Funny this subject came up on yesterday's BBC QI show. I liked the poetic description of consciousness not as the driver of thought but as a compass needle that

Funny this subject came up on yesterday's BBC QI show. I liked the poetic description of consciousness not as the driver of thought but as a compass needle that points the way the thoughts were going anyway. I've not believed in free will for a long time, I think the idea is quite problematic at many levels. It implies that people would act out of character, that we don't make decisions based on inputs and internal feedback borne of experience, and that our brains don't follow known physics. However, it's fine to act as if you have free will and so do others around you, even if one doesn't believe in it. You still need to run the universe to find out the future, so even disproving free will doesn't pragmatically change life.