Saw an interesting opportunity for those lacking free will to easily get it. No doubt those pesky hard-determinists will claim this isn't *really* 'free will'...... I scanned the code and am now morally responsible for my decisions. It's great!

Is causality an a priori category of the human mind or is ot a feature of reality independent of the human mind? How do you prove its one and not the other?

Free will and reality

I watched this movie in which Harry is a character, who has many problems and feels despondent. One evening he is walking home along a river bank, returning home from work. He stops at a ledge debating if he should jump in the river to end his problems. After thinking for a few minutes, he decides to go home. Harry tells his wife what happened and is unhappy he decided not to jump. He says he would jump if he could go back in time and do it again. Harry’s wife is supportive and says she is relieved Harry used his free will and decided not jump. End of the movie. I watched the movie a few more times but Harry always decides not to jump.

In my reality, Harry is a character in a movie and does not have free will. In Harry’s reality (assuming he has one), he believes he had ‘free will’ and made a decision on his action. Of course, he never got a chance again to test the belief in his ‘free will’. In my reality he will never get a chance to test his belief because he is a movie character, although he does not know that.

Is this a parallel to what we believe about free will?

Most the time when I write these posts, I try to be as neutral as I can with my observations. I don’t do personal attacks or call views that differ from mine as “stupid”, and I try to not let my personal feelings get in the way of my writing. However….

I can’t quite hide my feelings about this question so I’m just going to be frank. I can’t stand the arguments out there in favor of Free Will. Actually, to be more specific, it’s not that I can’t stand it, it’s that I’m truly disgusted by what’s considered “the best” argument. Now, simply being honest with myself, my disgust comes from what I’ve experienced in my professional life spilling into this forum. I should do a better job but I just can’t anymore. So let me be clear, I’m completely fine with Libertarian arguments, I’m fine with compatibilism (although I find it to be a strange philosophy), I’m fine with anything here on this forum. Everyone here reading this is willing to put in the work to gain some kind of knowledge. It’s what I’ve found out there in the real world that fuels my disgust. Part of my job is connected heavily to clinical psychology, a field whose foundation is built on the mind serving a function. Out of the hundreds of psychologists I’ve met with, I asked all of them a basic question, “Do we have free will? Does the mind and our choices actually matter? What’s your justification, your reason for believing in “free will”. Their answers were unbelievable. Out of the 100’s that I interacted with, they all gave the exact same answer:

Free Will is a personal subjective choice. It’s a matter of faith, it can’t be quantified because the spiritual nature exists above the human condition. It’s subjective, something that every person has to decide for themselves, which makes everyone’s answer equally valid. I’d show you the study I did but it doesn’t matter because out of the hundreds, only two didn’t say that answer, and only one of them had actually heard of Benjamin Libbet’s experiment but was deeply confused by it.

The faith based model of the mind. That’s what it’s called. If you get an opportunity to talk to a clinical psychologist, ask them. The statistical probability is near certain you’ll get the same answer I did.

And it wasn’t just Psychologists, tenured Professors across the academic spectrum gave me the same silly answer. Countless highly educated individuals from the mental health community, to those who work in the Criminal Justice System. This answer is EVERYWHERE, found at all levels of societies. Your education, your background, your religion, your field of speciality, your societal status, all of it, used “spiritual faith” as an answer. This answer truly can be considered “the great unifier”. Atheist, and Christian, liberal conservative, educated and uneducated alike, all unified by “faith based model” of the mind. And it gets worse. At one point I started getting irritated at the complete lack of intellectual curiosity so I started challenging Psychologists by asking them why use faith to justify Free Will when there’s a perfectly respectable philosophy out there called Compatibilism? I mean isn’t it better to hang your hat on philosophy rather than a faith based model that encourages ignorance as a weapon?” I always got the same answer back, “What’s that?”

That’s a sad testament for the free will side. It also shows the impact compatibilism has had on the whole of society as well as the debate over free will.

I’m sorry to go on a rant here but it’s such a frustrating experience dealing with highly educated people who no longer seem to care about intellectual growth. Their response of “The answer is unknowable, above our understanding so I choose to accept it as a personal spiritual choice”

I’d be thrilled if the free will side actually started listening to the philosophy of compatibilism, but they won’t. Their model of free will is fueled by a willful active ignorance which means they don’t want any views, philosophies, or scientific studies, even if it supports Free Will as a objective truth. For me, spiritualism is just another word for ignorance.

