>
Similarly, Block Universe ideas are rejected by many people on the grounds of "but what about free will?".Didn't know about block universes so far, but as for the general idea of a deterministic universe, I never quite got why people see it so much as a contradiction to free will.
When we experience free will in our lives, I think what that mostly entails is that we have thoughts and make decisions based on our experience of the world - plus our own knowledge, memories, attitudes, feelings etc. Our thoughts and actions are influenced by a great deal of what happened in the past, but we don't access the past directly: All we have is our memory of past events. And memories, knowledge, attitudes etc are all part of the brain - and therefore part of the current world state.
So as long as the entirety of your thinking and decision-making is only based on your memories, this seems perfectly compatible with a deterministic universe to me. It also doesn't restrict free will in any practically meaningful way: All it says is that if given the exact same "brain state", you'd decide in the same way - but it's practically impossible to have the same brain state twice. If you can remember having made a choice in the past, then your brain is already in a different state than it was back then, so it's perfectly possible to choose differently the second time without violating determinism.
On the other hand, if you could somehow reset your brain exactly back to a previous state, this would imply forgetting everything that had happened since that time - and then it's not a big surprise that you'd choose the same way as you did the first time.
(And I think if you use that definition of "free will" then in principle even LLMs could have it: They have their own "brain state" with "memories" encoded as the model weights, the prompt and all the tokens emitted previously in the conversation.)
There is a second, orthogonal discussion about free will, which asks how much influence biological and subconscious factors have on thinking. I think the famous "your neurons triggered long before you 'decided' to push the button" experiment belongs to that category. I found that discussion always much more reasonable, but also a lot less clear-cut: There is a much larger spectrum of possible outcomes than the binary "full free will/no free will" of the "deterministic universe" discussion.