You wonder why people care if they think there is no ability to make a free choice, a choice that is not forced in any way?
If they honestly have the faith that nothing they do is a free choice then why try to convince another person of anything?
That we try and try to convince others of our thoughts is because we have freely chosen them and therefore think they are important and true.
These pretenders in not believing in free will can easily been seen through. They don't really believe it for a second. That is why they care what other people think.
Pretty much.
The fact that we're having this 30+ page argument rather implies that free will exists. Unless someone wants to make a compelling argument for how we're all destined to participate in this thread at this time, and are incapable of doing anything else? Because that seems far, far, far more like woo to me than simply acknowledging that choice is real.
It's very,very unlikely that any given person will win the lottery. But that does not allow me to conclude that all people who claim to have won the lottery are liars.
Assuming that there is no choice, then no matter what we are doing, it is exactly as implausible as anything else we could have been doing.
Our participation here was not predictable in advance; But that doesn't mean that it is evidence that we chose to be here, any more than the lottery numbers are evidence that the person supervising the draw was choosing which numbers came out. 5, 15, 3, 21, 6, and 42 had only a one in five hundred million chance of having been the six numbers drawn. Clearly something that unlikely couldn't happen without a conscious choice!