I can argue both sides of this question and end up on the same inconclusive place I started with.

Open discussions on this are not waning though. This is one of many giant compilations. I don't foresee mankind being capable of resolving this any time soon.

But something in me clicked, now I feel there's a hat I can throw into the free will ring. It does not necessitate me picking a camp, but it will certainly look like I have.

As far as debates go, I think the free-will-exists camp has the burden of proof, in the sense that it's not reasonable to demand from determinism-camp proof for the absence of free will.

In my mind, arguments from free-will-exists camp are not overwhelmingly convincing (too long for me to lay them out here, you won't want that anyway.)

Determinism-camp however has a slightly easier job laying out the arguments: everything is made of cause and effect, what looks like free will, complexity or randomness is simply our inability to compute them.

Here's where my hat is thrown. Determinism folks are not sufficiently appreciative of the implications of taking away free will from people.

They are usually content with treating this as an almost-scientific inquiry. "Look, does this thing exist or not? If not then let's agree that it's not."

Comfort is often offered in the line of "if free will does not exist, we are obligated to become more compassionate and understanding." It's not untrue, it's just not going to tip anyone over.

When debates reach this point, exists or not has stopped mattering. That tells me people don't really care if free will exists, they care about what to do if it does not.

Name any established value system (schools of philosophy) from the history of mankind. Good or bad, young or old. Think of any sense of morality that was taught to you by parents or schools.

It's matters not if humans learned opposing ideas and fought wars over them. All of these values and ideas are dependent on the assumption that we have free will to carry out them out.

Even the most passive of philosophies contend that the one thing you control is your mind.

We don't explicitly know if we have free will, but we act as if we do. We don't even think about it, because the people who educate us act as if we have free will do what they say. The cycle repeats.

Those who came to think about it has gone far enough epistemically that they too have to pretend that free will exists just to continue playing the game.

You may say, at this point, free will is a story (in the Harari-an sense). A story like money, something that got willed into existence not because it's real, but because it's useful.

Determinism shares a problem with communism. It makes sound argument but provided no viable solution ("dude I'm just pointing out the problem"). In the worst case it even opens up room for new bad ideas to come in, just like Communism.

Given that free will is what everyone been brought up with, yanking it out amounts to a major philosophical overhaul nobody is prepared for.

There is simply no competitive value system ready to take over that runs on absence of free will. As long as you start a sentence with "you should...", you've baked free will into it.

It does not mean free-will-free value system does not exist or never did, but at the moment I find it hard to imagine. It's like trying to visualize six dimensional physics.

This has the potential to be the biggest intellectual frontier since the Axial Age, certainly above the pay grade of this post. I could however speculate on how to set the conditions in place for such a value system to be developed.

Contemporary societies are too civilized, domesticated, and ingrained to develop ideas that are free-will-free. Mental models are hold back on a linguistic level, in that I'm not optimistic that thinking in any existing human language is capable of doing the job.

It has to be developed within a completely fresh civilization, away from the burden of existing languages and thoughts. It has to be sandboxed, cut off from our contemporary world to avoid idea-pollution. That way they get to develop their own languages and mental models.

You may be thinking this can be done on a far off planet. But even those people came from Earth and probably speak English.

More realistically though, a completely fresh civilization is simulated virtually without humanitarian issue. Once you have one simulation, an infinite array of simulated civilizations follow.

My proposal shall stop here. At this point I can only be capable of hoping that they develop an Axial Age of their own; by luck, philosophies that are free-will-free.

If I sense traction, perhaps I would push this idea further.