There's indeed no free will (basic physics tells us that, can be also experienced directly via LSD or meditation), but to see if there's consciousness just inflict pain onto yourself.
All this being said it's pretty clear why would humans, or any other apes, or any other species, have morals - to reduce the pain/suffering that them and others receive.
If we cannot trust our experience of free will then we cannot trust our experience of anything and there is no such thing as "basic physics". After all, basic physics requires that there be a physical world we can observe in such a way as to make true statements about it. If we cannot trust interior observations about choosing freely between alternatives then we certainly cannot trust exterior observations that are mediated through imperfect senses.
Furthermore, if there is no free will there is no morality, since all things are determined and you cannot do otherwise than what you do. (There is no morality involved in the bouncing of a cue ball off of a pool table wall).
> After all, basic physics requires that there be a physical world we can observe in such a way as to make true statements about it.
But that's the point of confusing free will with consciousness. You can experience something (that's the hot stove argument), and inference is perfectly possible for even today's computer algorithms to do (which are certainly not free). Even something as common as a virtual memory system deciding which pages to swap makes predictions/inference based on what it has seen in the past.
Morality is still a thing, much like there are worse and better paging algorithms. Think of it as mental models of how things work, much like the rest of science. In this view morality is a study of how things/consciousnesses feel.
Edit: another way to look at morality as a science is like this: assume most people genuinely don't want to cause suffering of others, and especially of themselves. But they can still cause harm by being simply wrong.
how does basic physics tells us there is no free will? That is generally an argument about hard determinism which could be argued is invalidated by The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
Randomness does not yield freedom. A robot connected to a truly random source (like a decaying radioactive substance) is no more free than a fully deterministic x86 chip.
Sorry but that is exactly what I meant: the world is a) either deterministic or b) partially deterministic and partially random (for example quantum), and in either of these cases there's no way you can construct free will agents.
Arguably the b) version is not simple physics, but that's what I meant.
There's indeed no free will (basic physics tells us that, can be also experienced directly via LSD or meditation), but to see if there's consciousness just inflict pain onto yourself.
All this being said it's pretty clear why would humans, or any other apes, or any other species, have morals - to reduce the pain/suffering that them and others receive.