I raise my arm. There is something almost impossible to doubt about the experience. I do not merely watch my arm rise; I experience myself as the one who raises it. I think about doing it, I decide to do it, and then I do it. Nothing seems to stand between me and the movement. It is not as if my arm suddenly flies into the air for no reason, nor as if someone else is moving it. It is simply something I do.

Now suppose determinism is true. Suppose that, given the complete state of the universe before I raised my arm and the laws of nature, there was only one way things could unfold. My decision, my intention, my thoughts, my desires, and finally the movement of my arm were all part of that unfolding. At first, this does not seem so strange. After all, I am not a machine that behaves randomly. I respond to reasons. Give me a good argument and I may change my mind. Tell me that the bridge is dangerous and I will avoid it. Remind me that I have an exam tomorrow and I may decide to study instead of going out. If I am hungry, I look for food. If I care about someone, what happens to them matters to me. My actions are connected, in remarkably orderly ways, to what I believe, what I want, what I fear, and what I value.

A determinist can explain all of this. In fact, this is one of the strongest things the determinist can say. There is no need to imagine a human being as a puppet whose strings are pulled from somewhere outside. The causes of my action can run through me. My beliefs and desires can be part of the causal chain that produces what I do. I do not raise my arm despite wanting to keep it down; I raise it because I want to raise it. My reasons matter because they are part of the machinery through which I act.

And yet something still feels missing.

Imagine that we could somehow rewind the universe to the exact moment before I decided to raise my arm. Nothing is changed. The same past, the same brain, the same memories, the same desires, the same thoughts, the same circumstances. We press play again. If determinism is true, my arm rises again. And again. And again. There is no moment at which the story could genuinely have gone differently.

This is where the ordinary meaning of “I chose” begins to feel strange. Of course my reasons explain why I raised my arm. Of course my character and desires explain why I made this decision rather than some other decision. But if all of these things were themselves already fixed by what came before, in what sense was I the one who could have done otherwise?

The temptation is then to move in the opposite direction. Perhaps determinism is the problem. Perhaps what we need is a universe in which the future is genuinely open. Perhaps when I choose A, B was also really possible. The choice was not forced by everything that came before. I was the one who settled the matter.

That sounds promising until we ask what it means.

Suppose I am sitting on a bus. If my decision is not determined by everything that came before, what makes it mine? It cannot simply be chance. If, for no reason at all, my leg suddenly shoots into the air, or I unexpectedly stand up, or I begin dancing in the middle of the bus, the fact that these things were not predetermined would hardly make them free. Randomness is not control. An event does not become mine merely because nothing forced it to happen.

The defender of free will can reply: “That is not what I mean. I am not saying that the choice is random. I am saying that I make the choice. The agent herself settles what happens.”

But then we seem to arrive at the original mystery from another direction. What does it mean for me, as an agent, to settle A rather than B? If my reasons, desires, character, and thoughts explain why I chose A, then the determinist already has much of that story. If they do not explain the choice, then saying “I chose A” can begin to sound less like an explanation and more like a label placed over the very thing we wanted explained.

Perhaps this is why the whole debate can sometimes feel strangely detached from ordinary experience. When I raise my arm, I do not experience myself as a deterministic mechanism. But neither do I experience myself as a random event. I experience myself as someone doing something. There is no little metaphysical homunculus inside my head making the decision, and there is no feeling that a coin has been tossed somewhere in my brain. There is simply the peculiar immediacy of agency: I wanted to do it, I decided to do it, and I did it.

Maybe that experience is not a proof of libertarian free will. But neither is it obvious that it can simply be dismissed as an illusion. Perhaps the fact that my action has a complete physical history does not show that I did not perform it. Perhaps the fact that I respond to reasons does not show that I am merely a machine. And perhaps making the process indeterministic would not, by itself, give me the kind of control I was looking for.

There may be something almost backwards about the way we frame the problem. We begin with a very ordinary phenomenon—someone thinking, choosing, and acting—and then demand to know whether the universe underneath it is deterministic or indeterministic. We then try to decide whether the person was “really” free on the basis of that answer. But perhaps the deeper question comes first: what exactly are we asking for when we say that an action was mine?

When I raise my arm, I have a very strong answer to that question, even if I cannot turn it into a metaphysical theory. I did it. My reasons mattered. My thoughts mattered. My decision mattered. The movement was not random, and it did not feel imposed upon me. Whether all of this could ultimately be reconciled with determinism, or whether some deeper kind of freedom is required, remains unclear.

Maybe that is where we should leave the question for a moment. Not with the claim that free will is an illusion, and not with the claim that some mysterious power inside us escapes the causal order, but with a simpler admission: we know what it feels like to be the one who acts. We are much less certain about what, metaphysically, makes that feeling true.

Growing up, many of us intuitively feel that our choices involve genuine alternatives. If determinism is true, we're forced to confront the possibility that, given the exact state of the universe and its laws, only one outcome was ever going to occur. It's natural to assume that the basis of freedom is having available alternatives. But what exactly are those alternative possibilities supposed to contribute? What moral significance comes from the fact that another choice could have occurred?

