You chose to type a reply to me right? I guess you could assume that you are compelled and your free will is an illusion, but honestly that view is shit.

I'm a lot more confident in my own consciousness than I am of the universe's, but to be honest I'm not entirely convinced of either.

I think the bit that's throwing me is the jump from "we know that consciousness exists" to "therefore the universe as a whole must be is conscious" but I bet I'm misinterpreting this somewhat.

Not who you're replying to, but I'll take a crack at this and share my ponderings on this topic.

Let's take for granted first that you're convinced of your own consciousness. You're more confident in it you say, though not thoroughly convinced, so let's start there. So in light of the fact that you are not simply a being inside the universe, but an integral, inseparable part of it, is you observing the universe not the universe observing itself? This might not be "the entire universe in totality is a big, pondering mind" but it at least means, again given that you are conscious, that the universe is at least as conscious and aware as you are.

If you're not conscious then there's no starting point from which to even begin this line of inquiry.

You believe in an actual free will? What’s your view on compatibilism?

You might like one more than the other, and one even might cause you to experience a better (more optimistic, agency-ful etc.) life than the other, but there's absolutely zero empirical proof either way.

If there is equal evidence for two hypotheses, but one resonates with your personal experience and causes you to live a better life, what could possibly possess you to take the disempowering view?

Practically leading my life as if I had free will and being convinced I actually do have free will – despite zero evidence either way other than my senses and my reasoning, both of which regularly fail/deceive me in all kinds of situations – are two very different things.

There's of course also a variant of Pascal's wager in here, except that this one is logically sound, in my view: If there is free will, why not make use of it? And if there isn't, my beliefs aren't my choice anyway.

And just like from Pascal's wager, we can't derive any actual information about the nature of the universe and our conscious existence in it from that line of reasoning.

The main point of disagreement I have with this is that I don't think the notion that your senses and reality are not always perfectly in sync implies that your perception of free will is false. There's a lot of approximating that goes into taking sensory input and generating an experience, that doesn't invalidate your experience of making decisions.

Also, your doubt in your own free will isn't free, it has a cost. Is that doubt serving you in some way to offset that?

That may well be the case, but it feels deeply epistemologically wrong to me to say “I am certain about X” just because being certain about X might come with certain psychological advantages. Not much good follows from that line of reasoning applied to many other issues.

I also don’t think “it’s quite plausible that there is free will but I’m agnostic about it” is a particularly harmful position to have.

> that view is shit.

Do tell. I also have strong views about free will, but opposing views are worth more than an offhand dismissal.

It's disempowering and does not resonate with our conscious experience, and given there is no more evidence for it than the opposite view, I find the idea that someone would choose a world view that tends to cause depression and fatalism to be absurd.

There's another option: the Skeptic's choice to withhold judgement when there's not enough evidence.

That is a choice that entertains both notions. The problem with that is that entertaining the notion that you are a powerless observer of the universe who must abide surfing the waves of fate with no agency is soul crushing for most people. If that choice isn't bringing you some power in some other way, why make it?

So you're very much in the Pragmatist camp, something is only true if it's useful?

Personally, I find it impossible to choose to believe something, all things equal, just because I like the implications. The doubt will always be in the back of my mind, "But what if it's not really true?"

I hold to compatabilism. As far as I can tell, the universe unfolds according to natural laws, and we're no exceptions. But we have agency over our own lives, the decisions we will make matter, and we're free in every way that's meaningful.

It isn't so much that, as given we don't know and we have equal evidence in a number of different directions, our utility function should be biased towards believing in things that empower us and help us lead a better life. If the weight of evidence were in favor of a hypothesis that was disempowering, the situation might be different, but it isn't.