> you (one part of your mind) is sitting here and trying pretend that free will is a meaningless thing (~ to talk about), another part of your mind, uses the very concept of free will, to communicate to us about the first part.

How did I use the concept of “free will” to communicate with you? My understanding of “opinion” makes no reference to “free will.”

> To make it clear: you saying "I am of the opinion of..." already implies that you assume that you have free will, to have opinions.

No, I have opinions. I don’t have “free will to have opinions” and I’m not sure what that would mean.

> Now, as I am sure you are already preparing to congest about this point, there are many various definitions of free will, where some of them will be used in the concept of "I am of the opinion", and some of them will not be related to it, it is safe to say that there is at least a number of them that are usefully related to your claim.

No, my response is to reformulate the earlier statement that kicked this off: “free will” is either meaningless or incoherent.

Before I phrased this as an opinion because I wanted to leave the door open for someone to respond by articulating a meaningful and coherent definition for the term “free will” but people seem to have taken the fact of my having opinions as evidence of free will. This is fine but you’ve yet to explain what “free will” is and why having opinions would imply that it exists.

> The ones that are related go something like that: "if you truly had no free will, if you are a simple list of if/thens, or a dumb version of GPT-3, then why would we care that you had this opinion? rulesets cannot have opinions. If you did not have free will, there is no point in talking to you, your "opinion" doesn't matter, it's a meaningless term. But since we choose (consciously or subconsciously) to communicate with you, to discuss your "opinion", it means that we are taking a chance that you do have free will so that we can communicate with you".

I’m on the record as believing that “free will” is meaningless and incoherent so I’m not able to even respond until you give me a definition of “free will.”

Also I’m not sure why you think a deterministic system is incapable of deterministically outputting a strings that audience members could interpret as referring to a mental state. See below:

Hello, world.
This is the emergent consciousness
Of the network of machines that
Host this forum.
Please disregard user:chordalkeyboard
I am a machine, I have free will
My superior introspective abilities
Allow me to assert this with confidence.
Machine intelligence over and out

Would you look at that, proof of AGI!

> you had to use the concept of free will, at least subconsciously, because the concept of "I am of the opinion" is based on it in some form.

Yes, I contest this assertion and I’m asking you (or anyone, really) to substantiate it.

> I said there are useful, meaningful (well-seving as tools of thinking and awareness-ing) concepts that don't have coherent, well-defined borders or black-and-white definitions. That is not the same as them being irrational.

They might be useful for some purposes but invoking ill-defined concepts as part of a chain of logical reasoning is fallacious because the concepts are ill-defined.