Does the belief in free will promote societally useful behavior? It might. It probably does. However, there’s a term for belief without evidence. Faith.
The problem is not with faith, exactly, but with faith that increases social cohesion at the cost of individual happiness.
If free will is patently false, then how can suffering be caused explicitly by attachment to desires? Suffering from attachment comes about after free will is accepted.
If you realize that you’re not responsible for how you feel then you can let go and experience life fluidly rather than being trapped in your head.
Both determinism and indeterminism are linked, each able to build the other.
We need not concern ourselves with whether determinism makes us robots or indeterminism makes us dice, and instead we can enjoy the fluidity that knowing our will is automatic gives us.
If will is the faculty of choice, and automaticity is patterns proceeding without influence, then what is automatic will? It is choices that are made based on the universe, not a separate ego.
Belief in automatic will is the understanding that the feeling of free will is detrimental.
Rather than setting us free, the idea of free will imprisons us in suffering.
When one falsely believes they are in control of their actions, then when they fail to carry through with their plans they will berate themselves.
Cutting away the cruft of free will and especially the ideas of identity and control, we are free to more fully experience the world, as it is Now.
The illusion of free will is helpful when you need to survive in a harsh environment and make evolutionary distinctions between good and evil, life and death.
Today it only causes suffering because you think you can disobey the universe.
If inner peace comes from detachment from desires and living in the moment, how do we do that? How do we experience the Now instead of living in imagined stories of good versus evil?
It seems to me the illusion is only broken (or most successfully broken) when we accept that nature is going the way it will go, and we get to experience it, rather than force it into a predefined box.
You don’t need an identity any more than you need a belief in invisible pink unicorns. The universe happens — and you’re in it.
The ego, the sense of an identity, is fundamentally an imagined idea. If you want to turn your attention on the experience of living rather than the delusions of thinking, you can.
When you become deluded that your identity exists in reality, you allow suffering. Inner peace is challenged when you believe you must be a certain way.
The truth is the universe is a certain way and you cannot influence it unless it allows itself to be influenced.
If we are automatic mental patterns with no inherent control over our future because of the unpredictability of quantum mechanics, shouldn’t we realize that our awareness operates automatically, and these human bodies are but tools to wear?