> Your argument isn’t with me, it’s with iconic physicists spanning the range from Sean Carrol to David Deutsch.

Of course, and (maybe more importantly) a number of philosophers. However, other philosophers (and, indeed, some iconic physicists) might not disagree.

> any argument against vibes around an asymmetrically deterministic universe with a clear arrow of time and a unique dualist window of self is going to be unpopular

Dualism is popular in general population, but monistic materialism is probably more popular among the tech crowd. Both approaches don’t strike me as elegant, naturally.

> how one chooses to interpret and integrate the vanishing impossibility of free will

Well, how one chooses to integrate the consciousness being the only thing that we can assume objectively exists (as the only thing we have direct access to, empirically) is also personal matter. The ways of waving it off (pretending it’s an illusion, etc.) are many… Once you stop doing that, though, suddenly free will is no longer such a crazy notion.

I’m not sure that a dichotomy between say illusory and real is the right category to examine consciousness with.

Consciousness is pretty difficult to define in any satisfactory way because we don’t have a way to know what another means by the word. I know how it feels to me, but not to you and vice versa. I’m aware that exceedingly clever people work on the problem and have for a very long time, and I hope they find some success, but I think it remains an open problem in most ways.

For my two cents I tend to think that pursuits like defining consciousness, or even higher level things like free will and even spirituality are very worthwhile, but likewise very difficult if not impossible to collaborate on with rigor.

I think I was a bit too flip in painting it as though consciousness and free will and spirituality are somehow inferior or less important topics than physics and cosmology and what not: put better I would say that they are very different pursuits and I think it perilous to try to integrate them under the guise of science. Physics can be done in collaboration with others, we have mediums for reaching some level of evolving consensus on that. Consciousness and free will are much less obviously amenable to any rigorous consensus.

Understood. I agree on difficulty with rigour, but then when you and I use “rigour” we mean it in a particular sense informed by the current philosophy of natural sciences. I suspect a possibility for rigour in other approaches, even if it looks not very rigorous to us in the framework of that philosophy.

> I think it perilous to try to integrate them under the guise of science

I may disagree on this somewhat, since physics can well be interpreted under monistic idealism where consciousness is a first-class citizen. The resistance may stem from it causing natural sciences (physics, etc.) to become subordinate to philosophy, which can be explained as an artefact of how science is done in our society (note how this anchors us again to humans and therefore consciousness): natural science allowed a lot of progress that benefitted our well-being (along with some consequences that potentially do not, cf. advanced weaponry), it gained certain status and many people don’t want it to lose that status for various reasons (maybe on occasion selfish ones). The resistance strikes me as misguided, natural sciences were in fact informed by philosophy, and philosophy may be evolving.

It’s like there was a healthy competition between different maps, natural sciences had won, but other maps are still useful (e.g., cases where modern medicine fails yet meditation/mindfulness do the trick are frequently mentioned even on HN), and competition would still be healthy. Perhaps I don’t need to be concerned and the conflict I want to remove via some universal philosophy is in fact evidence of competition keeping on and the plurality of maps. Maybe I in fact lament the lack of rigour that could benefit those other maps if modern science treated them seriously.