> 1) I think free will is a concept that has to be approached in a practical matter: as in we get better social outcomes if we assume people have free will.

The concept has utility.

You must understand, this is the most horrifying part! People are sentenced to prisons, torture, and death for "making bad/evil decisions". I'm not saying we should let murderers be murderers, but what I am saying is we should start looking closely into possible "down to the hardware" remedies instead if prison. If we are operating on this whole free-will notion, then that will never happen.

> 2) Processes with simple rules can still exhibit emergent behaviour.

Define emergent in this case, I dont know of any truly emergent behavior that violates the rules of what caused it, you could say 'organic life' was an emergent behavior, but it still obeys physics.

>you'll forgive me if I don't just take your word for it.

I think if we can't get passed an agreement that magic isnt real, that may be a reasonable time to end the discussion.

> we should start looking closely into possible "down to the hardware" remedies instead if prison

That's where hard determinism fails it, because all it can do is to make a very broad statement that our behaviour was predetermined, without going into the details.

Really we can't make "down to the hardware" fixes or even do a post hoc analysis of the cause of behaviour, so it's really useless as a theory, it has no predictive power.

In every culture, in every era, people have usually been pretty sure they had everything figured out, and that they understood life and the world completely.

I don't believe our present time is any more enlightened in this matter than any other.

(Also it seems to me that you keep using the word 'magic' as a weasel word: as if people disagreeing with you are just children who believe in silly things.)

> In every culture, in every era, people have usually been pretty sure they had everything figured out, and that they understood life and the world completely.

I don't think anyone here believes they have everything figured out.

> I don't believe our present time is any more enlightened in this matter than any other.

I think we're slowly getting better over time, as our collective knowledge compounds as time goes.

> Also it seems to me that you keep using the word 'magic' as a weasel word

You made a claim that a 'choice/decision' is not necessarily a physical process, I don't know how else I should interpret that.

> 1) I think free will is a concept that has to be approached in a practical matter: as in we get better social outcomes if we assume people have free will.

> The concept has utility.

This is a thinly veiled argument from consequences. You're not the only one to do this, I see this from many people arguing in favor of free will.

Edit: I would also question the utility of the concept compared to the alternative. Show me some hard numbers for what happens in a society constructed around the lack of a metaphysical free will, and then I may reconsider. (I suspect that this sort of society hasn't existed and may never exist, because free will is such a persistent illusion that it may as well be a phantom limb for most people. We're probably hardwired for it at some level, like the incessant drive for reproduction that most people have.)