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"Free will" is an ill-defined concept. I've never seen a definition precise enough to be wrong. All I can tell is that "free will" is the persistent ecstatic emotion one feels when contemplating the idea that the mind is so special that it must belong to a category of object distinct from ordinary matter and exempt from the ordinary rules of causality. I see no reason to accept this premise. It's impossible to argue against a feeling.
The most parsimonious model of consciousness is that it's just computation.
To the extent that this is true, it seems to me that in this context, it's still better-defined as a concept than "computation". That is to say, we can describe free will and its apparent connection to our behavior with considerably more detail, precision and evidence than we can with "computation".
The usual argument is that physical laws are sufficient to explain all our observations, computation is the physical process that gives rise to the highest-complexity ordered behavior we observe, the apparent existence of free will appears to contradict the physical laws, and so the best explanation compatible with those laws is computation. Would that be the essence of your argument?
Could you define "free will"? I have never seen a definition of free will that didn't boil down to sentiment or incredulity. (Mathematical function evaluation, OTOH, has a rigorous definition.) I agree with the argument from parsimony that you've presented in that I don't see a need to admit anything beyond physics to explain our experience, including our perceived sentience. I additionally find that "free will" is too vague to even reject specifically notwithstanding that we don't need to specifically reject it because physics is sufficient anyway.
I want to do things, and I do them. I don't want to do other things, and I don't do them. Neither other people nor other things can directly override either my apparent individual motivation, nor my individual ability to manifest that motivation into action. Every conscious experience of my entire life serves as evidence of this apparent capacity, and every functional system humans build or interact with is based on the assumption that this apparent reality is how things actually work.
"Don't see a need" is an interesting phrase. I'm pretty sure you don't have an empirically-verifiable explanation for what caused the Big Bang, so there's at least one experience, the physical world around you, that physics as we understand and can test it pretty clearly can't explain. Nor is there empirical evidence that we can see behind the Big Bang even in principle; all the evidence we have indicates that we will never be able to. This does not mean that there might not be some deeper version of physics inaccessible to us that is, in fact, seamlessly complete, only that we have no access to any such deeper physics, and thus appeal to that deeper physics is is strictly unfalsifiable.
To the extent that you are satisfied by appeals to the unfalsifiable, I am as well. The difference is that I assert that what we see is what we get: we see apparent free will, and so I assert that free will exists. Your position is that what we see is an illusion, caused by a completely different process, which only appears to be free will in every single way we can observe or test. Notably, your general position is the end-state of a decades-long retreat into a Determinism-of-the-gaps, as much stronger and more falsifiable Deterministic claims were in fact consistently falsified.
Claims that Free Will is parsimonious are exactly backward; to the extent that Determinism must be true because Free Will breaks Materialism, the strong evidence of Free Will's existence and the consistent falsifications of testable Determinist theories are in fact significant evidence against Materialism.
So do I. My desires are outputs of a function incorporating my history and a bit of randomness. Nothing mystical about it.
"Free will" isn't required to model humans as organisms with intrinsic drives and memory that respond to incentives.
Sure, but there's a pretty strong case for post-big-bang materialism.
I'm not sure any physics can answer the question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?", at least not without recurring into a different "something ". This question vexes me, but seems independent of consciousness and experience and so on, which we can explain using physical laws given the singular prior that something indeed exists.
Can you elaborate on these falsifications? To be clear, I'm not talking about naive functionalism. Human actions are not merely the result of immediate inputs. We have state. We have an internal history. We can introspect. I'm merely asserting that parsimony suggests we treat this reflection as a computational process grounded in the material world.
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