I have a friend who’s convinced that there’s no such thing as free-will. We go back and forth on this frequently. Thinking about LLMs and how companies are investing billions in predicting what we want before we buy it or using LLMs to remove choice from us suggests to me that not only is free-will real, but is such a threat to things like capitalism that it is being actively fought against.
The question of free will doesn’t even need to exist. What’s the point? We already know different people act differently. Whether they’re just post-hoc justifying things, or deciding things differently, doesn’t really matter when the behavior will be different either way.
Especially at a further removed point like what corporations want. They want people to hand them money, regardless of the reason. They’re already dealing with more people than individuality will ever matter, so the question is completely moot.
Yes, they want people to be easily controlled and mentally corralled into specific behaviors … so they can exploit people more efficiently. That’s it. They’ll try to do it regardless of free will. In any case, humans are quite a complex system, so it takes a great deal of time and subliminal training to get people to behave the same.
That’s basically culture. Hence why the US has such a fucked, dumb culture; capitalists have been driving it for generations. That’d happen with or without free will when they’re allowed to run rampant as they have.