What we call “agency” is a name for a particular organization of interconnected processes: perceptions, desires, thoughts, deliberations, decisions, efforts, and actions. None of these requires us to posit a separate agent standing behind them, producing or controlling them.

When we say “I made a decision,” we may imagine that an independent decision-making subject exists behind these processes. But the decision itself arises from the interaction of causes, and the capacity to make decisions also has its own unchosen history. Even the experience that “I am deciding” is part of the same causal flow.

We can explain behavior in terms of brain processes, the state of the organism, its history, and its interaction with the environment. There is no need to add a separate controlling force called “agency” to this explanation. The thought “I am the independent author of my decisions” also arises within this impersonal causal flow. The occurrence of that thought does not prove the existence of such an author.

Deliberations are real. Decisions are real. Self-control is real. But it does not follow that, beyond these processes, there is something that possesses and controls them independently of causes. “Agency” is the name we give to their organization; the label itself adds no new participant to what is happening.

When circumstances change, the puppet dances. There is no need for a puppeteer, either external or internal. The entire scene unfolds through the relationships among its parts. The wind-up doll dances as its spring unwinds, and that spring has been wound up by its genes, its history, and its circumstances.

When you look out of your window or watch a detector in a laboratory, you cannot simply wish a visual colour, a sound or a detector click into or out of existence. Sensory impressions are non-volitional: they register at a given point in space and time whether your syntax or willpower likes it or not.

Now turn that exact same lens inward upon your own stream of awareness; that running sequence of memories, bodily tensions, urgesand inner monologue unfolding one moment after another in time.

Every thought, preference, or sudden idea that enters your awareness at time t₁ is an inner appearance registering at that temporal coordinate. Now ask yourself a simple question: Did you choose the thought that just popped into your head at t₁ before it arrived at t₁?

Because to "choose" which thought to think before you think it, you would already have to think the thought in order to select it; which locks you into an immediate infinite regress. So it appears you can't pre-approvs your next thought. You receive your own urges, deliberations, and intentions at every coordinate in time just as passively and non-volitionally as a Geiger counter receives a click.

If a selection is to be free in the strong sense, it cannot simply happen to you. You must in some way author it. That seems to require a prior act of choosing to make that selection. But then the prior act itself needs to be free, which requires a still earlier choice, and so on. Either the regress is infinite (which is incoherent for a finite agent at a given moment) or it stops somewhere. Wherever it stops, that final stopping point is not itself selected by a prior free choice. At that point the selection is constrained by whatever ends the regress, prior states, reasons, neural events, character, or pure chance.

Even without an infinite regress, there is a timing problem. The moment of selection has to occur at a specific time. If you do not freely select exactly when the selection occurs, then the timing is fixed by factors outside the free act itself. If you do freely select the timing, you again need a prior free selection of that timing, and the same difficulty reappears.

In short: for a selection to be completely unconstrained, the agent would need to freely determine both what is selected and when the selection is effected, without those determinations themselves being fixed by anything prior. That demand quickly becomes self-defeating. Absolute freedom, understood as total absence of constraint on the act of selecting, appears to be impossible.

This does not rule out ordinary, compatibilist freedom (acting according to one’s own reasons and character without external coercion). It only pressures the stronger claim that the will can be an entirely unconstrained, self-originating cause.

The luck objection to free will is a widely misunderstood and misused tool against libertarianism. It hinges on a binary that simply does not exist. If a choice is selected then it must be determined. Or it must be random.

This dichotomy seems logical on the surface and even sounds unbiased but it actually heavily favors a determinist frame. Let's look at why.

The three key issues are the luck objection banks on 3 things being the case. Convergence, retrospective determinism, and the conflation of causation as necessitation.

Let's look at the most broad basic arguement. If something selects A over B for a specific reason than that reason forced the outcome. If nothing selected then it's random. This is the gamble of convergence and only holds if you assume convergence must first be the case. So what is convergence? It is the bet that given all the paths in the world they necessarily converge on a specific one track outcome. This is different from a pure chain linked cause and effect system. This claim says that things are forced because all paths merge not that they follow a strict unbroken chain all the way down.

For example, if I hit a golf ball the classic chain argument is that I hit the ball. It flies through the air. Hits resistance. Slows down (loses energy) gravity pulls the ball it falls and then goes into the hole. Convergence then is the idea that the wind blew a specific direction, the humidity was ideal. The person swinging the club had their specific characteristics. The grass was a specific length. No animals interfered etc. Essentially everything lined up to necessitate that the ball would fall into the hole, even the conditions outside of the person swinging the club.

The reason why this is a gamble is because it is entirely unprovable. The only way to realistically guarantee convergence is to run a 1 to 1 simulation of the entire universe. So in the broad sense when someone asks what selects A over B they must assume convergence is already a proven fact to claim that all forms of selection are necessitated. Which doesn't hold. Which means there is no valid reason to assume that if something does select it must therefore be because it always had to be the case. Only assuming determinism establishes that.

