Assuming that FW exists, can you somehow actively use it or not? That is, can you meaningfully choose a strategy “I am going to solve this problem using my FW”, such that the strategy is more likely to succeed if FW exists, and more likely to fail otherwise?
If the answer is “yes”, then of course it is instrumentally useful to know whether FW exists or not. The correct answer would allow you to design better strategies for success.
If the answer is “no”, then the debates about FW are a waste of time, and your choice to believe or not believe in FW will have no impact on your life, so there is no “better” choice. (The best choice would be to stop wasting your time thinking about it.)
The distinction between FW and no FW does not seem useful to me because it lumps together “deterministic” and “random”, but the former is predictable and the latter is not, and in my opinion for everyday life the ability to predict is the important thing.
Question “can I really freely choose to do X?” does not really sound useful to me, and a more useful thing would be “what can influence my future choice of X?”. The former you can only philosophize about, the latter you can act on, and thus increase or decrease the probability of you choosing X in the future.
A more subtle way is to change your focus from “can I freely choose X?” to “how can I choose X?”. Because, if you don’t know how, is it any useful to know whether you “can”? Without a “how”, the “can” reduces to “it can happen randomly”. With a functioning “how”, things become (somewhat) deterministic. Either way, there seems to be no FW, only knowledge… or its absence (either as “I don’t know” or “it is unknowable”).
Talking about the “how”, we can consider external and internal causes. The external you address by changing your environment, the internal you address e.g. by therapy. For example, if you want to eat less cookies, you should a) stop buying them, so even if you are tempted at late night, you can’t just start eating them, because they are not easily available, and b) think about what might motivate you towards a healthier lifestyle. But both of these approaches assume some kind of determinism. (And the role of randomness is reduced to “and sometimes, despite the best efforts, this may fail”.)
tl;dr—ignore the FW metaphysics, focus on how things (such as you) actually work
(See also my reply to ChristianKl.)
Assuming that FW exists, can you somehow actively use it or not? That is, can you meaningfully choose a strategy “I am going to solve this problem using my FW”, such that the strategy is more likely to succeed if FW exists, and more likely to fail otherwise?
If the answer is “yes”, then of course it is instrumentally useful to know whether FW exists or not. The correct answer would allow you to design better strategies for success.
If the answer is “no”, then the debates about FW are a waste of time, and your choice to believe or not believe in FW will have no impact on your life, so there is no “better” choice. (The best choice would be to stop wasting your time thinking about it.)
The distinction between FW and no FW does not seem useful to me because it lumps together “deterministic” and “random”, but the former is predictable and the latter is not, and in my opinion for everyday life the ability to predict is the important thing.
Question “can I really freely choose to do X?” does not really sound useful to me, and a more useful thing would be “what can influence my future choice of X?”. The former you can only philosophize about, the latter you can act on, and thus increase or decrease the probability of you choosing X in the future.
A more subtle way is to change your focus from “can I freely choose X?” to “how can I choose X?”. Because, if you don’t know how, is it any useful to know whether you “can”? Without a “how”, the “can” reduces to “it can happen randomly”. With a functioning “how”, things become (somewhat) deterministic. Either way, there seems to be no FW, only knowledge… or its absence (either as “I don’t know” or “it is unknowable”).
Talking about the “how”, we can consider external and internal causes. The external you address by changing your environment, the internal you address e.g. by therapy. For example, if you want to eat less cookies, you should a) stop buying them, so even if you are tempted at late night, you can’t just start eating them, because they are not easily available, and b) think about what might motivate you towards a healthier lifestyle. But both of these approaches assume some kind of determinism. (And the role of randomness is reduced to “and sometimes, despite the best efforts, this may fail”.)
tl;dr—ignore the FW metaphysics, focus on how things (such as you) actually work