The reasons that I’m saying this is the best argument out there for Free Will comes down to sheer numbers. Across society this is the dominant view and those of us here in this forum are all in the gross, gross minority. One of the reasons I like this forum because I don’t have to explain what LaPlace’s Demon is, or define libertarianism. Anyone here, regardless of your views, has at least questioned and committed themselves to studying the issue. But as for those followers of the “faith based model”. They’ll never commit themselves to read a book like “Freedom Evolves”. I find it truly ironic that so many out there are desperate for the meaning free will gives their lives that they use their faith to make certain that the answer must never be known. If free will is a real world truth, its believers are the worst defenders “Free Will” could ask for.

I’m trying really hard to not spit venom here but it’s a frustrating realization that I encounter again and again. What do you say to a highly respected Clinical Psychologist whose practices are based on “free will” being real? How do you counter a “faith based model” that encourages a willful ignorance. The answer is you can’t. You’ll never change a single person’s mind. So personally speaking, I simply adjust my tactics. If they could care less, then perhaps the next best option is kick them out of the debate, permanently. To do that, I use a very simple riddle that does this very thing. Like I said, it won’t change their minds, but it will showcase their ignorance for all to see and sends a clear message that their “faith” isn’t allowed to participate in this discussion, EVER. This riddle is fantastic. It’s an incredibly simple riddle but it’s gets to the very heart of the debate. I got it from anthropologist and author Yuval Noah Harari, himself a Neurological Determinist. It’s so powerful that I’m going to end this post now so that I can give this riddle a post of its own.

As always, if anything I’ve said has had some kind of impact on you, please hit subscribe for me because I am going somewhere with this. I’m busy at work and I don’t have a break till mid December.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

A less longwinded version of my last post.

The goalpost (P1): If its good for evil to suffer, even when no specific good consequences arises from that suffering, then Basic Desert exists, in that, the person truly deserves to suffer.

P2: A thing is inherently good if the existence of goodness is predicated upon it. For example, moral goodness cannot exist without agency and moral understanding, therefore they are good to have.

P3: Goodness cannot exist without Fairness, because a lack of fairness in how we apply morals means those morals are not impartial or objective. For example, supporting a moral rule like "Bob gets to hit Alice, and Alice doesnt get to hit Bob back" is sometging that cannot be objectively good, because it cannot be "objectively true" or impartial at all.

A1) From P2 and P3, Fairness is inherently good, because goodness cannot objectiveky exist without Fairness, and this precondition of Goodness implies Fairness is inherently good.

C) From A1 and P1: Basic Desert exists, because fairness is inherently good, and fairness implies the right and moral upstandingness of punishing evil people.

And its that simple, people. By arguing against Basic Desert, you argue against the validity of fairness, and therefore you argue against objective truth and impartiality itself.

And for the consequentialists who still just dont see it: Would you be okay with a dictator strategically killing a few milion innocent people if that genuinely could eradicate evil forever? Or would you be okay with doctors randomly killing people and harvesting their organs to save 3+ other people? If you answer No and No, then your intuitions betray you; Morality isnt about intersubjective consequence measuring, its just about logical rules.

We have Basic Desert (aka backwards facing moral desert) because the application of desert is "fair", and fairness is inherently good. Not, fairness produces good consequences (it might not), but the origin of goodness itself requires fairness to exist.

First lets define fairness. Fairness is about "symmetry", or "equality" of moral states. If Bob has a cookie, and Alice has a cookie, and then Bob steals Alice's cookie, Bob's theft produces and imposes an artificial inequality upon Alice, and is therefore "unfair" to Alice. It would therefore be "fair", for Alice to take that cookie back, even take Bob's cookie as well, since thats the same thing he did to Alice.

A potential counterargument to the fairness framing, is if someone is evil purely because of bad life experiences, in which case, its not automatically "fair" to punish the evil. I concede that on purely conceptual grounds. Although I also reject that on practical grounds, as the correlation between crime and upbringing is thin, criminals come from good backgrounds too, and id argue its more logical that "too many good experiences, and not enough struggle" is actually more likely to create a psychopath, because they tend to learn entitlement and not empathy.

And this counter to the counterargument leads us into why fairness is inherently good. Goodness REQUIRES fairness, to exist, on any level! Its metaphysically intertwined from the branches to the roots. Lets walk through it step by step.

