I think people feel like they're the cause of something when they make a choice and then cause something by that choice. That whole choice process is carried ou

I think people feel like they're the cause of something when they make a choice and then cause something by that choice. That whole choice process is carried out by physical reactions in our mind. Neurons fire and produce the thoughts representing alternative choices, the neurons fire to process the choices, to come up with different ways of judging the choices, the neurons fire in a way that picks the choice with the highest expected value, and then they fire in a way that produces a good feeling for thinking it through and making a choice, in order to weight the other neurons into doing this process more often. To our mind, from the inside, judging and making a choice feels like a basic feature of the universe, because it really is a basic feature of our brain itself, but that feature isn't a basic element of the universe, it's implemented in physics and neurons. People are evolved to consider the decision process as a basic element in the world partly to recognize the decision-making ability in others, so we can instinctively predict other people's decisions, and know that we may be blamed by others for our decisions, and do that we can blame others for their decisions. So the ability to make decisions feels like a basic element of the world in ourselves and others, but that feeling is evolved into us to make us effective socially, it's not an element of the universe. If you made an AI and an entirely self-contained virtual world for it to survive in, and you peeked into its memory, would you expect to find it actually caring (beyond mere curiosity) about whether the physics/software it existed in was deterministic (with pseudo-randomness, though still completely unpredictable to the virtual inhabitants), even though it wouldn't result in any possibly noticeable changes for it? If you traced the AI's beliefs and found that it believed that the correctness or free-ness of its decisions were linked to this question, you would assume the AI was very confused about something.