So the problems of this comes exactly from the mistake of building yourself on what you experience and know. That self construction is not the basis of reality.
So it is true we think what we think. We judge what we judge. We do what we do. There is no issue.
The issue is that we model this as a body that does all this, and then a copy of that inside who makes the final judgement.
Why should we need a second entity within us to make the final decision? Why can't the original one do it?
Thinking about it the situation is ridiculous.
It is like looking in the mirror and expecting our mirror image to make the decisions of our life. This is exactly what thoughts about "free will" are.
Consider this way. Don't we think the body is perfectly capable of saving itself? Why would it defer executive control to some other entity inside it? In fact in emergency situations it does take control and does a perfect job. So we know the body is perfectly happy with autonomy. In fact the body is better than that because it creates what we see, feel and think! And in fact it is better than that: it creates us too!
So when the think about "free will" that is just a mirror image of the living body doing everything quite autonomously. It is like talking about the holiday you had.
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https://www.unexplainedpodcast.com/episodes/2016/4/13/episode-6-extra-the-ultimate-price
Now this podcast was interesting. Everyone mentioned makes this mistake above. Altruism so understood has got nothing to do with survival or welfare it is the battle between the reflection and the view of the reflection. When Jesus dies on the Cross he is not literally saving anyway. Everyone dies. He is showing how not to identify with the reflection when you see it die.
Now RE: the maths of fitness this blog has identified one problem. It applies to ideas themselves, and so to the theory. So you have the situation where a theory proposes that the survival of an entity is linked to its fitness function, and that implies this theory has a fitness function. But we have a chicken-egg problem. How do we decide the status of the theory? You can't say it became established because it has a high fitness function, because we only say that after it has becomes established. The mistake underlying all this is that Hamilton et al argued their theory was true. And deciding it was true they then applied it to everything. Truth came first. When Price gets all confused it is because he forgot that Truth determined the value of the theory, not the theory itself. When he read it and decided it was True that is the critical step upon which the theory rests, not fitness. Once we accept the judgements that go into thinking something is true as the basis of the world, then really theory is rather pointless.
It is the same problem at the start. Price having decided that the mirror reflection was himself, then cut his own throat because he saw himself as unnecessary. This is the well in to which Narcissus falls every time. Who is that in the reflection at the bottom of the well? Obsessed we lean over to get a closer look. It is so tangible and real, it is everything that I am not. When I think about myself it is so ghostly and unsatisfying. But there is something physical, tangible, real, it has colour, it moves, it is beautiful. Like a siren calling to us. Eventually we get what we want and we fall down and drown. This is the story of the whole of the Western World from Plato onwards in a single devastating allegory. A.I. right now is us thinking we can see ourselves in new reflections we have found. We're not even here, so how can we be there!
So Narcissus is drawn to get it all the wrong way around. Did Price think for a second before cutting his throat: not who is being cut, but who is cutting? If he had reidentified with the cutter, rather than the cut, with the viewer rather than the reflection, he might have pulled himself out of the well.
And so does the reflection have free will? Who cares, it isn't the one making the decisions!
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