There is a difference between consciousness and free will, though. There may be no such thing as free will and it's all a trick to us, but I mean, there's still a "me" here that experiences things. I can't be sure there's a "you" there, since your consciousness is entirely outside of anything I can perceive, but I can _assume_ it, since it makes sense that we share so much, we'd share that property, too.

It gets really tricky with machines. We share _nothing_ with them, but what about when they start sharing properties with us that we associate with consciousness? I don't have any good answers for that.

But is your "me" an actual entity, or is it just the process of experiencing things? And if the latter, what does it even mean for it to have a persistent identity - and does it, or is there just an illusion of one when you consider a single time slice of processing (e.g. "now").

The problem is that, just as with the outside world, we only have the perception of our own inner workings, not real understanding of them. So we are modelling "I" as an entity, and it seems useful enough for day-to-day purposes, but how accurate is it really if you get to the bottom of it?

How can I be sure there's a "me" here?

Apologies for not catching this in a more-reasonable amount of time, but you're going to have to be more specific about your question. The vast majority of humans throughout history agree that they are "someone", though the full nature of what "someonehood" entails is definitely debatable. I assume you're asking some question about the full nature and definitions and whatever, but you're not really doing it in a way that's answerable. If you can quantify that question better, I can attempt an answer. But this question is the epistemological equivalent of "how fast is a car?"

You can only be as sure as you allow yourself to be. Nothing can be proven when it comes to metaphysics.

> or because I’m compelled to by my genetic and social programming, predictably and without a genuine choice in the matter?

I don't understand how anyone can doubt this even a fraction of a second. Magic does not exist.

If you have enough information about my DNA, my society, where I am now and what I'm doing, I think you'd be surprised how predictable each and every decision and action I make becomes.

ChatGPT 4, limited as it is, could probably predict me down to a low margin of error with that kind of info alone, and it would seem like magic to me.

A character on the NBC/Yahoo! show Community had a good one-liner: "I'm not psychic, Annie. That's just an illusion caused by extreme preparedness."

I think it would vary a lot depending on the specific decisions and how unique the combination of circumstances are. Even though things tend to repeat on a large enough scale, different combinations can still be highly unique.

OTOH when they are not... a simple exercise one can do is go ask GPT-4 to simulate a comment section on some political news story posted online; you can even have it write a fictional news story first, for good measure. It is extremely good at it, and that tells me volumes about the actual (rather than perceived) rationality of our public discourse.