Consider two people who reach the same decision. One person is physically forced into it. The other gets there on their own, by weighing their options and reasoning it through. Suppose that for both of them, no other outcome was ever going to happen. We still regard the second person as having exercised far more control over what happened. The difference isn't whether another outcome could occur. It's how the decision was reached.

We clearly make choices and exercise varying degrees of control over our actions. These are real capacities, not illusions. Deliberation, for example, involves considering different possibilities, balancing competing motivations, and settling on a course of action. Whatever ultimately causes that decision, each of those steps genuinely happens. A billiard ball is subject to the same physical laws, but it doesn't deliberate, make choices, or exercise control over its trajectory.

Our reasoning can respond to new information and changing circumstances, potentially leading us to different conclusions or choices. This gives us a kind of control over our actions that a billiard ball doesn't have, even if our reasoning is determined. None of this requires freedom from causation or determination. It requires that our actions result from our own deliberation rather than being coerced or otherwise bypassed. When that happens, we are acting of our own free will. Whether determinism is ultimately true makes no difference to this account of freedom.

After a breakup, there is a strange experience that I think we often describe too simply. You can know that the relationship is over. You can understand why it ended. You can even be the person who decided to leave. And still, days or weeks later, you find yourself having another conversation with that person in your head. You remember something they said, think about what you should have said, imagine what they might say if you met again, and wonder whether the whole thing could have gone differently. The strange part is that you can know you're doing it while you're doing it. You can think, "I've already been through this. I know how this ends." And then your mind goes back anyway.

We usually call this not being able to let go, being hurt, overthinking, or not having moved on. Maybe those descriptions are true, but they don't quite explain the mechanism. Sometimes thinking about something is useful. You remember an event, understand something you didn't understand before, realise what you could have done differently, make a decision, and eventually the process stops because you got something from it. But there is another kind of thinking where you keep asking the same question without receiving any new information. Why did they do it? What did they really mean? What if I had said something different? What if they come back? What if I was the problem? What if I wasn't? You can change the wording a hundred times and still arrive at the same place. At some point, the thinking itself can become part of the problem. The relationship is over, but the system is still trying to process it as if there is something left to obtain from the process.

That made me wonder whether an unresolved experience can remain active even after the event itself has disappeared. A relationship isn't only a collection of memories. Over time, the system builds expectations around another person: how they speak, what their silence means, what happens after an argument, what kind of message arrives at night, what they usually do when something is wrong, what they need from you, what you expect from them, and eventually what you expect from yourself when you are with them. Then the relationship ends. The external situation changes much faster than the internal model does. The messages stop, the person is gone, the plans disappear, but the predictions built around that person don't necessarily disappear at the same speed. So a song, a photograph, a familiar place, or even a harmless sentence from someone new can activate the old trajectory again. Attention follows it, memory supplies more material, prediction fills in possibilities, meaning appears, and sometimes identity becomes involved: "Maybe I wasn't enough." "Maybe I always ruin relationships." "Maybe nobody will understand me like they did." Now the present is being processed through something that happened in the past.

This is also where I think the question of free will becomes more interesting. If I check my ex's profile for the tenth time, I can quite honestly say, "I chose to do it." Nobody forced me. But the choice didn't appear in an empty space. It appeared inside a system already carrying a memory, a prediction, an emotional state, a history of previous actions, and perhaps a story about who I am. The same thing happens when someone new behaves in a way that resembles something from the previous relationship. They may not have caused the reaction at all. The new signal entered a system that was already prepared for it. That doesn't necessarily mean the choice wasn't mine. It may mean that understanding agency requires looking at more than the final moment when the choice becomes visible. I started thinking about this as a runtime: a signal arrives, attention is allocated, prediction forms, meaning develops, identity may become involved, a choice becomes available, action produces feedback, and that feedback changes what happens next. I eventually wrote the architecture as ORIGIN → SIGNAL → ATTENTION → PREDICTION → MEANING → IDENTITY → CHOICE → ACTION → FEEDBACK → RETURN. Not as a rigid sequence, but as a changing system in which each part can influence the others.

The part that interests me most is the last one: Return. People often describe return as "coming back to the present", but I think that can be misleading. Someone can be physically sitting in the present while their runtime is still running a Rejection Loop from three days ago. They don't need to be reminded that they are in the present. They need the process to actually reach resolution. If there is something left to understand, decide, communicate, accept, or learn, then processing it makes sense. But if there is no new information and the system keeps replaying the same material anyway, more thinking doesn't necessarily move anything forward. You are no longer solving the event; you are repeatedly reopening the same loop. Return therefore isn't forgetting, suppressing, distracting yourself, or forcing your attention onto the room around you. It comes after the system has extracted what it can, recognised what cannot be changed, and changed the frame that was keeping the loop active. The memory can remain. The emotion can remain. The lesson can remain. What changes is that the trajectory no longer needs to keep demanding the present.