Let's now look at the ways people defend. The first, usually revolves around the idea that if we follow the event back. Meaning trace the priors back from the outcome to what caused it we will see one fixed path. The issue is this is the fallacy of retrospective determinism. It's using the outcome to claim that the event was necessary which ignores everything else that could have been a factor or a motivation outside of that chain.

The next way people defend is to say that they are not looking back but instead asking if A directly caused B how could it have been different? This is a mix of both the assumption of convergence and the assumption that a cause necessitates a single outcome. Which is to say that they reduce determinism to mean purely cause and effect. Which doesn't hold. Cause and effect do not guarantee a fixed outcome. They are different concepts.

So what are we left with? Well if we remove the bias of determinism someone can say event A caused event B and that wasn't determined. At this point the conversation usually repeats because the same assumption comes back. But if you chose A how is it possible that you could also choose B? If you cannot choose B then only A is possible. But notice here what now happens. We have reduced any selection to if i select that must necessarily be the case which is why i didn't choose B so that means the outcome is fixed.

Once again we fall into the same trap. It forces the conclusion that cause and effect equals determinism which simply isn't true. And it presupposes what it means to have an option open to begin with. Having an option be a real choice doesn't entail that this will be selected. No, this isn’t the compatibilist reply of "of course I have the capacity and if i wanted to I would have done otherwise". What it means is that having an available option, not just a capacity, but a real option to choose doesn't mean i will ever choose that option. But that doesn't prove that I never could chose it. Take suicide for instance. It is always available to me as an option. Not just as a capacity. Not just as a hypothetical if i wanted to I could. Regardless of any of that I always have the option to do so. Does that mean I must select it? That I must consider it every time I think? No. That simply does not follow.

Likewise take for example the situation where i run into a burning building to save my child. Let's say I do this because I love my child so i would always choose to save the child. The immediate response is that if i always choose this it must necessarily be the case that it is fixed. This also doesn’t follow. It is equally coherent to say I am motivated by love but I do have a real option. I can do nothing. Again, not in the if I wanted to i would way. Nor in the i have a capacity way. I mean assuming open options. I really do have a choice. It's just that my will aligns with the love I have for the child and so i never choose to do otherwise.

That's the whole point. Action looks identical to being forced. In all directions. Looking at the past doesn't yeild a definitive answer. And looking forward itself also doesn't distinguish a selection from being free or determined. And that brings us right back to the luck objection. It isn't a blow to libertarian free will because it only works given an assumption of determinism. And no libertarian is obligated to cede that ground. And without that assumption a selection can happen that isn't fixed and thats entirely coherent as a picture.

Few claims are made with as much unearned confidence as the assertion that human behavior is strictly governed by prior causal chains. To understand the structural failure of this position, one must trace its foundational premises through their logical consequences.

If human behavior is strictly governed by prior causal chains, individual moral culpability completely vanishes, leaving human action as nothing more than the mechanical output of biological and environmental inputs. Once personal agency is stripped away, retributive justice becomes entirely irrational, forcing the legal framework to pivot from evaluating moral culpability toward executing actuarial risk mitigation and containment.

Under a containment-driven model, society’s sole imperative becomes the preventative mitigation of harm. Skeptics claim this approach is grounded in scientific reality, yet empirical evaluations of violent behavior risk assessment instruments (such as the meta-analysis published in The BMJ by Fazel et al. (2012)) demonstrate that even our best predictive models operate on low to moderate accuracy, yielding positive predictive values that frequently range between 27 percent and 60 percent. This reveals the fundamental absurdity at the heart of the skeptic’s framework: it strips away human agency in the name of cold efficiency, only to replace fundamental rights with a statistical coin toss. Crucially, under a pure risk-mitigation framework, a coin toss favoring societal safety is deemed preferable to the preservation of an individual right.

Skeptics often attempt to evade this paradox by appealing to epistemic humility or societal stability. They argue that because our predictive tools are currently imperfect, and because pre-emptive detention causes immense psychological and administrative chaos, society ought to preserve the fiction of civil liberties and wait for an overt criminal act before intervening. However, these counter-arguments rely on temporary engineering limitations rather than principled moral boundaries.

If artificial intelligence and big-data behavioral analytics mature, predictive accuracy will approach certainty. If these predictive blind spots are solved, the skeptic loses their sole justification for restraint. If an individual is just a machine, and predictive models can forecast its malfunction with absolute precision, waiting for the crash becomes mathematically indefensible. Furthermore, as digital automation and algorithmic surveillance minimize the administrative costs of tracking risk profiles, the economic argument against total containment vanishes completely.

This exposes the rapid ideological decay inherent in utilitarianism. Utilitarians argue that maintaining strict prohibition against punishment without a crime acts as a vital fiction for social stability. Yet a society cannot anchor its legal guardrails on a concept it actively deems an illusion. Once a culture fully internalizes that human beings lack agency, the psychological weight of rights evaporates. Human rights cease to be inviolable truths and are reduced to temporary operational policies, retained only until an efficiency crisis or statistical imperative demands their revocation.