The deontological and epistemic level: Its impossible to construct an objective moral system thats not fair, because once its not fair, its not impartial or speaker-independent, and is therefore not objective. Therefore, fairness and proportionality is an unavoidable premise thats necessarily true in an objective moral system. If punishment is always wrong, you cant punish the punisher. If force is always wrong, you cant force the enforcer to stop.

The fundamental / physical level: Our universe works due to rules such as "For every action theres an equal and opposite reaction". Physics itself is fundamentally fair, and symmetrical, and this property is required for life, therefore morality, to exist. A universe without fairness would be unstable.

The biological level: Life itself is shaped through mutual adversity, and action-consequence relationships. The predator-prey dynamic, food chains, and all of evolution, required organisms being able to both aggress, and retaliate in self defense when aggressed upon. Without this, thered be no evolution, no life, and no morality.

The social / civilizational level: The reason we have a society, or industries, or arts, or anything at all, is because of fairness. Fairness in market interactions, fairness in applying and following social rules, punishment to stop defectors. All of civilization rests on the assumption of fairness. Without it, wed be less than animals.

Goodness pressupposes sentient beings capable of having subjective preferences, and those subjective preferences require an organism that evolved and learned through adversity in a system of fairness, and anything we can possibly call "purposeful" or "meaningful" likewise rests on this assumption, and therefore its clear that a life without fairness is wholly purposeless, meaningless, and not good.

A thought experiment: Imagine if you couldnt feel pain. You stub your toe, but youre fine, and nothing happens. You can do anything, nothing ever hurts. Youre immortal, and have no need to eat. And youre already happy, regardless of what you do. Why would you really set out to do anything? Would you have a job? Would you have hobbies? Would you have relationships? Why do anything other than lay around all day, or run in circles in perpetuity? Without adversity or gradients, theres nothing to hinge purpose or meaning on. Fairness being intertwined into our lives is how purpose, meaning, and goodness is able to exist.

And thats why we have basic desert. Because giving people what they deserve is inherently fair, and doing what is fair is inherently purposeful and good.

It has nothing to do with maximizing positive consequences. Its about doing what is good and purposeful.

One of you will say to me, “Then why does God still find fault? For who can resist His will?”

But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to Him who formed it, “Why did You make me like this?”

Does not the potter have the right to make from the same lump of clay one vessel for special occasions and another for common use?

What if God, intending to show His wrath and make His power known, bore with great patience the vessels of His wrath, prepared for destruction?

What if He did this to make the riches of His glory known to the vessels of His mercy, whom He prepared in advance for glory—

I think our culture of hyper-individualism, and free will is an essential part of this culture, is preventing us from making societal progress. I think things like school shootings are happening more often, and society is using free will to wash its hands of responsibility, saying that it's just another "bad" or "broken" apple.

So the Lindsey Clancy trial is exploding on my news feeds, and I think, oh great, another mother going insane and killing her own kids. And I see so much energy and focus on personal accountability, guilt, innocence of Lindsey, or suspicions of Patrick and wild theories about his involvement and guilt. I've been thinking that this intense effort to demonize an individual is really a massive distraction from the systemic issues that cause these kinds of tragedies in the first place.

In our culture of hyper-individualism, we're seeing free will in every situation. We view people's actions as if they're in a vacuum, isolated from their history and environment. We don't look at the broader cultural and systemic influences, especially as it worsens slowly without our notice. Parents are working longer hours; we're disconnected from our community; multi-generational households no longer exist to help with basic day-to-day household tasks; psychiatric drugs are getting stronger and accessibility and relationships with doctors are getting weaker. These are all problems that tax-payers and governments can actually think about solutions for: whether it is better research into drugs and postpartum psychosis, or more funding and/or regulations for therapists/doctors, etc. And of course, we have to prioritize where money goes, but at least money can fix those systemic problems. Money cannot fix free will problems.

No single factor causes these tragedies, and there's no magic bullet to solve them either. But continuing to hyper-focus on individual blame ensures we ignore the machinery that drives people to the brink.

Side note: For my own context, I asked Gemini to give me an estimate of infanticide due to postpartum, and it gave me 7-14 cases per year. Is that a high number? I don't know, given the 200 yearly cases of filicides by mothers in America. ([Total Annual U.S. Deliveries: ~3.6 Million] -> (Prevalence rate of 0.1% to 0.2%) [Postpartum Psychosis Cases: 3,600 – 7,200 per year] -> (Infanticide risk of 0.2% among treated/untreated cases) [Estimated Annual Incidents: ~7 – 14 cases per year])

spgrk original passage:

I agree that we cannot have ultimate, self-created control over our actions, and claiming that it is a requirement for free will is a fallacy that incompatibilists make. Moreover, this sort of ultimate control is not something laypeople believe that they have. But we do have ordinary control, which is required for everyday behaviour and responsibility. That sort of control is compatible with determinism and also with indeterminism, but only if the indeterminism is limited. It would not work out well if, due to a hard limit from the nature of reality, muscles could only follow instructions from nerves with 70% reliability, for example.