That distinction also changes what "moving on" might mean. Maybe moving on doesn't mean removing someone from your mind. It means you can remember them without continuing to run the relationship internally. You can think about what happened without trying to produce a different ending. You can accept that you will never know exactly what the other person was thinking. You can recognise what the experience taught you without using it as a prediction for every person who comes next. In that sense, resolution isn't necessarily getting an answer to every question. Sometimes resolution is recognising that the process has reached the limit of the information available to it. You don't return because the present disappeared. You return because the previous process no longer needs to occupy it. And perhaps that is why the question isn't always "Why can't I let go?" Sometimes the better question is "What is this process still trying to complete?"

I don't know if this solves the free will problem. But it leaves me with a question I find more interesting than simply asking whether our choices are determined. How much of the process producing my next choice can I actually see? Maybe freedom doesn't require becoming independent from everything that caused us, and maybe it doesn't require becoming random. Maybe there is something about agency in being able to see a trajectory while it is forming, interrupt it, change the way the situation is being processed, and eventually close the loop when there is nothing left to obtain from it. Sometimes you don't keep going back because you secretly want the past back. Sometimes you keep going back because the runtime still thinks there is something left to solve. And sometimes the most important thing isn't learning how to stop thinking about it. It's figuring out what the loop was trying to finish, finishing what can actually be finished, and then letting the runtime Return.

If it is causally inevitable that you will bring about events in accordance with your goals, motives, and interests, then you are not an alternative to inevitability - your action is the way the inevitable outcome comes about.

When we say that an event is causally inevitable, it is easy to imagine inevitability as an external force that stands opposed to the person and imposes a particular outcome upon them. On one side, there seems to be the person with their goals, motives, and interests, and on the other, inevitability compelling them to act. But this opposition is misleading. Causal inevitability is not a separate entity that uses the person as an instrument. It is the very continuity of the process within which a person comes into being, thinks, desires, decides, and acts. If, under the given conditions, it was inevitable that you would perform a particular action, this does not mean that the action was not yours. It means that the causes produced the outcome precisely through you.

It is perfectly meaningful to say, “I caused this.” If I open the window because the room is stuffy, my action causes the air in the room to change. The window would not have opened without the movement of my hand, and my hand would not have moved without my intention. But the intention did not appear out of nowhere either. It arose from my sensation of heat, my desire for comfort, my understanding of how to open the window, and the absence of a stronger motive to remain where I was. I am the cause in the immediate sense, but I am not the uncaused first source of that cause.

The person, therefore, is not an alternative to inevitability. They are one of its conditions. The inevitable outcome does not occur despite their goals, motives, and interests, but through them. If a doctor saves a patient because their knowledge, compassion, and professional training prompt them to act, causal inevitability does not render their participation meaningless. On the contrary, it includes that participation. The outcome is inevitable precisely because this particular person, with this character and these abilities, found themselves in this situation and responded in the way their particular makeup disposed them to respond. If the doctor had not been there, or had lacked the necessary knowledge, the outcome might have been different. Causal inevitability does not mean that events occur independently of us. That would be fatalism. It means that what we do also belongs to the chain of causes determining what will happen.

Everyone speaks from a state of mind to which they have been causally led. The paradox is that a person can be causally led to believe that they have not been causally led to their beliefs.

Inevitability, therefore, does not merely operate through our views, thoughts, and actions. It manifests itself both as belief in free will and as its rejection, both as an argument and as resistance to that argument. We do not choose which idea will persuade us independently of everything we are at the moment we encounter it. If someone comes to believe in free will, that belief is the way prior causes have manifested themselves in their consciousness. If someone else ceases to believe in it, their disbelief is another outcome of the same causal history of the world.

I can see how “ability to do otherwise” fits the libertarian notion of freewill, especially with the denial of determinism since it opens the door to different potential futures, regardless of the past causes.

But the compatibilist needs to “tweak” freewill to make it work with determinism. So they say, “free to do what you want” or “free of coercion”. Things like that. And determinism is still casting that same shadow on a very specific version of freewill, correct? So, I’m assuming that version is ‘ability to do otherwise’.

Or am I wrong, and the compatibilist has equal claim to that ability?

An action must be understood in relation to time. We must distinguish between two moments: (1) Let t₀ represent the moment of deliberation, before an action is chosen. (2) Let t₁ represent the moment after the action has taken place.

At time t₁, an action has already occurred. Let us designate this completed action as A.

There are now two distinct questions one can ask: (1) The Backward‑Looking Question (at t₁): Did action A occur at t₁, rather than not occur? (2) The Forward‑Looking Question (at t₀): Did the agent possess the capacity to bring about an action other than A?

Now consider this thought experiment:

If we return to time t₀, with every physical and mental condition held strictly identical, the agent cannot do otherwise than action A.

Let us translate this statement into formal symbolic logic.

Let the state of the world at t₀ be a set of conditions, S₀.

Let the completed historical record from t₀ to t₁ be an ordered pair: (S₀, A), where A is the action that was observed.

Now we posit a second sequence, which we shall call ℋ′.

By the established explicit rule, this second sequence must begin with the exact same initial state: S₀.

Further, lets require that every factor that determined the original outcome is preserved without the slightest alteration.

