Granting the authors' assumption that we don't in fact have free will, it seems very difficult to argue that we need a false belief in order to learn efficiently and be intelligent. If it's possible to give a coherent explanation of why the false belief is helpful, then that's sufficient to indicate how we could do without the false belief.
The argument is not that we need a false belief, but rather that we need to view ourselves as free on one level to learn efficiently, even if we know we are not free on another level of abstraction. Most ppl mix up these two level of abstraction though.
> summary, we argue that, in order to efficiently learn from our successes or mistakes, we need to imagine that we are free. This imagined freedom is physical freedom in the simulated reality of our world model.
I don’t understand why we would need to imagine that we are free in order to engage in certain patterns of behavior. Surely we could just engage in these patterns of behavior for the reason given: that they enable us to learn efficiently.
The paper seems to conflate reasoning counterfactually with imagined freedom, but I don't think the two are so tightly linked. For example, I can reason counterfactually about what would happen under alternate laws of physics, but this doesn't mean that I (necessarily) believe that these altered laws correspond to possible states of affairs.