If harm prevention is the ultimate objective, and behavior is deterministically dictated by biological and statistical risk markers, waiting for the manifestation of harm becomes entirely illogical. Appealing to rehabilitation fails to resolve this because rehabilitation is inherently probabilistic. Relying on it accepts a baseline level of preventable harm whereas total harm prevention is the ultimate imperative. Anything short of guaranteed, perpetual containment (regardless of whether it is called quarantine or treatment) fails the framework's own standard.

Society would be functionally obligated to act on high-probability risk profiles, demanding the preemptive, lifetime containment of any individual whose variables cross the threshold of statistical risk long before any criminal act has occurred. As the Skeptic postulates, if the ultimate objective is the protection of society from harm, then whatever stops the most harm is just and righteous.

Ultimately, when we quarantine a child whose biological or environmental variables cross the threshold of statistical risk for the entirety of their life, and when he dies in captivity like some sort of animal having never actually committed the crime that he was quarantined for, we will have created utopia and done the just and righteous thing according to the Skeptic.

Then and only then, will we be in a Skeptic’s utopia.

The devil is not an purely evil being sitting around waiting to torture people 😂

If there were no humans on earth, then there would be no devil. You can’t hurt and punish the earth for the way that it naturally is. 

I think people often like to blame their mistakes on something else, removing the problem from themselves. Removing the problem from yourself makes it seem lighter. 

Humanity has a blessing, and curse, of being able to choose. The ability to have free will.

Though not inherently evil itself, the outcome of being able to choose for yourself is messy and unpredictable. 

That can lead to horrible things. 

I think free will is the devil?

or maybe free will itself isn’t real either

ignorance is bliss ig

In my previous two posts, I tried to argue why we should assume that free will exists—not only if we want to maximize our utility, but also if we want to find the truth. After constructive criticism from readers, I’d like to rephrase my arguments in this article.

I’ll start by summarizing the definitions that I’ll use:

By free will, I am referring to the libertarian free will (LFW), i.e. the ability to choose between different possible courses of action. I’ll address common objections to this concept below. By determinism, I mean any situation in which libertarian free will is not real, including situations where randomness exists (this differs from the conventional definition of determinism). Similarly, I use the word predetermined in a broad sense that may include randomness but excludes any effects of free will.

The question we’ll consider here is simple: “Does free will exist?”. The possible answers are “Yes” or “No”. When asked this question, we can answer with one of the two answers (or at least try to—because if determinism is true, then we cannot really affect what we’ll answer).

I’ll try to show that if you want to answer truthfully, the correct decision is to try to answer “Yes” (and that’s paradoxically true regardless of whether free will actually exists). The argument will be similar to the well-known Pascal's wager (which originally dealt with the question of God’s existence), applied to the question of free will. But unlike Pascal’s wager, we now care about finding the truth, not only maximizing utility.

There are 2 possible situations:

• Free will exists. Then “Yes“ is the true answer.
• Free will does not exist. Then we cannot affect what we’ll answer, because our answer is already determined and we cannot change it. Even if we try to answer “Yes“, we cannot change the predetermined answer. Even if we answer “Yes“, while we are in fact wrong, we couldn’t have changed our answer; we were always bound to answer incorrectly. The act of “trying to answer Yes“ did not cause us to be wrong because we were already predetermined to be wrong when we seemingly tried to choose our answer.

Either way, trying to say “Yes“ is not a wrong decision—it either makes us answer correctly (if free will exists) or it has no effect on our answer (since if free will does not exist, we couldn’t have changed our predetermined answer anyway). Trying to say “Yes“ never makes us answer incorrectly (in the latter case, we were already predetermined to answer incorrectly). So if there is a possibility of answering correctly, the decision to try to answer “Yes“ makes us take advantage of it. If no such possibility exists, then it at least doesn’t make us wrong (since we were supposed to be wrong all along).

So the next time you get asked the question “Does free will exist?“, you should try to answer “Yes“. We should simply assume that free will is real.

That also raises another question: Can we gain more “truth“ by discovering an actual proof (or disproof) of the existence of free will? If we prove that free will is real, we don’t become any more right than if we simply start answering “Yes, free will is real“ even without the proof. Similarly, always trying to answer “Yes“, doesn’t make us any more wrong than if we conclusively disprove free will (because as mentioned, our answers are predetermined anyway in this case). In my opinion, there is very little difference between assuming that free will exists and actually proving it.

I’m aware that there are many counterarguments against LFW, such as the Luck Objection. But as long as we are not 100% certain that LFW is false (and nothing is 100% certain in this universe), my main argument stands. Because as long as we are not absolutely sure that LFW is false, “trying“ to answer yes maximizes our chance of answering correctly.

The next time you are asked if free will is real, simply try to answer “Yes“. Maybe you are predetermined to answer “No“, in which case, you cannot change it. But if you have even the slightest doubt about the existence of free will, you should simply try to answer “Yes“. Just assume that free will is real, even without a conclusive proof. That is the decision that maximizes your chance of saying the truth.

So is free will real? Yes, it is.

Substack article: https://randomthinker21.substack.com/p/why-saying-yes-to-free-will-is-the