Perfect Jeff! Great response.

@WilliamFleming thanks. I don't want to leave the impression that I think dasana are unassailable - but you have to actually understand them in order to refute them. It's obvious from his continued tirade against the physical that he understands neither mimamsa nor vedanta and his complaints all focus on an aspect of hinduism that no longer even exists. Unlike Abrahamic views modern Hinduism actually changes with evolutions of culture and science. Listen to the Dalai Lama - he's a man of science. The few modern Jains are the same. The astika philosophies are the same way overall even if some local cultures do still embrace aspects of bhakti. Atheists and many in the west get hung up on the existence of gods within the hindu gamut of beliefs without realizing the HUGE difference between abrahamics and hindus in that aspect. Hindu gods are models of conduct and personifications of traits they wish to emulate ... NOT mystical beings set on high in judgment.

Robotic people have attempted to dominate many times but their regimes always come to naught.

@WilliamFleming Those people in the past didn't have access to the tools and resources that may be available to those in the near future. Already governments and large corporations collect invaluable data on nearly everyone, most of which is offered up to them for free, or perhaps more accurately exchanged for their free services. As tools utilizing machine learning and deep neural networks become more prevalent, information about people that they may not even be consciously aware of will be used against them in ways that the users may be unable to fully understand.

Imagine a system that knows everything about you, what you do and don't like, where and how you live, and other more subtle things such as how you will react to certain stimuli, your nervous quirks or your facial expressions. Such a system could be used to convince you, not through overt manipulation or coercion, but through genuine influence to do what it wants you to do, or what it's users want you to do.

If you believe in free will, then all the actions you are taking are fully yours and just happen to disproportionately benefit some other party. If you do not believe in free will, then you will be able to recognize this is happening, and although no actions will be able to free you from it, you can take steps to level the playing field so to speak.

@Happy_Killbot Wouldn’t taking those actions be a demonstration of free will?

@WilliamFleming No, because if the world is deterministic or stochastic in nature they would have done those same things anyways, including you choosing to not do the systems biding. We still can't rule out that free will exists, but if we can effectively manipulate anyone as if they were a machine, then for all intents and purposes they do not.

Lets put this a different way. For the sake of argument, lets assume that every tangible object is both sentient and capable of free will. If you pick up an object and turn it in your hand, you can not prove that it didn't turn simply because it wanted to. Therefore, the fact that it moves as you want it to would be irrelevant because it is choosing to do what it wants, and that desire just happens to coincide with your own. You can never prove that every object doesn't have free will, but for all pragmatic purposes they do not.