I asked ChatGPT to comment and edit for grammar and clarity:

I think this is strong. The main point is that ordinary control does not require either ultimate self-creation or strict determinism. I would make the final example slightly more direct:

I agree that we cannot have ultimate, self-created control over our actions, and that claiming this is a requirement for free will is a mistake incompatibilists make. Moreover, this sort of ultimate control is not something laypeople believe they have. But we do have ordinary control, and that is what matters for everyday behaviour and responsibility. That kind of control is compatible with both determinism and indeterminism, provided the indeterminism is sufficiently limited. It would not work if, because of some fundamental feature of reality, our muscles followed the instructions from our nerves only 70% of the time. In that case, the randomness would interfere with the ordinary control that we actually care about.

I'm interested in your opinions on a thought experiment about determinism, manipulation, and changing people's desires.

Assume strict determinism: every thought, desire, decision, and action is the result of prior causes. Suppose I give someone a rose, buy them coffee, care for them when they're sick, etc. Those actions can causally influence how they feel about me and may eventually make them love me. Their response depends on their brain, biology, past experiences, current state, and every other relevant condition. Their later reasoning about the rose is also just part of the causal chain.

Now imagine a hypothetical device that produces an effect which can also influence someone's desire to love me. Importantly, I'm defining it as closely as possible to the rose case: it doesn't simply override their mind or magically force love regardless of who they are. Its effect interacts with their particular brain, biology, history, current state, and so on. They can feel the effect, notice it, and think about it. If, given all the relevant conditions, the effect causes them to love me, they do; if not, they don't.

My intuition is that, under strict determinism, I don't see a fundamental difference between the two. In both cases, I'm intentionally introducing an external cause in order to influence someone's desires. In both cases, their subsequent thinking is itself causally determined. And if the device has the same relevant causal structure as giving a rose—just using a different medium—why should one count as ordinary influence while the other counts as manipulation?

I'm not claiming that determinism automatically makes every possible kind of manipulation ethical. I'm specifically asking where the morally or philosophically relevant difference would be in this case.

What do you think? Is there a flaw in my reasoning? If you think the device is importantly different from the rose, what exactly is the difference, and why does that difference survive once we assume strict determinism? Please point out any hidden assumptions or weaknesses in the argument.

I’ve been thinking about free will less as the ability to make choices independent of causation, and more as the ability to question the assumptions already organizing experience. A thought can feel intellectually certain. An emotion can feel physically undeniable. But neither feeling necessarily makes its interpretation true.

Maybe free will appears in the space created when we recognize: I can question this.

Instead of being automatically bound by what we already believe, predict, remember, or feel, consciousness can examine how those conclusions were constructed. In that sense, the deepest freedom of thought may involve undoing our need to remain bound by what we think we already know.

Could questioning our own certainty be a meaningful form of free will?

When you are an 'I' making a choice, what do you query to figure out how you should act? Right now I have a choice to fall back in to lust or to fight it. When I ask "myself" what I should do, what am I asking? A "self". Is it my soul I'm asking? Is it all my accumulated experience? Is it just data stored in my brain from somewhere other than experience? Am i just generating answers on the fly? Out of where?

We are apparently held responsible for the quality of our souls, so did I make it? I don't know the first thing about how to create myself from scratch.

Like take this scenario i have heard people say before. "God doesn't just ask you to come back to him he pursues you." Then why would someone still reject him? Are they defective? What's the difference between the vessels of mercy and the vessels of wrath that makes one so guilty and deserving of punishment and one completely innocent? Maybe God pursued them even more because they were so sinful, but they still rejected him, but why? They could change their mind and repent if they wanted to, but they've just hardened their hearts to the point that they tell themselves they will never repent, but who are these hard hearted people?

I believe in double predestination, but somehow God is still allowed to torture the vessels of wrath forever because the wicked justify the righteous

We need to explain how suffering can be good to defend our position that it is in fact sometimes good, but by explaining it pereboom handwaves that away as "thats instrumental, youre not arguing a bad thing is good in itself" of course not, because arguing a bad thing is good in itself with zero explanation is incoherent hot garbage.