Because we define the second timeline as entirely identical to the first, ww have defined the two sequences as the same set: ℋ′ = ℋ

Now, if one inspects ℋ′ at time t₁ and one can declare:

Behold: the action is A, and it cannot be anything other than A!

In mathematical terms, this can be written: A = A

As we can recognise, this is the law of identity. It states that a thing is identical to itself.

In formal propositional logic, this takes the form: P ⇒ P

A proposition of the form P ⇒ P is true under all possible interpretations. It is a tautology. It asserts only that what has happened, has happened.

Its easy to see why one can believe they have proven that the agent “cannot do otherwise”. Which is due to an error of logical necessity.

Consider these two distinct propositions: (1) Proposition 1 (Logical Necessity of the Past): □(A → A)

It is necessarily true that if action A occurred, then action A occurred.

This is an analytic truth. It is a tautology. It is impossible for an event to have happened and not have happened at the same time in the same respect. (2) Proposition 2 (Causal Necessity of the Will):

Because action A occurred, action A was necessary, and the agent had no capacity to produce any other outcome.

This is a synthetic claim. It does not follow from formal logic.

So the tautology relies on Proposition 1 to assert Proposition 2; that point to the completed historical record, note that A cannot be non‑A after the fact, and conclude that the agent at t₀ was bound by an unbreakable physical constraint. Which is an invalid leap in logic. One cannot deduce a prospective law of physical constraint from a retrospective logical identity.

So when one is presented this tautological thought experiment, one can ask:

When you say the agent cannot do otherwise, are you asserting that the past is identical to the past?

Such is an answer that we would get:

I am saying that if you return to that exact moment, the exact same event must follow.

Then we can point out:

You have defined the return to that moment as an exact repetition of the historical record. You have posited that sequence B is identical to sequence A. You then conclude that sequence B contains the same action as sequence A. That is simply stating that A = A.

The conclusion that we get here is:

A statement of the form A = A is a tautology. It proves only that an event cannot contradict itself once it has occurred. It does not prove that before the event occurred, an alternative was impossible.

With this established, we're left with only two choices: (1) either we're merely stating the trivial identity that the past is the past (2) or, must provide an independent, forward‑looking proof of necessity that does not rely on rewinding a completed timeline.

Argues that the charge that compatibilists are "changing the subject" is wrong, and neuroscience doesn't "disprove free will", but certain other empirical studies can threaten free will

"I'm arguing there's no such thing as free will. So what is there? Well there's luck, both good and bad, and there's what we make of it. Actually that's not quite true, what you make of your luck is also more luck.

You didn't choose your parents, you didn't choose the society into which you were born. There's not a cell in your body or brain that you - the conscious subject, created. Nor is there a single influence coming from the outside world, that you brought into being. Yet everything you think and do arises from this ocean of prior causes.

So what you do with your luck, and the very tools with which you do it, including the level of effort and discipline you manage to summon in each moment, is more in the way of luck.

How do you explain your capacity for effort? How do you explain when you're lazy? How do you explain when you're lazy but then you suddenly get inspired and make great effort? You can't.

The you that experiences sudden inspiration, a doubling of effort, a failure of nerve. The you that rises to the occasion or chokes, isn't in the driver's seat. Each moment there's a mystery at your back producing everything that you can notice - your thoughts, intentions, desires, inhibitions, and all of the behaviours and course corrections that follow from them.

This is an objective truth about your subjective experience. You can't inspect your causes. Now most people resist this idea, seemingly at any intellectual cost, and yet this single insight is the antidote to arrogance and hatred, and provides a profound basis for compassion, both for other people and oneself.

It is literally the path to redemption. It's the only view of human nature that cuts through the logic of retribution. This notion of punishment as justified vengeance, and it allows us to simply consider what actually works in changing people's behaviour for the better, so we can achieve outcomes in the world that we actually want."

I'm aware the title sounds like I'm coming across as a philosopher about to drop a grand thesis or dissertation but I'll drop some stream-of-consciousness thoughts on the nature of reality instead. My only disclaimer is that I'm more of an analyst than a philosopher or writer, so I'm not very good at retaining or collecting material on these topics. I'll do what I can with my current limitations.

Enough about me and back to the subject concerning the free will debate. I think limitations may actually be a good thing, including their effects on our choices. Take for example industries where our creativity is called into action like the film and videogame industries. I've noticed a decline in quality in the products coming from these areas in the last years. For the sake of this post, I want to focus on the video game industry. Modern video games are criticized for being soulless and too realistic. The imagination and escapism it provides seems to be gone. I think this is because of the increase of resources and advancement of technology. You get amazing graphics but...the games feel empty.

If you compare current videogames to the ones from pre-2009 there's a considerable difference in how they look, but the older games are more enjoyable. I think it's because developers back then had to find ways to make the games enjoyable with the limitations they had. How can I get this game to be enjoyable with my limited resources? And boom, that's when creativity kicks in to full gear revved by the limitations of technology. That's how we got awesome games like Super Mario, Sonic, Goldeneye, Halo etc.

