[TheOtherHobbes]

Absolutely no human has ever operated like this.

We experience choice and decision as subjective processes controlled by a subjective experience of self. But all of those experiences are subjective, and delusional to varying degrees.

I recently had a fascinating experience with a lawyer while buying a house. The vendors and the agent did various things annoy my lawyer, and she set up a situation where the agent was - apparently as a free choice - compelled to pay the lawyer a sum of money to close the sale.

I'm sure the agent made what she considers a free choice, albeit not a comfortable one. But in fact the lawyer was always in control of the situation, and knew exactly where to push, and how hard, to get the result she wanted.

If you have good psychological insight, humans can be ridiculously predictable and easy to manipulate. And said humans will still insist their decisions are made with full awareness and agency - even when they aren't.

So in what sense is will free at all? You really don't need to resort to quantum physics to understand there are serious problems with the concept. Marketing, politics, and law provide plenty of evidence that free will is a convenient fiction, not a psychological ground truth.

[waterhouse]

In game theory, you encounter situations where a player's optimal strategy is a "mixed strategy", i.e. "x% chance of choosing strategy A, y% chance of choosing strategy B, ...", with at least two nonzero values in x,y,... . For example, in rock-paper-scissors, if your strategy is anything other than 1/3 rock, 1/3 paper, 1/3 scissors, then an opponent can defeat you (in terms of expected value) by choosing the right pure strategy. People don't normally take out a die to make the choice, but... In a sport like boxing, if in certain situations you always "punch high" or "punch low" or otherwise act predictably, that will probably hurt your chances against an observant opponent. That presumably applies to real fights as well. Outside of direct combat, sometimes someone does you a small favor (or a small offense), and maybe the only favor (or punishment) you can do them in return is significantly larger than that; in that case, the appropriate response might be an x% chance of doing the thing and 1-x% of doing nothing.

So nondeterminism is a useful skill in at least some circumstances, quite likely some circumstances that existed in the environment where we did lots of evolving. Therefore I would expect us to have evolved some capability for (apparent) nondeterminism.

How often does the agent deal with lawyers in an adversarial situation? How often does the lawyer deal with people in adversarial situations like that? If an expert is able to see through and manipulate a beginner, well, I don't consider that good evidence that humans can never effectively deploy nondeterminism.

[EventH-]

On the contrary, this example only /supports/ the classical understanding of free will, in the sense that it shows the will operates only on goods that we perceive, and not on those which the intellect does not know.

We often operate with imperfect knowledge of our situations. That is simply because our intellects are not all-knowing.