Stephen Hawking says free will is illusion. We're atoms. Atoms follow rigid laws. Therefore we have no choice.
This is reductionism. A mistake. It is also a mistake of scale.
Laws of physics aren't a person making you do things.
They're not some supernatural force pushing atoms around.
Laws of physics are just descriptions.
They describe what happens.
They don't make it happen.
It's like saying the rulebook controls the chess game.
No. The rulebook just describes how chess works.
Reality has levels: atomic, molecular, biological, human thought. Just because low-level descriptions exist doesn't eliminate high-level explanations.
When you lose at chess to a computer, the silicon didn't beat you, the program did. The program is an abstraction over atoms, like human thought.
When I decide, I decide. Not my atoms. Not physics laws.
My decision-making is a high-level process that's as real as any physical process.
We obsess over absolute foundations. No absolute foundation for knowledge exists.
Every fundamental theory raises the question: why this way, not another? The questions never end.
Well, the best way is to work at the level that explains what you need to explain.