If you find these ideas bizarre and impossible to accept as useful as I did when I first encountered them, it's well worth a deep dive into the subject.

And I think it must go hand in hand with a deep dive into the oddity that is our experience of self, which doesn't seems to really exist in the way we tend to think it does either. Another idea that I found bizarre and impossible to accept as useful when I first encountered it.

But the deeper and harder you look, the less reasonable it seems to accept the idea of free will as people commonly understand it, and the more obvious it becomes that the experience of being a self is a real experience, but one that has an illusory quality and is backed by deep, unquestioned beliefs that don't hold up under scrutiny.

I was raised by extremely religious parents in a church that took much of the bible literally. I realized in my teens that I was not compatible with these views, but what I took away from the experience is that many of society's deeply held beliefs about personal responsibility, retribution, shame, vengeance, etc. all have their roots in religious dogma.

While a growing portion of the world has moved beyond this religiosity in most aspects of daily life, it remains embedded deeply in our legal system, and in how we treat other people who "wrong" us.

I don't think it's helpful to assume that free will absolutely doesn't exist in any way shape or form, or that it absolutely does. But I do think it's useful to look at the reasons that our common conception of it can't be accurate, and to look at the resulting implications of that inaccuracy.

I've personally started to see myself more as an expression of a much larger process. I'm inseparable from the history of humanity before me, from the environment that sustains me, from the evolutionary processes that led to this moment, from the circumstances of my birth and family, etc. And I find this perspective to provide - paradoxically enough - a kind of freedom from the ideas beat into me from a young age about my personal responsibility for things that in retrospect, I had zero control over. It has helped me understand the actions of others more charitably, even if those actions still require some corrective.

As others have mentioned, none of this means we don't put dangerous people in prison, or that the corrective mechanisms built by society aren't useful. It just frames the picture differently, and points to the need to shift attitudes about people who break societal rules. Personally, it's helped me stop incessantly blaming myself for things that I can't possibly be responsible for, which was the gift that kept giving after I left the church.

Looking back, the reason I couldn't even entertain these ideas at first is that the thing we call "free will" absolutely exists as something that we experience, but we've layered thousands of years of deeply ingrained religious thinking and interpretation on top of the experience and then let the fact that we experience it justify the layers of interpretation, without questioning the interpretation itself. More people than ever have left the explicit religious beliefs aside, but haven't really examined the source of the remaining imprints.

Once you start questioning those beliefs and start a rational examination of their implications, it all starts to dissolve.