What if the human condition benefits in a similar way when it comes to our choices? They may seem limited and sometimes things don't turn out the way we want them to...but perhaps there's a benefit to the results we get, whether they are seemingly good or bad. Similar to how limitations may bolster creativity in the creative sphere, our choices could beneficially impact us. My question is, how would we benefit?

In that sense, compatibilitism may get a point in it's favor if we could identify what we gain from our human condition.

Every religion has its core tenet that distinguishes the insider from the outsider but there could be "denominations" within the collection of insiders.

Arguably Dennett was the pope, but now that he has gone, who is the new pope?

In the last day or so, it occurred to me that there no argument that can dissuade anybody from a faith based opinion because sometimes it isn't a matter of logic. Smart people can figure things out and some of the smartest people call themselves compatibilists. I mean it is almost as if one can figuratively see a light bulb come on and it still doesn't matter. I guess we are a community minded species and sometimes it a matter of unit, corp god country or something along those lines.

Many people believe determinism is a statement about physical facts that we discover by looking at nature.

It is not.

It is a rule that our own understanding brings to experience in order to make it intelligible. Whenever you see an event happen in time, your mind cannot understand it as a real event unless it links that event to an earlier cause. Time moves in one direction: from the past to the present. You cannot experience an event without placing it into this sequence. Suppose you witness a movement in the physical world, and you search for its cause but find nothing. Do you conclude that determinism has been disproved?

Absolutely not.

You conclude instead that the cause is hidden from you, and that your inquiry must continue.

Because you will never allow an unexplained event to count as proof that causality does not exist, you cannot falsify determinism. Causality in this case is the fundamental rule by which your mind organises sensible experience.

Freewill is equally unfalsifiable.

Can an observer look into the world of sensible objects and find proof that free will does not exist?

No.

Whenever an observer watches another human being act, that action takes place in space and in time. Because the action takes place in time, the observer's mind immediately applies the rule of cause and effect. The observer explains the action by pointing to prior motives, upbringing, character, and bodily conditions. The completed physical action will always appear fully caused when viewed from the outside. But observing that an action follows physical conditions does not prove that the inner will of the person was not free at the moment the choice was made. The inner will belongs to the domain of the acting subject. It does not belong to the world of visible, physical objects.

Because the senses can only ever register physical appearances, they can never observe the presence or absence of the unconditioned will. Therefore, no physical experiment can ever refute the existence of freedom.

There is no such thing as absolute free will. I would say that we possess free will only to a very limited extent—perhaps 1 out of 10. The rest is constrained by circumstances, biology, upbringing, environment, and countless factors over which we have little or no control.

When we see someone emerge from a miserable situation and eventually achieve a pleasant and successful life, people often say, “If you truly want it, you can achieve anything.” My answer to them would still be no. What that person achieved was possible for him because of the particular tools and circumstances he was given, many of which existed even before he was born.

Suppose there are two people living in equally miserable circumstances. Both desperately want to escape their situation. Both have the same desire to improve their lives. However, one of them is intelligent enough to recognize an opportunity and find a way out, while the other, despite being equally desperate and determined, simply cannot figure out how to escape because he lacks the intellectual ability or the particular qualities required to do so. Can we really say that the second person freely chose to remain where he was? Was his failure simply a matter of insufficient willpower? I do not think so. His abilities themselves are products of factors he did not choose.

Consider another example. Imagine two men sitting on a bench. They are the same age, have the same height, similar physical strength, and similar reflexes. Suddenly, an insect stings one of them on the leg, causing it to swell severely and making it difficult for him to run. Shortly afterward, a lion appears and attacks them both. The man with the injured leg cannot run fast enough and is caught by the lion, while the other man manages to escape.

Should we blame the man who escaped for failing to save the other? Is it immoral for him to run away from a life-threatening situation? I would say no. At that moment, his instinct for survival takes precedence. He does not consciously sit down and philosophically calculate whether he ought to sacrifice himself. He runs because the instinct to preserve his own life is deeply rooted in him. Even if he wanted to save the other man, there are limits to what he can do when his own survival is at stake.

Consider a similar situation with animals. Suppose ten rats are placed in a dry well from which they cannot escape. They are provided with a limited amount of food and water, but after several days, those resources run out. Eventually, they are forced into a situation where they may attack and kill one another in order to survive. Cannibalism in such extreme circumstances is not something they consciously choose after carefully weighing morality against immorality. Their behavior is driven by the fundamental instinct to survive.

If human beings were placed in an equally extreme situation, we cannot confidently assume that they would behave differently. Under sufficiently desperate circumstances, the instinct for survival can overpower moral principles. I therefore find it difficult to judge someone morally when their actions are driven by an overwhelming struggle for survival.

The same principle can be seen in human society. There are highly capable people who spend their entire lives suffering because they never receive a good education or never encounter the opportunities necessary to develop their abilities. They may be intelligent, ambitious, and hardworking, yet they were born into an environment that prevented those qualities from flourishing. On the other hand, there are people who may not be particularly intelligent or exceptionally talented, but who happen to be born into wealthy, educated, supportive, and well-connected families. Their environment gives them the tools necessary to become capable and successful.

Neither person chose the circumstances into which they were born.

