I agree that there is no free will, but to act as if that is true is pointless. Nihilism isn’t useful. If it makes you feel better, you are doing what you would have done regardless even if there was free will. I don’t think the fact every action is predetermined matters much. If anything, it makes me have compassion for the worst people, who arguably were fated to be what they are because of the domino effect.

I often wonder if the dominos will ever fall in a way that guarantees us all a positive outcome. Can we heal our monsters? So that every domino thereafter creates no more?

¯_(ツ)_/¯

Poetically, you are the universe trying to understand itself.

I think we have free agency within various external constraints. Which means we can try to find ways to circumvent external constraints, while also understanding that, as the fictional Ian Malcolm Smith put it, just because we can do a thing doesn’t mean we should do it.

It is an impossible concept invented by humans. Free from what? Literally everything you do is because of things beyond your control. It isn’t predestined, it just isn’t up to you. The question is, at the end of the day, were you kind?

You have free will, but you also have chains that bound you.

Starting from the social order, you need money and other social relations (friends, family, bosses) to literally survive in the modern world - you’re not omnipotent.

Then you have the cognitive chains - stuff you know and understand, as well stuff you can invent (or reinvent) from your current knowledge - you are not omnipresent.

Then, as a consequence, without these two, you cannot be (omni)benevolent - you’ll always fuck something up (and even if you didn’t, most actions positive towards something will have a negative impact towards something else).

All these are pretty much categorically impossible to exist - you’re not some god-damn deity.

But does this mean free will doesn’t exist?

Hardly. It’s just not as ultimate a power or virtue as some may put it. Flies or pigs also have free will - they’re free to roll in mud or lick a turd - except for when they’re not because they do it to survive (cool themselves or eat respectively).

We humans similarily eat and shit, and we go to work so we have something to eat and someplace to shit. Otherwise you die without the former or get fined without the latter.

So that’s what free will is - the ability of an organism to guide what it’s doing, how, when (and, to some extent, even why) it’s doing it, according to its senses and sensibilities. It’s the process with which we put our own, unique spin on the things in our lives.

Being an omnipotent, omnipresent and (omni)benevolent would in fact remove the essence of what free will (with all its limits) is, because our actions wouldn’t have any meaningful consequences. It’d all just be an effective (what I’ll call negative) chaos - a mishmush of everything only understandable to the diety.

So in fact, the essence of “free” will is that it’s free within some bounds - some we’ve set ourselves, some we’re forced with (disabilities, cognitive abilities, physical limits, etc.). Percisely in the alternative scenario would “free” will cease to be free - because someone already knows it all - past, present future, local and global, from each atom on up. There’s perfect causality - as perfect as a movie. You can’t change it meaningfully - any changes become a remix or remaster - they lose their originality.

With the limits on our thinking which cause us to be less-than-perfect, they cause a kind of positive chaos, one where one tries to do their best with what they have on their disposal - as they say, you get to know people best at their lowest. Similarily, everyone gets corrupted at a high enough power level - some just do it sooner than others. So surely, at an infinite power level, not even someone omnipotent, omnipresent and (omni)benevolent all at once would be able to curb this flaw.

No, we don’t have free will. HOWEVER, I don’t think that arguement will hold up in court.

Every decision you make and everything that happens is based on conditions, and nothing exists outside of conditions.

In the ultimate sense there’s no such thing as free will, because everything has a conditioned existence.

it all depends on how you define a person. Most likely, you think that a person’s consciousness is something inside the brain, and in this case, the “external” body really influences your decisions. But that’s not how it really works. The body is also a part of you, so everything that happens inside it, including “the hormone levels”, is a part of you. And your experience is a part of you too. It’s just that you can’t control it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not your decisions. Otherwise, we will come to the conclusion that muscle memory is also not a part of you, but some kind of external factor. In general, if you are interested in my answer: yes, we always make decisions on our own.

Yes. Every person has to believe in it to accept the notion of good and evil.

Tl;Dr, yes*

I find this discussion to be an exercise in frustration. There’s a lot of philosophical jargon that gets glazed over and nuances that often get ignored. I also think it’s an incredibly complex and complicated topic that we simply do not have enough information available to us to determine in a scientific manner.

For instance: what kind of “free will” are we talking about? Often it’s “Libertarian Free Will,” that is, absolute agency uninfluenced by any external factors. This much is disproven scientifically, as our brains run countless “subconscious” calculations in response to our environment to hasten decision making and is absolutely influenced by a myriad of factors, regardless of if you’re conciously aware of it or not.

However, I think that the above only “disproves” all notions of free will if you divorce your “subconscious” from the rest of your being. Which is where the complication and nuance comes in. What is the “self?” What part of you can you point to as being the “real you?”

From a Christian perspective, you might say the “self” is your soul, which is not yet proven by science, and thus the above has no bearing on, as it cannot take the soul into account. But from the opposite side of the spectrum, from a Buddhist perspective, there is no eternal, unchanging, independently existing “self.” And as such, the mind in its entirety, concious awarness or not, is just another part of your aggregates, and from that perspective it can be argued that a decision is no less your own just because it was not made in your conscious awareness.

With my ramblings aside, I am a Buddhist and so my opinion is that we do have free will, we’re just not always consciously aware of every decision we make. And while we cannot always directly control every decision we make, we can influence and “train” our autopilot reactions to make better decisions.

No. We make choices, we think, but those choices come frome somewhere. And all of the roots are beyond our control. There is no room for free will, it is a magical reduction of why we do things. We don’t say a ball has free will when it is kicked down a hill. I can’t separate myself from the ball in any meaningful way.

OK let’s just start with the assertion that there of a casual link back to the beginning of time.

We will begin with the big one first. We don’t even know if time had a beginning.

If we assume that time began at the instant of the big bang. There is no plausible link between my bean induced fart, and some random energy fluctuation, there are just too many chaotic interactions between then and now.

There are so many things we don’t know, making the extremely bold claim that free will doesn’t exist, is dangerously naive.

We can’t even solve Navier-Stokes; neuronal interaction is so far beyond what we are currently capable of, it’s ridiculous.

My recommendation to anyone contemplating this question. Assume free will exists; if you are wrong, it will made no difference; you were destined to believe that anyway.

The circumstances that led you to any particular decision are pre-determined at the time you’re making that decision, simply through the fact that those circumstances have already happened prior to the current decision at hand; but that doesn’t mean you don’t have the free will to make that decision in the moment.

To extend on that a little: if you were able to make the same person face the same decision multiple times under identical circumstances, I don’t believe you’d get identical results every time. It may not be an even distribution between the possible choices; but it wouldn’t be a consistent answer either. The Human element introduces too much chaos for that kind of uniformity.

The way I see it, the brain is essentially a neural network that builds a model of the world through experience. It then uses this model to make predictions. Its primary function is to maintain homeostasis within the body, reacting to chemical signals like hunger, emotions, or pain. Our volition stems from the brain’s effort to achieve this balance, using its world model as the foundation for action.

Maybe not 100% because I am the sum of my experiences but I can choose to act against my impulses if I want to.

There is only one choice: feeling or rationality.

When you feel, you do what feels best.

When you think, you do what is the most valuable.

So no free will but that choice.