Free Will

Free will is one of those ideas that do not really reflect on anything real. It is at best vaguely defined, and the result is that any discussion on the topic tends to get bogged down in all sorts of details that have nothing to do with what the concept presumably is.

Free will has nothing to do with whether or not we live in a mechanical universe. Rather, it is related to the fact that the precise state of our universe is unknowable.

Because we cannot know the precise state of the universe, we have to calculate the probability of certain outcomes in order to take action, and it is this calculation that we call free will.

The fact that the calculation is done by a biological organism that had no choice but to make the calculation as it turned out, does not rob the calculation from its status as free will.

We may be mechanical beings with no choice but to produce a certain calculation, based on purely mechanical, and therefore deterministic, criteria. However, the outcome is in fact unknowable, because the initial state was unknowable, so there is no way of calculating with absolute certainty what will happen if a certain choice is made.

There is therefore a need for a feedback loop in which there is reward for good calculations and punishment for bad calculations.

If a biological organism keeps miss-calculating the outcome of certain choices, it will end up starved, killed or otherwise incapable of reproduction. This applies to life in a society of people just as much as life in a jungle.

The feedback loop must be present for the organism to function correctly. Any attempt at tinkering with the feedback loop will end in sub-optimal performance by the organism. In a society, dangerous and damaging behavior must be punished, or there will be no correction.

The fact that some people are criminally disposed from birth does not diminish the need or fairness of just judgement.

Political tinkering with the feedback loop is always a bad idea, be it in the form of welfare hand outs to poor people, or bailout to the rich. Taxes, subsidies, punishment for crimes with no victim, moralistic conditioning, etc. It's all counter productive.

Finally, even machines can have free will. All that is required to build a machine with free will is a decision making algorithm in which outside responses to actions are fed back into the calculating circuit. There is nothing mysterious about the concept when properly defined.