I think self consciousness is the sticking point for a mechanical or probabilistic universe. It exists. It eludes quantifiable definition. It makes no sense in a mechanism. It is central to free will.
As long as self awareness is an input at least in part independent of the rest of the world, if makes your outputs non deterministic if it’s not taken into account. Yet self awareness defies explanation at the moment. Ie there is no known way to account for it.
If I hallucinate prismatic shapes overlaying everything, it does not follow that there is some non-physical phenomenon which is responsible.
“It is obvious that the world is covered in prisms. It’s obvious that those prisms don’t fit in my eyeballs, therefore the entire scientific edifice is mistaken and we need a metaphysical explanation for my experience.”
No, actually, that’s the point they allude to: that free will might be an illusion, a hallucination.
No one denies the lived experience of free will, the inquiry into it asks if we can quantify that qualia without resorting to complete determinism.
If we can’t, it is perhaps an illusion. There is ample precedent for lived experience being an illusory lie told to our minds by our brains - visual hallucinations are the closest example to hand.
Beings without free will can’t prove anything though since the verbs available to a being without free will is an empty set, and passive descriptions are more apt.