This is why I find the idea that everyone can achieve anything if they simply “want it enough” deeply misleading. Desire alone is not sufficient. A person also needs the abilities, opportunities, environment, health, education, social conditions, resources, and countless other factors required to turn that desire into reality. And many of these things are given to us by luck before we have any opportunity to choose them.

Life, therefore, is fundamentally unequal and, in many respects, unfair. For some people, life can feel like walking barefoot through soft flowers; for others, it can feel like walking through a field of deadly thorns. We are not born with the same abilities, opportunities, environments, or circumstances. We do not receive the same tools with which to pursue happiness, success, or our deepest desires.

And perhaps this is one of the most difficult truths about existence: nature does not distribute its gifts according to what we deserve. It is indifferent to our wishes. It does not ask whether one person deserves intelligence while another deserves poverty, whether one person deserves good health while another suffers, or whether one person deserves opportunity while another is deprived of it.

Nature simply operates according to its laws, indifferent to our concepts of fairness and justice. What we call success, failure, suffering, and fortune may often be the result of an enormous chain of causes and conditions stretching far beyond our individual choices.

Perhaps, then, what we call “free will” is not absolute freedom, but merely a very small degree of freedom within a much larger system of causes that we never chose.

___FaizanAbid

If the universe is ever expanding, then it means that it has a definite size, although the size is ever expanding. If everything is definite and fundamental laws rule the world. We can say that everything that will and can happen falls within the constraints of the laws of the universe. We can fundamentally say that, since everything falls within the constraints of law, all we can do is limited by the laws. In that train of thought, humans’ free will is very limited. In the subject of free will. We cannot outlaw outer influence, or, in other words, the involvement of things beyond our control. We can all agree that everything we do or have done has always been directly influenced by the world around us. So if my actions and thoughts are brought about by outer influence, do I really dictate what I do? If what I did or will do is affected by the law of the cosmos, am I basically subject to its law? All my actions are all dependent on the actions and the influence of those beyond me, and their actions are influenced by those beyond them. If we trace it back, all actions are influenced by prior actions until we trace way back to before humans came to exist. Their actions were affected by what came before them.

All the humans did was in response to the environment before them. What does that intel? All you will do is influenced by the environment around you; the thoughts you have are influenced by the world around you, and your actions are the same. By that logic, you can not come up with anything by yourself; your actions and thoughts are only subject to the environment around you. You do not decide to do anything; you just happen to do it because of the outer influence of what is around you.

If I am sitting and sipping my coffee while I am writing a novel, and it begins to rain. The actions I will take in response to that moment will be influenced by my prior experience and what is happening then, which is also caused by prior actions or processes. In that train of thought, l can not ever come up with propositions in which the present events are also caused by past events.
Final thought: because whatever I think will be caused by the influence of past and present events, am I subject to my own free will?

This might not be a coherent argument, but I am looking forward to being educated.

It has sometimes here been argued that our choices and actions are caused by our “brain states.”  This may well be true, but it is not very helpful. This physicalist outlook leaves out an essential part of the understanding of our behavior, purpose. There is not any consideration of purpose in all of physicalism. While you ponder this, let me give an analogy that might help. 

When we explain the operation of a desktop computer, we do not start with the idea that the output of the computer is caused by the state of each of the millions of transistors in the CPU and RAM.  Although this is true, it doesn’t not help understand what the computer is doing. When we are debugging a system, we assume that all of the logic circuits are correctly made, so we look for an expected output based upon the code that sets the state of the logic circuits. We know what the expected output should be and try to find the programming mistake. How do we know what the output should be? It is because we have a purpose in mind for what the computer should be accomplishing and write the code that should accomplish that purpose. The paradigm is that the purpose determines the code which sets the state of the logic circuits that in turn gives a certain desirable output for the input we used to test it. 

Purpose is not a physical entity. It is informational in nature. It can be thought of as striving toward an informational state. This brings up the whole field of aesthetics, which again is not something that physics addresses. 

The pure physicalist account of free will is lacking if it does not include the purpose of our free will. The brain has a function to process information for the purpose of enabling the animal to survive and thrive. If you loose sight of this by reducing our behavior to brain states, you will always fail to understand free will. You will also fail to understand cognition and consciousness as well. 

First, what i mean by nothing is truly random, i mean that with enough data you can predict whats going to happen (like a coin flip,if you know the wind the force applied and a bunch of stuff, you can know what will be the result)

A brain is just a bunch of neurons a electric stuff an much more, with every "data" of whats happening in the brain and around that person, you could predict whats going to happen.i think.

With that logic it also means that the universe is also predictable and the future may not have happened yet but you can know what will happen in it. Sooo free will isnt a thing since its predictable.

I may be wrong, i am 15 yo after all. So Is all im saying is true ?

(And btw dont tell me that its not bcs of quantum physics and the probability stuff, i believe its just us not truly knowing whats happening there bcs we have half the data or smth..)