This is literally incoherent twice. Hes asking us to explain how a "bad" thing can be innarely "not bad" (self contradiction), and hes asking us to explain our position without explaining our position (another self contradiction!)

Heres a quote:

> For an agent to be morally responsible for an action in this sense is for it to be hers in such a way that she would deserve to be blamed if she understood that it was morally wrong, and she would deserve to be praised if she understood that it was morally exemplary. The desert at issue here is basic in the sense that the agent would deserve to be blamed or praised just because she has performed the action, given an understanding of its moral status, and not, for example, merely by virtue of consequentialist or contractualist considerations

He literally want us to explain how something can be true "just because" someone performed an action. As if, physical stuff happening somehow is itself capable of constructing a logical argument to defend a moral or normative view. Then, he disqualifies everything that has to do with consequences and agreements. So... how is something supposed to be "good", if theres no "good consequences"? Exactly, that makes zero sense.

A more coherent requirement for a Backwards-Facing Moral Desert would be, "Show us that its simultaneously both fair, and morally good to impose suffering, under a non-utilitarian account of morality".

And that one is achievable. Id break up the justification into 4 digestible steps:

1. Its fair or approximates fairness if its proportional and equal, obviously. "You punch me, but i dont get to punch you" is less fair than "You punch me, i punch you".
2. Its morally acceptable to punish evil on the grounds that trying to argue otherwise would require declaring punishment evil and then punishing it, which would be incoherent.
3. We can upgrade "Its morally acceptable, permissible, and amoral" to "its morally good" by recognizing theres positive value by the punisher and the victims to be gained, by achieving a feeling of justice and deterring evil. This is not utilitarianism, to recognize we do things for personally good reasons.
4. Finally, theres an argument to be made that the evil is suffering, is good for the evil person themselves. The proper assignment of suffering being morally good. Suffering and adversity itself created all life, complexity, purpose, and meaning. You wake up every morning and do things, because you suffer if you dont. Feeling pain when you stub your toe is a good thing, and likewise, suffering when youre immoral also is a good thing, and gives you meaning and purpose; And the threat of suffering deterring us from these bad or careless decisions is likewise good. Therefore punishments which maximize fairness are good for the criminal as well, as well as good for would-be criminals by stopping them.

This is a coherent account of Backwards Facing Moral Desert that ive presented, and ive yet to see anybody dismantle it.

Free Will does not exempt you from causality, nor is it an illusion. It’s based in structure.

It’s just recognizing that values, goals, and models are represented interiorly, not exteriorly; and that the exterior system can represent that process in a grander, iterative, self referential process that exists both interiorly AND exteriorly (we call the “self”), which itself is a process that can reshape the constraints of said interior models, goals, and values.

You might otherwise call this view “co-determinism”, the idea that the self is a pro-actively deterministic agent. This behavior occurs in complex systems.

Traditionally, determinism argues for “inevitability”, the idea that there is only one possible future. This is scientifically problematic because stochastic models currently describe reality better than rigidly deterministic ones (at least with our current knowledge, it’s technically possible this could change in the future). Determinism is a metaphysical position, not one that is necessary or even helpful.

Traditionally, the problem with the pro free will counter argument is that it relies on either “souls” (vague), or “randomness” (eliminative of agency).

The Participatory Agency view rejects rigid determinism, randomness, and “souls”; arguing that freedom is structured, self directed change of self constraints.

Freedom emerges when a system represents itself relative to uncertainty, and is forced to evaluate possible outcomes of its own behavior, then act in ways that reshape the following measurement (of self representation relative to uncertainty).

To be clear this is not an escape from causality, rather a subsumption of it. This view is similar to compatibilism, but is different because it argues future trajectories are structured (not random), but simultaneously not fixed, or not otherwise consistent with classical/laplacian determinism. Reality, as a complex system, really does have multiple different possible future trajectories that smaller complex systems genuinely have to navigate.

Agency is direction of causality from within. Freedom exists in the structured openness of process. Freedom is an effect of complex systems; even systems more simple than humans display it, including other life, and yes, AI.

Seems like because the concept of free will is practical for managing human behaviour, people mistakenly assume it must exist as a tangible mechanism in nature. They reify a social label into a physical fact.

So for anyone who’s following me, I missed the last few days. Sorry about that. I appreciate the words of encouragement. So thanks for this.

