Why the Book Determined Totally Misses the Point on Free Will

I read the book Determined by Robert Sapolsky and disagreed with the core thesis on numerous accounts. I think it misses the point of what is meaningful about free will and the only things it can sensibly mean. It does not matter one iota if your decisions are written down that is what determinism is. What matters is that if things would have been different what would have happened would have been different.

Causal model of crime if do punishment less suffering or more taking into account what effect it would have on if the crime would have been done. There is an experiencing self that suffers from punishment they do not have libertarian freewill it is an incoherent concept.

It feels like since they can't exercise magic control they don't deserve it. But the calculus is of retrocausality. Retrocausality is what deserving it is about. I deserve to get my piece taken after a stupid chess move, not because I could have done differently it was determined but because had I been able to have done differently it may have been that I would have given the one move would result in my piece being taken and the other it not. It causes me to make a different move when I anticipate. The same logic holds if I am a human or a chess engine.

Punishments that do not aim to address future behavior do not exist on the level of the real world they exist on the level of agents in the world of agents. Much as modern physics does not resemble our intuitions about the world around us, so too paradoxically can the world of agents seem foreign to us. But likewise it is much more real than our intuitive world is.

Suppose there was a computer controlling your actions with a remote control it is benevolent towards you and wants what is good for your experiencing self if you commit murder you should be punished for it in this case, it is just and right for it to be so as it helps prevent the murder that already happened. We may wish for some ground to stand on to say hey you don't deserve that, the problem is that there is none.

I think this part may be key since we yearn for a perspective from which caring about experience we can forgo punishment, say just make people think punishment is happening and let people go without doing it. But the precise inclination towards this being conceivable makes it impossible in the world or agents, if we would do this under circumstances X then others could reason if they were in X they will not be punished. What this means for arguing about free will is that without drawing this out explicitly you have to either take recourse to kind of flat out insisting on people being morally responsible in the libertarian free will intuitive sense or acknowledge it and seem cruel. But it is neither really it is not cruel because the imagined alternative is impossible and while it resembles the endpoint it does actually validly proceed on independent merits.

It is almost as if our intuitions of free will were adaptive and gave us a window into how the world of agents looks without needing 20th century philosophy to give us the grounding for being able to facilitate functional cooperation. A bit of invented magic as a simple placeholder for how agents work. Does this mean that people that do charity for the praise are more praiseworthy? Not exactly morality is more complicated than simple heuristics.