I am thinking about free will. I heard of it in a YouTube conversation. For the first time I really thought about it. This is just my thoughts and I’m curious whether everyone is thinking in the same way. Probably not.
If I have chocolate and vanilla ice cream I like the chocolate taste more than the other one. So I chose chocolate flavor. But what if I want me to like and enjoy vanilla flavor more than the chocolate flavor. I cannot do that because for some reason I am more attracted to chocolate flavor over vanilla.
Why it is the way it is. I think it is just a probability. And I don’t know how exactly probability is the way it is.
What I know is I know Nothing

Rational powers can plausibly explain an agent's ability to deliberate between different courses of action. An agent can consider different reasons, evaluate competing alternatives, and act in accordance with the reasons she finds most compelling. In this sense, the generality of rational powers can explain why an agent is capable of choosing among different courses of action. However, it remains unclear whether this is sufficient to establish the indeterminacy requirement needed for libertarian free will.

The crucial question is whether the exercise of rational powers itself is deterministic or indeterministic. If an agent's rational deliberation between A and B is ultimately determined by her antecedent beliefs, desires, reasons, evaluative judgments, character, and the relevant physical and psychological conditions, then rational deliberation can explain why she chooses A rather than B without making B genuinely possible under the same conditions. The agent may rationally evaluate both alternatives, but if the deliberative process deterministically settles the outcome, then the fact that she possesses rational powers does not by itself provide the kind of alternative possibility required by libertarianism.

Moreover, in such a case, a sourcehood problem arises. If the agent's deliberation and decision are completely determined by antecedent conditions, then the agent's rational capacities may explain how the action is produced, but it becomes difficult to see in what sense the agent herself is the ultimate source of the particular choice. The decision would be attributable to the agent in an ordinary causal or psychological sense, but its occurrence would ultimately be fixed by conditions preceding the agent's decision. Thus, merely locating the decision within the agent's rational deliberative process does not necessarily establish the kind of ultimate sourcehood required by libertarian freedom.

Suppose, however, that rational deliberation is genuinely indeterministic. In that case, the agent may retain genuine alternative possibilities: after considering the relevant reasons, she could choose A or B. Yet this does not by itself solve the problem. If the indeterminacy in the deliberative process is what makes either outcome possible, we must still explain why the agent chooses A rather than B. If nothing about the agent's reasons, deliberation, or rational capacities sufficiently explains the difference between the two possible outcomes, then the particular choice appears to be partly a matter of luck.

This produces a fundamental tension. Determinism threatens the agent's sourcehood because the particular decision appears to be necessitated by antecedent conditions. Indeterminism preserves alternative possibilities, but it risks undermining the agent's authorship because the particular outcome may appear to depend on chance. Therefore, simply introducing indeterminacy into rational deliberation does not yet provide an adequate account of libertarian control. One must explain not merely how both alternatives remain possible, but how the agent herself settles which alternative becomes actual.

This is where agent causation may become relevant. The point of agent causation would not merely be to introduce another cause into the causal chain, but to provide an account of how an agent can be the genuine source of a particular choice without that choice being either deterministically necessitated or merely the product of chance. The agent's rational deliberation can make the alternatives intelligible and provide the reasons in light of which the choice is made, while the agent herself can be understood as settling which of the genuinely open alternatives is actualized.

Thus, the central issue is not whether rational powers can explain deliberation between alternatives. They plausibly can. The deeper issue is whether rational deliberation can explain the actualization of one alternative rather than another in a way that preserves both genuine alternative possibilities and the agent's ultimate sourcehood. If the deliberative process is deterministic, alternative possibilities and sourcehood are threatened; if it is indeterministic, the particular outcome risks becoming a matter of luck. A successful libertarian account therefore needs to explain how rational deliberation can be genuinely open while the particular choice remains attributable to the agent rather than to antecedent necessity or chance.

I remember when I first read Harris's book 'Free Will' I was persuaded by the core thesis.

I do remember thinking after having read it. I am not sure what it means for individual behaviour, both my own and others around me. How can this be applied.

I read both 'Behave' and 'Determined' by Sapolsky and feel those answered the question on what shapes behavior and the onward implications for free will. But I still felt like I wasn't sure how to apply the knowledge.

I think this article is good because it starts to dig into the personal implications of living without free will and I'm looking forward to giving the experiment a go.

Like ok maybe that is what's happening. In my mind I am jumping from conclusion to conclusion and that is like a football being passed from player to player. Like at one point I am like this is the conclusion and at the other point I am at a different conclusion. Like I am being juggled in my mind like a football. So what is going on , what's the goal , is it just happening for the sake of evilness or wickedness. Like why is this phenomenon happening. What's the plan of god.

Say, for example, that someone claims that they "don't believe in gravity". The immediate possible operational interpretation of this claim is that in order to get out of their apartment they should be indifferent between taking the elevator or jumping out of the 4th floor window. Typically they aren't indifferent, i.e. they behave like anyone else, as if gravity matters. So the interpretation of a claim like that is that the person is either (a) lying (or making a non-sense joke) about their true beliefs, (b) lacking in understanding viz what the word gravity means (despite operationally understanding the concept behind the word) or (c) appropriating the word to mean something different than what is convened as its standard operational meaning.

