[TheOtherHobbes]

Of all of the concepts like "consciousness" and "agency", "free will" is probably the least useful and poorly defined.

It's a hand-me-down from Western beliefs about morality and individuality - including Thelema and Christianity.

So there's a lot of starting from the concept and working back to assumed conclusions.

Generally humans do not have free will, do have very limited political, economic, and psychological agency, usually selected from a small number of competing rule sets, and are also far more easily influenced than they suspect.

Culture is more like a cellular automaton or diffusion system. Occasionally a transformation ripples out from an individual cell, often for fairly random reasons, but the big patterns are emergent, and every so often the soup shakes itself up and settles into a new arrangement.

IMO LLMs are the most recent proto-version of that, running on a different substrate.