[OkayPhysicist]

I suspect it is improbable, because an honest, undeniable belief that you lack free will would drive someone stark raving mad. It would represent a fundamental phase change in the way an individual interacts with the world, which I would wager would be antithetical to effective transmission of the belief.

Far more dangerous would be the 90% mark, where understanding of psychological determinism advances to a point where people still believe they have free will, but are wildly effective at influencing others. That looks like advertising today, but worse.

[MikeSchurman]

I don't believe in free will. I haven't really for about 20 years or so. However, I act as if I do, as I've always done. It's a habit I choose not to break. Changing to act as I believe would be too much for me to handle. I would need to rethink pretty much everything I do. It's a completely different set of axioms in every domain of human knowledge, ethics, behaviour and interaction.

I don't think I'm raving mad, but perhaps because I don't act on my beliefs, I don't fit your conditions?

However, I do believe the justice system would be better run with this in mind.

[Dracophoenix]

Not that I agree with your premise, but why would you personally adopt a cognitive dissonance? A healthy mind is generally regarded as satisfied with itself as it is free of self-contradictions.

[MikeSchurman]

I think behaving as if there is no free will is such a change from how I was raised and how 99.99% of society believes and functions, would require some Buddha-level strength of will, which I don't possess.

It's so different than all the constructs we've created, you can kind of throw "generally regarded" out the window, frankly :) (don't mean that to sound harsh if it does). All of psychology would need to be rewritten. By me? I guess?

The 3rd option is to try and convince myself of what I regard as a lie (that we have free will), which is also difficult, but probably easier?

[kaibee]

> I suspect it is improbable, because an honest, undeniable belief that you lack free will would drive someone stark raving mad.

This presumes that humans are some kind of ultra-rational uber-mensch that is incapable of ignoring inconvenient facts.

Truth of the matter is that an illusion of free-will is just as good as the real thing from the perspective of an individual human's mind.

Also I think you're confusing free-will and predictability, everyone kind of seems to do this for whatever reason, but they aren't mutually exclusive at all.

All of your actions can be the result of quantum mechanical effects, eg. "true randomness", but still be completely unpredictable beyond a certain time/noise horizon even with a 'perfect' simulation. But unless you want to suggest that the free-will arises from the quantum-foam (which I mean, is as unfalsifiable a claim as any other religion, so go for it), you kinda run out of room to fit the free-will.

As for my experience of not believing in free-will? Its been pretty much fine.

I suspect that belief in something free-will-like is pretty evolutionary adaptive, so I think we'd expect it to arise in most simulated minds subject to similar evolutionary pressures.

The only thing I haven't really figured out is why we aren't just p-zombies, but what is life without some mysteries, right? (And given this, I wholeheartedly agree with u/mikeschurman about the need for a justice system that isn't unnecessarily cruel)

[Enginerrrd]

I don't believe in free will at all. I never really did from a physics perspective, but after many years of meditating, I don't believe it at the highest levels of abstraction now either.

I don't understand how that is supposed to change anything at all about how an individual interacts with the world though?