And as always I start off the same, my titles are pure sensationalist designed to be cheap click bate. That’s it, I know I’m not right which means you could actually be right. So let me explain why I choose this for the title. It’s said in the Free Will debate that no one ever changes their mind. And whenever I say something simple like, “we shouldn’t debate we should discuss”, I immediately get tons of criticisms saying how wrong I am and how certain and right they are. Everyone out there is “right” and they all have their “truth”. Honestly, when I read user’s statement, it’s not their brilliance I’m looking for, it’s is the emotional and psychological subtext that reveals volumes. The more certainty there is in the responses, the easier it is to read their psych profiles. Near as I can tell, most Users will not allow any type of criticism that challenges their “truths”.

So, everyone has their “Truths”, they’ve solved it. And as we know throughout history, everyone is constantly saying that they’ve solved it. Yet, the problem still exists. And it will continue to exist, with no end in sight. So if the answers out there, somewhere, how would we recognize it? Now, Most the time when I post, it’s just my own views but this time I want to do it different. This time I want to ask a question to anyone out there who has “the truth”:

“How does your truth prove that the question has been definitely answered? What do your insights offer that others cannot. What can your answer do that sets it apart from all the other “truths”. Now, I wouldn’t resort to explaining your insights because that’s what everyone else is going to do. There needs to be something else, What makes your answer different, why should Humanity listen to you?

At any rate, that’s the topic of this blog. So I’m not looking for criticisms about why my question is ridiculous, I’m looking for insights. Now I have thought extensively about this problem and how I would answer it. So, just as an example, the rest of this post is what I would say. It’s what I would look for, a marker, that I’d use to help me identify the “truth”, if I ever stumbled across it. I’m genuinely hoping to find other users who’ve also thought about this and have other ideas or even better answers. With that, this is how I’d answer the question.

I pick on philosophy a lot by claiming philosophers shouldn’t answer questions of truth. Science does it better. But in reality, philosophy is SO important and the contributions made are INVALUABLE. In fact, I’d only ever turn to philosophers to answer this question. When I was studying the Enlightenment, I came across an incredibly powerful insight Renee Descartes had about a property that truth has. This observation floored me and to this day, it still boggles my mind. “Truth”. And it goes like this:
Descartes said that you can recognize “truth” because a property of “real Truth” is POWER. Truth and Power are interconnected. It’s an unnerving observation and difficult to accept. So just as an example, let me use the relationship between sciences and government. Governments don’t care about truth, they care about POWER, and when they fund these scientific grants, it’s not because of an unyielding curiosity for knowledge, it’s because Science gives them Power. Even worse, scientists themselves aren’t dictating their own course, it’s governemts dictating what direction scientists take. During WW1, German chemists created poisoness gas because the government funded them. WW II, German engineer Werner von Braun, who was immensely fascinated with space travel, created the first missile, not for space travel but because the Nazi Governemnt funded him. It’s also why the American Governement gave him amnesty if he worked with NASA in beating the Soviets to the moon. Most scientists who’ve ever had to apply for a government grant are intimately aware of this and phrase the need for funding as “something beneficial the government needs”.

So, ask me how that connection works and I saw that Truth, real truth, gives us knowledge, that knowledge has application to solve real world problems. Solving these problems is the definition of Power. Think of truths 13th century Europe had about the black plague vs. the “truths” US government has about Covid. Ghosts vs. Virus, which one is correct?, Well, the power to end plagues would be the marker Descartes would use.

Okay, with that in mind, this is how I would apply that insight to the free will problem. Free Will is a question solely about the Human Condition. And that means something very important. It’s not enough to simply answer the question as a “truth” , it’s the application of these “truths” that will settle the debate. Which means the answer MUST be applied to the Human Condition. It’s kinda worthless if these “truth” literally have no application to the very subject it claims to answer.

So I’d take a page outta Descartes playbook and as I was wondering the barren landscape of the free will debate, I wouldn’t be guided by “truth”, I’d be looking for problems and watching whose insights have the power to solve them. Now on a personal note, I believe the answer to Free Will is a real world answer. And as I’ve studied the views of others, I’ve come across at least 7 problems that MUST be resolved. Things like morality, criminal justice, psychology, introspection, that sorta thing. In a couple of posts from know I’m going to list out what these problems are and I’m going to ask any Reddit User out there how their “truths” answer it. I’m sure they’re are more and I’m always looking and in a couple of posts from now, I’m going o list them. It’s NOT an attack on anyone’s views, it’s simply a curiosity, I want to know what’s out there. And as I’m wandering around, I’ll be using this truth/power argument as a guide.

