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We evolved to have a constant experience-reaction feedback loop. If a bee stings me, the signal takes time to travel up my arm, get to my brain, and then be processed into action on my part.
If we imagine alien anthropologists who move and react to things in femtoseconds, they might look at humans staying still for eons as a bee lands on them, stings them, and then just let the bee stay there for millions of femtoseconds before slapping it and conclude that we're not truly conscious. We're constantly "starting and stopping" actions when nothing is going on, even if we have a relatively continuous, rolling awareness.
I don't see how it is that different from LLM's in principle, except that because we're designing them, we have to be the ones to put them into an agentic loop to accomplish things.
This essentially is the hard-determinism stance. You have no free will because you are just a causal mechanism probabilistically responding to external system according to your internal set of parameters (that you didn't choose). I don't think it really takes an alien to see that.
I believe humans can walk untrodden ground, that we have the ability to do things that are not causal mechanistically related to external stimuli in a way that an LLM currently does not. If you want to profer that you are just a flesh-bag robot with no free will, that is a belief system, but I'm not sure you'd like the ramifications of essentially being an object.
My feeling has always been that free will of this style is undesirable.
Consider something I do every day, like drive to and from work. I want my actions to be causally determined by my character, my memories and experiences and the kind of person I am, because I would never just decide to randomly swerve my car and hit the concrete barrier between the lanes at max speed.
But if I have the kind of radical free will that you propose, then there's always a possibility that, in spite of my upbringing, and the moral character I have spent my whole life cultivating and inhabiting, I could just make the random decision, causally unburdened by anything that has come before, to slam into the concrete divider head on at max speed in my car. I don't want the free will to "walk untrodden ground" that you propose. In a very real sense, it seems to me that whatever a-causal "decider" there is in me in such a situation, must not be me, since I would never have chosen to do the things a truly free version of myself would have chosen.
On the other hand, if I inhabit a deterministic universe, then I at least can know that whatever I do, it will be causally downstream of the person that I am, and that is comforting, regardless of whatever my ultimate fate will be. At least, on some level, I can say that I am truly the agent acting in the world, and reaping the consequences of my actions.
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