Free will as legal fiction: what cheap, accurate prediction does to blame and choice
block_wallet · reddit · 2026-10-25
Responding to "haters will say determinism is bad," the author argues that if behavior is deterministic enough and models good enough, the distribution over what you'd do is known before you "choose" — your input still happens, it's just not news. Feeling free inside while being predictable outside is coherent; the free-will fight collapses into phenomenology vs forecastability.
The liability angle is the interesting part: free will is often a story we tell so praise, blame, contracts and punishment have somewhere to land. If prediction gets cheap and accurate, that story starts looking like a legal fiction — useful for coordinating humans, not for describing the causal graph. Courts, feeds and products already optimize around what you will do, then dress it up as what you chose.
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