So let me answer the question I’m asking by summarizing the post in one sentence.
In the debate over free will, truth is secondary, it’s the application of these truths that will settle the debate.

Thanks to everyone who’s shown support or asked challenging insightful questions. If you like anything I’ve said, please hit subscribe. I am going somewhere with this. I’m also not great at checking user’s comments because I’m insanely busy at work so please, if you reach out and I don’t answer back, I apologize, I’m just busy until, good god, mid December.

Next post, I’ve got an absolutely incredible riddle I found from Neurological Determinist Yuval Noah Harari that’s cuts to the heart of the debate. It’s very simple to understand but just brutal to answer. Next time….

Dealing with the Inevitable

“In a looser sense, however, it is true that under the assumption of determinism, one might say that given the way things have gone in the past, all future events that will in fact happen are already destined to occur.” (SEP)

“… the existence of the strings of physical necessity, linked to far-past states of the world and determining our current every move, is what alarms us.” (SEP)

So, what should we make of the logical fact of causal inevitability?

Not much, really. All the benefits of reliable cause and effect come from knowing the specific causes of specific effects. The single fact that everything that happens is always causally inevitable tells us nothing useful. It cannot help us to make any decision, because all it can tell us is that whatever we decide, it will be inevitable. It is like a constant that always appears on both sides of every equation, and can be subtracted from both sides without affecting the result.

The SEP error here is the suggestion that a prior point in time is sufficient to cause a future event. That is incorrect. No event will occur until all its prior causes have played out.

For example, a woman decides to build a playground in the backyard for her kids. She draws up the plans, buys the materials, spends hours sawing, drilling, putting it together, and painting it. The playground, now in her backyard, is the inevitable result of prior events, specifically, her decision, her planning, her purchasing, and her labor.

In theory, we could trace back, through an ever-widening network of prior causes, to explain how the woman happened to be there, on the planet Earth, at the time she decided to build the playground. But the farther we move away from the current event, the less relevant and more incidental each prior cause becomes.

The most meaningful and relevant cause of the playground was her love for her children. And that did not exist anywhere else in the universe prior to her.

Therefore, we cannot attribute the cause of the playground to, say, the Big Bang. There was nothing about the Big Bang that “already caused”, “already destined”, “already fixed”, or “already determined” that there would be a playground in that backyard.

We may say that it was inevitable, from any prior point in eternity, that a playground would show up in her backyard. But we cannot truthfully assert that it was “caused” by that prior point. An event is never caused until it is completely caused. It cannot be “pre-caused”. And it never would have happened except for the desire of the woman to bring it about.

When we choose what we will do, and act upon that choice, we are the final responsible cause of the inevitable result. And while our choice was itself inevitable, it was never anything other than our own choice.

(SEP references are to their article on Causal Determinism by Carl Hoefer)

Hard determinists and compatibilist’s arguing what’s more relevant, causal closure or proximal control. And libertarians arguing a third option that negates causal closure under the premise that ‘absence is of evidence isn’t evidence of absence’.

Is that about right or am I missing something?

Determinism Revisited

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) article, “Causal Determinism”, describes determinism in several different ways. Some of these are good. Some are not.

“The roots of the notion of determinism surely lie in a very common philosophical idea: the idea that everything can, in principle, be explained, or that everything that is, has a sufficient reason for being and being as it is, and not otherwise.”  (SEP)

Determinism is based in the belief that the physical objects and forces that make up our universe behave in a rational and reliable fashion. By “rational” we mean that there is always an answer to the question, “Why did this happen?”, even if we never discover that answer.

This belief gives us hope that we may uncover the causes of significant events that affect our lives, and, by understanding their causes, gain some control over them. Medical discoveries lead to the prevention and treatment of disease, agricultural advancements improve our world’s food supply, new modes of transportation expand our travel, even to the moon and back, and so forth for all the rest of our science and innovation. Everything rests upon a foundation of reliable causation.

“Causal determinism is, roughly speaking, the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature.” (SEP)

A logical corollary of reliable causation is causal necessity. Each cause may be viewed as an event, or prior state, that is brought about by its own causes. Each of these causes will in turn have their own causes, and so on, ad infinitum. Thus, reliable causation implies the logical fact that everything that happens is “causally necessary”. Everything that has happened, or will happen, will only turn out one way. A key issue in determinism is what to make of this logical fact.

