Challenge accepted, thanks—and I think easily surmounted:
Your Fakeness argument—I’ll call it “Sheer Size Argument” makes about as much sense as for a house cat seeing only the few m^3 around it, to claim the world cannot be the size of Earth—not to speak of the galaxy.
Who knows!
Or to make the hopefully obvious point more explicitly: Given we are so utterly clueless as to why ANY THING is at all instead of NOTHING, how would you have any claim to ex ante know about how large the THING that is has to be? It feels natural to claim what you claim, but it doesn’t stand the test at all. Realize, you don’t have any informed prior about potential actual size of universe beyond what you observe, unless your observation directly suggested a sort of ‘closure’ that would make simplifying sense of observations in a sort of Occam Razor way. But the latter doesn’t seem to exist; at least people suggesting Many Worlds suggest it’s rather simpler to make sense of observations if you presume Many Worlds—judging from ongoing discussions that later claim in turn seems to be up for debate, but what’s clear: The Sheer Size Argument is rather mute in actual thinking about what the structure of the universe may or may not be.
Interesting how you introduce a sort of ‘let’s not just be about semantics’ while in the end, the disagreement boils down to essentially exactly that.
I think you’re completely right with what you point out, but I think this is not about having to convince SH about the ‘existence of free will’, rather about what terminology to best use in which discussion with whom.
I remain highly sympathetic to SH’s framing, as
0. SH is simply always right on everything. Ok, small joke to start (though—gosh—isn’t he kind of so so amazingly right in most things? My personal opinion; still always surprising me, though I appreciate quite some smart people seem to not like him).
Retributive justice—as in really within jurisprudence or so—questions are essentialy when we discuss free will, and here’s where most people are stupidly confused while SH’s exposition and interpretation is spot on about it—as I have the impression you mostly agree
In our daily usual interactions the same applies even much more broadly. I instinctively hate you if you do something bad and I think you’re somehow evil in a way that’s beyond ’that unfortunate creature is just suffering the tumor—or, as you put it, it’s tumor all the way down to even that more usual seeming creature still! - and this is absolutely impossible to see and rmbr for 95% of people or so → It’s exactly SH’s framing that’s an ideal summary as to why we’re wholly wrong in our instincts.
With point 2. said, I do agree that emphasizing the nuances you point out—and which whom I’m convinced SH rather fully agrees—might, for quite some people, make the whole free-will-not-in-the-way-you-instinctively-mean less of a non-starter, and thus be a fruitful addition to the discourse. What I dislike though is some of the nuances in your framing/wording, that makes it initially sound as if you’d try to rebut more than you actually, substantively do.