On the dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines

I disagree. See my response to Layke1123 just now.

> Knowledge is power in society. Does it change your fate? The answer is no

Again, I disagree; see my response to Layke1123 just now. I understand the attitude you are taking; I just don't think it's a good idea. Believing this will cause more harm and more suffering. More on that below.

> I realized they were in fact acting mentally ill because of their belief that people make choices when regarding one's sexual orientation and gender identity.

I'm very sorry you went through what you went through. And how you deal with it personally, in your own life, is of course entirely your choice. But that very observation (see the irony?) illustrates the error in the general conclusion you are drawing from it.

Even if people's sexual orientation and gender identity are not choices they make (which I agree they aren't), that doesn't mean there are no choices at all, period. For example, even if you can't choose your sexual orientation, you still choose who you partner with, and those choices make a difference. And that's not all; see further comments below.

> I don't blame them or ever want to desire they had free will because I would've sought vengeance for the conversion therapy I suffered. Instead I'm glad fate had me realize they weren't to blame but how the universe unraveled and no individual had any power over how they came to be.

First, as your very next sentence illustrates--"I personally don't think that means people should be left scot free when they violate others."--you admit that the matter of vengeance is separate from the question of choice. Whether or not people make choices is a separate question from how we should respond to what people do.

Second, even if your family didn't choose the religion they got brought up in, or the beliefs that religion inculcated in them, they did choose to put you through the ordeal they put you through. They could have chosen otherwise. What's more, they themselves might not have realized that they could have chosen otherwise (more irony)--those very same religious beliefs quite possibly included the belief that they were forced to do what they did, and if they had instead believed they had free will, the ability to make their own choices, they might have stopped to think instead of just acting automatically on their beliefs about sexual orientation and gender identity. In other words, they were blaming you for what they claimed was your choice (when it wasn't), but they were also refusing to admit their own ability to make choices and that those choices affected you. Whatever that is, it is not a simple "belief in free will" and wouldn't be fixed by a simple eradication of "belief in free will".

> I think the social systems just need to change to a rehabilitation system like how the healthcare system treats people that get sick.

But that system is screwed up as well. Homosexuality used to be defined as "sickness"--and the system then forcibly medicated people with sex hormones to "cure" them. (Look up what happened to Alan Turing, arguably one of the best mathematicians of the 20th century.) And don't even get me started on all the other ways the healthcare system disempowers people and thereby makes their condition worse instead of better.

The only way to avoid having people be abused is to respect their freedom of choice. What should happen in cases like yours is that the person themselves should choose how they want to deal with whatever it is they are dealing with. Their family shouldn't dictate it to them. No "system" should dictate it to them. No "system" should label them, whether it's labeled as "sickness" or "non-standard sexual orientation" or "gender dysphoria" or whatever. No system should tell them they need "rehabilitation". If people ask for a particular kind of help or care, that's fine; but a belief like "free will doesn't exist" has always been a handy excuse for others or "the system" to force "treatment" on people and abuse them.

Yes, that's true. However...

> It's not ok to stand by and let child trafficking happen.

...unless child trafficking is happening right in front of you, you're not "standing by". There are a zillion bad things always happening around the world. Are we all supposed to stop all of them? And how would not believing in free will help stop all of them? I don't see how that follows at all.

Furthermore, let's say we do stop believing in free will; then what? Do we all get forced to drop everything else in our lives and go stop child trafficking? Says who? There is no way to even implement a scheme like that unless someone makes a choice and decides what needs to be stopped and tells others to go stop it. Calling this "not believing in free will" strikes me as pointless at best, and deliberate manipulation at worst.

People do not have choices. They are particles reacting to their environment, and what you describe as a "choice" is actually a carefully choreographed cascade of chain reactions. You can attribute a sense of "making choices" to that all you want, it doesn't change the fact that if I interject into that process and stop any one piece of that chain reaction, your behavior is altered.

You only have the illusion of free will, because you don't understand exactly how the system works. You brain has hallucinated not just the outside world, but your internal world as well. It is inescapable, and rather than fight it, you should embrace it like some us do and learn to operate in this new mental paradigm, not out right reject it because you fail to be able to operate in that space.

The fact that I exist is the only evidence you need to show that "not believing in free will" doesn't lead to your prediction of "worse outcome".

Now, you might say you fight child trafficking currently because you vote for people who make the laws that say it's illegal and "dust your hands", but yet it's not enough because child trafficking still happens. At the end of the day, you are ok with child trafficking happening because, "Well, at least I choose not to traffick children, so that's enough."

I didn't assert anything about "believing people can't make choices in a true sense of free will". Nor did I assert anything about individual cases.

Since you are apparently unable to properly understand statements that use terms like "choice", I will rephrase my assertion using your ultra-physicalist language:

There are causal processes that happen inside human brains. Those causal processes have effects outside of the particular human brains in which they take place. Those effects can include effects on what happens to the particular human in whose brain the causal processes are taking place, and effects on other humans besides that particular human.

The question is whether the causal processes that happen inside a particular human's brain have a much greater impact, on net, on what happens to that particular human, than causal processes that happen in other human brains; or, by contrast, whether causal processes that happen in other human brains have a much greater impact, on net, on what happens to that particular human.

My assertion is that a society in which the former is the case will have less human suffering, and more good things, than a society in which the latter is the case.

Note that the effects the causal processes inside human brains have outside those brains, whether on that particular human or on other humans, happen regardless of the beliefs held by the particular human in whose brain the causal processes are happening, unless you count the beliefs themselves as part of the causal processes. Which is fine with me personally, but in fact, in your ultra-physicalist language, the word "belief" is just as out of place as the word "choice"; in your ultra-physicalist language, people don't have beliefs any more than they make choices. But the causal processes happening in their brains have the effects they have regardless of what language you use to describe them. Using obfuscatory ultra-physicalist language to describe them, instead of the common, intuitive language of beliefs and choices that everyone understands, just makes it harder to think clearly about what is going on. It's like doing arithmetic using Roman numerals; yes, it's possible, but it's just making things much harder than they need to be for no good reason.