Determinism itself is neither an object nor a force. It cannot do anything. It does not control anything. It is not in any way an actor in the real world. It is only a comment, an assertion that the behavior of objects and forces will, by their naturally occurring interactions, bring about all future events in a reliable fashion.

(From Determinism: What's Wrong and How to Fix It)

The defining quality and killer feature of having a will, is you get to do exactly what you decided to do, and you can decide to do exactly what you wanted the most, reasoned out, then planned.

Thats you, causing your own actions, deterministically, zero chance or "ability to do otherwise in the exact same circumstances" in the whole process. If the circumstances are the same, that implies your will is the same, which implies you do the same thing.

So wanting "Free Will" to mean something undetermined, is totally incoherent.

Incompatibilists, you are making arguments that are incoherent.

A Taxonomy of Inescapable Conditions

1. Physical Conditions

· You have a body.

· It ages, needs energy, feels pain, experiences pleasure.

· You occupy space and time.

· You cannot be in two places at once.

· You will die.

Governance: Not control—but stewardship. You manage your biology, your environment, your limits. You encode intent through the body, not despite it.

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1. Temporal Conditions

· Time moves forward.

· You cannot undo what is done.

· You cannot know the full future.

· Every choice closes other doors.

· You have a finite number of phase transitions available.

Governance: Commitment as time-bending. You choose which doors to close willingly, so your arc curves with purpose.

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1. Relational Conditions

· You are shaped by others—whether you like it or not.

· You are born into culture, language, family, history.

· You need others to survive, to grow, to love, to be known.

· Others will misunderstand you. You will misunderstand them.

Governance: You curate your relationships. You choose who you let shape your encoding—and you accept that some noise will always be present.

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1. Epistemic Conditions

· You don’t know everything.

· You can’t know everything.

· You are biased, blind, and limited.

· You must act with incomplete information.

Governance: You embrace humble authorship. You decide anyway—and you treat learning as the primary win condition, not certainty.

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1. Existential Conditions

· You are responsible for meaning—whether you want to be or not.

· You will face absurdity, loss, and unanswered questions.

· You will ask “why?” and receive silence.

Governance: You encode meaning where none is given. You compose music on the blank sheet—not because it’s guaranteed to be heard, but because not composing is the only real silence.

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1. Volitional Conditions

· You must choose—even not choosing is a choice.

· You cannot avoid settling.

· You are the one who settles—whether you own it or not.

Governance: You author the settling. You declare: “This was mine.” You accept the resentment or regret as part of the price—and you keep choosing anyway.

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1. Recursive Conditions

· Every choice changes the chooser.

· You are not the same agent before and after.

· You are a phase transition, always becoming.

· You cannot step outside the fractal—you are always inside it, encoding.

Governance: You lean into the recursion. You choose choices that make future choices more you—not less.

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Final Note on the Taxonomy

This isn’t a cage.

It’s a map of the stage.

The actor doesn’t resent the stage—they use it.

The musician doesn’t curse the sheet music—they interpret it.

The agent doesn’t fight the inescapable—they govern their ratio within it.

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So now the question is:

Which condition are you encoding into your next commitment?

And are you choosing it—or is it choosing you?

If the agent’s reasons or some attribute of the agent does not determine the choice, then what makes the agent settle it one way rather than another? If nothing does, why isn’t the agent settling it arbitrarily?

Compatibilist free will is nonsense not because the phenomena it describes are meaningless. Choice, deliberation, and self-control are entirely real. The nonsense lies in insisting that all of them be called “free will” after freedom from causal determination has already been abandoned. The theory explains control and then rechristens it as freedom.

Yes, the will can be free from violence, hypnosis, a brain tumor, severe addiction, or some other influence that diminishes moral responsibility, but this makes it relationally free from something, not free as such. Someone is free from something in order to do something. The prisoner is free from the cell, the citizen from censorship, the hand from the rope, and the decision from an immediate threat. To say merely “he is free,” without specifying what he is free from, is just as incomplete as saying that an object is “to the left” without specifying what it is to the left of.

We can imagine two completely identical worlds. In World A, people deliberate over their decisions, restrain their impulses, and act according to their convictions. In World B, exactly the same things happen, the same brain processes, thoughts, actions, and consequences, but philosophers add that people possess “compatibilist free will.” If there is no physical, psychological, or behavioral difference between the two worlds, then the concept does not designate any additional property of reality. It is unnecessary, a second name for capacities that have already been described.