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> And personally, I don’t think that there is such a thing as free will. I think it’s an illusion.

If the natural state is that no one controls any of their actions, then putting people in chains takes nothing from them.

It's these sort of reductios that make me suspect hard determinism is silly.

But free will seems silly too. Decisionmaking comes from a physical process, or it comes magically from somewhere else. The latter seems, to use one of Quine's insults, "ontologically profligate."

Maybe the debate between free will and determinism is just an artifact of language.

A sentence like "He chose to take the bus" make perfect sense to me; it conveys information. But so does a sentence like, "He comes from a long line of bus takers, and that provides a fully adequate account to explain why he took the bus." (Even if that sentence sounds a bit silly, I get what it's conveying.)

The hidden premise fueling the debate between free will and determinism is that it only makes sense to explain any phenomenon in exactly one way. But why is it hot? It's summer. You're standing next to the open oven. There's an atmosphere to retain heat. Atoms are hitting you. The universe is nonempty. None of these explanations need crowd out all the others, they're each useful in a different context.

Similarly, "Why did he kill her with the knife?" will have different answers for the domain of law, psychology, biology, and physics.

Define "cognitive illusion" without using the concept of "free will". Thank you.
When the brain tries to draw associations with one point in time to previous events, something happens where the memory of making those associations appears to have occurred before the original point in time.
If you are trying to convince me of anything then you are assuming that I have the free will to change my mind.
I think not.