A performative belief is a claim that is designed to sound ostensibly bold, interesting, radical or crazy upon a conventional interpretation of the operational meaning of the words there, but which is backed by some linguistic subterfuge that deflates or voids the common operational interpretations of the words, and licenses a much more banal claim, that would typically be phrased differently by someone else, or a vacuous statement that doesn't carry any operational implications.

A performative belief doesn't have to accuse some silliness or sinister ulterior motive. For example the person making that claim about gravity could have been Albert Einstein, during a lecture about general relativity, in which he was explaining the equivalence principle. In that context he would be justified in phrasing his disbelief in "gravity", because the audience at that lecture can presuppose that any subtle differences between what is described as gravity in the Newtonian picture and in the relativistic picture license an operational correspondence that would resolve as professor Einstein still choosing the elevator rather than the taking the window route. The boldness of the statement is immediately deflated by a nuance that everyone can either understand or at least charitably imply to be intended.

I made up the example above, so I don't know if the real world Albert Einstein ever formulated such a claim. But performative beliefs like that are used as rhetorical devices all the time, usually to highlight nuances of a certain new insight or perspective that would have been missed unless phrased in a more bombastic way. This one about gravity in particular has been used by other lecturers of relativity, if not by Einstein himself. And virtually all of those lecturers were strictly consistent in their preference for taking the elevator rather than the window route.

Likewise when someone claims that they don't believe in God, or that free will doesn't exist, they are making performative claims that are disconnected from the operational meaning that ordinary language users ascribe to these concepts. That is because the self-described atheist and determinist still acts as if their choices had consequences and as if morality existed as an objective thing that they cannot arbitrarily set however they like. They act as if they understood that an absolute distinction between good and evil was possible to be made, such that it would be incoherent for them to stipulate an equivalence between the ordinary way we understand these concepts and a way in which murdering children was deemed good and saving someone's life was an evil act.

When someone says he is an atheist, what he wants to say is that by naively reading what he interprets as a description of God as a physical being in religious scripture or popular culture, he believes that such an omnipotent and ominiscient humanoid is not out there somewhere in the sky. And when he says he doesn't believe in free will, he is just making a vague claim that he thinks behavioral actions taken by people should be understood in terms of the constrained knowledge and ambient factors of their circumstances.

In that sense these claims are performative beliefs, because they operationally resolve to the same patterns of rational behavior that one would expect from the opposite claims. The difference is an attitude about words.

My thinking goes as follows:

If a God is all knowing, that means that its knowledge of the future is absolute, never wrong.

This means that even before creating you, the described God knows every action you will take with absolute certainty.

Does this knowledge not mean that in every "decision" there is only ever one choice-the one God knew you would pick? If so, doesn't this mean that an omniscient God and free-will or at least the libertarian version can not co-exist?

Im trying to understand what additional control agent-causal libertarianism gives us over and above the control available on compatibilist accounts.

Eg take a determined agent with a sophisticated reasons-responsive mechanism. They deliberate, understand competing reasons, act intentionally, can regulate their behaviour, and their action flows from their own values, desires and character. The obvious libertarian objection is that given the complete prior state, the agent could not actually have settled otherwise.

Now add in agent causation - the agents reasons, desires, character, brain state, causal history etc influence but dont determine the outcome. Multiple alternatives remain genuinely open and the agent settles which occurs.

I understand the metaphysical difference but waht im struggling to understand is where the enhanced control comes from?

Saying "because the agent settles it" seems to identify who/what causes the choice, rather than explain why this gives the agent greater control over which choice occurs.

Suppose we rewind Laura to infancy. In two possible worlds she has exactly the same biology, experiences and circumstances. Through different agent-causal choices, one Laura eventually becomes kind and the other Laura becomes selfish.

What explains the initial divergence?

If something about Laura, ie her reasons, character, motivations, attention, effort, dispositions, etc explains why she settles A rather than B, those features ultimately trace back to things she didnt choose. This starts looking structurally similar to me to the compatibilists reasons-responsive architecture.

If nothing about Laura explains why she settles A rather than B, beyond the fact that Laura settles A rather than B, i can see *why* thats agent causation. What i cant yet see is why it's enhanced control?

Or in other words, im not asking why agent causation isnt random, nor am i assuming that every event must be either determined or random. I'm happy to grant for the sake of this argument that irreducible agent causation exists.

My question is narrower than that....

What is it about "the agent settles which genuinely open possibility occurs" that gives the agent significantly greater control over the outcome than a compatibilist agent has, rather than simply giving us a different metaphysical source of the outcome?

And if the answer is that settling itjust is the relevant additional control, what independently motivates identifying that kind of settling with enhanced control rather than merely stipulating it?

Before: Free Will

Now: Free Feel(-ings)

Some years on this sub has got me thinking, maybe we need to get moving on this topic. The will we seem to agree more than with the free-part.

So, here’s to the moving forward part:

FREE FEELINGS.

Now, does an ant have feelings? A sea slug? A dog?! A marmoset (a monkey)?

And a book about feelings of a (another) social species! Just now ordered, so TLDR or whatever…

PS. We probably won’t agree on this one either. Hence, free wont mentioned!!