Freedom to act on one’s will is real. It is the difference between “I want to and I can” and “I want to, but I can’t.” A person who can leave a room and a person locked inside it are not equally free, even if their desire is the same. A person with Parkinson’s whose tremor is suppressed by deep brain stimulation can once again carry out their intention to pour tea. The freedom restored is entirely at the level of execution. The will does not need to have created itself for it to matter whether it encounters a locked door.

Freedom of origination, however, is a mirage. The feeling that “I am the source” is an internal signal, not an observation of causal origins:

The Minnesota twins raised apart often have similar habits, tastes, and choices. “My personality” turns out to be largely set in advance.

Wegner: people attribute movements to themselves that they did not cause, provided the thought preceded the action.

Gazzaniga: in split-brain patients, the left hemisphere invents a reason for an action triggered by the right, and the patient experiences that reason as their own.

Phineas Gage and tumors in the frontal cortex show how fragile the “essence” from which our choices supposedly arise can be.

Religion is best predicted by place of birth. “I chose my values” is true only within a framework that no one chose.

Strawson’s regress: to be responsible for what you do, you must be responsible for the way you are, which requires a prior choice, and so on indefinitely.

The mirage is convincing because we see only the final stage: deliberation, weighing the options, making the decision. The absence of a visible cause is experienced as the absence of a cause, or as “I am the cause.” As with visual illusions, the result is presented without its history.

This is where the hard determinist and the compatibilist diverge: according to the former, genuine freedom to act on one’s will is insufficient for moral responsibility, because responsibility requires ultimate sourcehood. According to the latter, the requirement of ultimate sourcehood is impossible to satisfy and therefore unnecessary.

The weakness in the compatibilist argument is that “impossible, therefore unnecessary” does not logically follow. If a condition is impossible to satisfy, there are two possible conclusions: either the condition was never necessary, or the concept that requires it is empty. The compatibilist chooses the former; the hard determinist chooses the latter.

We can use the following analogy here: if it turns out that witches do not exist, it does not follow that “witch” simply means “an eccentric woman.” It follows that witches do not exist. The question, then, is whether our ordinary concept of responsibility really includes a requirement of ultimate sourcehood. If it does, the compatibilist has not saved that concept but replaced it.

I believe we never have been. Freedom, as we imagine it, feels like a huge illusion. What exists might be a very limited freedom inside boundaries we were handed.

We did not choose, our country, class, family, and era were assigned at birth. A child born into poverty in a developing country and a child born into wealth in a developed one start with very different ranges of possible lives. Our minds were also formed without our consent. Language, culture, beliefs, and early experiences shape what we want and how we decide, so the person doing the choosing was already built by forces we did not select.

Add borders, laws, and authorities that most people cannot meaningfully defy, and the picture is one of choices made from a menu someone else wrote.

The strongest objection is that if freedom means choosing without any prior cause, nobody could ever be free, so the definition may be the problem. I agree the standard is demanding, but I think it is the honest one. A freedom that depends entirely on luck is not the same as the freedom we earned.

Still, we are free within what we have been given. A person can question their conditioning and act against it sometimes. That freedom is real, but it is unequal: some people have a wide room to move in and others a very small one.

If our starting points are a matter of luck, should we judge people's choices and outcomes as harshly as we do?

Few claims are made with as much unearned confidence as the assertion that skepticism offers a humane alternative to retributive justice. Yet under conceptual scrutiny, this humane facade collapses into an administrative framework that threatens the core of human dignity. Far from protecting the individual, Skepticism strips away basic desert reducing human beings to biological variables in a system of institutional risk management.

Proponents of skepticism argue that detaining dangerous individuals under a public health model, guided strictly by the principle of least infringement, avoids the harshness of punitive state action. However, relabeling non-consensual state detention as quarantine does not alter its structural reality. If the state detains an individual against their explicit will, the act remains fundamentally coercive. Attempts to salvage this model by appealing to hypothetical rational consent (claiming an agent behind a veil of ignorance would agree to such rules) fails to bridge the gap to reality. Forced state detention of an actual, non-consenting human being in the real world is not rendered consensual just because a philosopher constructs a theoretical scenario where a rational proxy ought to agree to it.

Furthermore, Skepticism falls into a dilemma regarding how the state responds to past actions. If the skeptic rejects preemptive detention to avoid punishing pre-crime, they must wait to react until after an act occurs. Yet if their post-act response is justified on purely forward-looking grounds, such as public safety or deterrence, the individual’s past action serves as an empirical trigger for state risk management rather than a moral boundary on the state's response. Conversely, if the state’s response is constrained strictly by what the individual did rather than what they might do in the future, the model silently relies on the logic of desert to set those bounds. The skeptic cannot disavow basic desert while simultaneously using past choices to limit state overreach.

Even when skeptics appeal to non-utilitarian frameworks like humanitarian duty or competing rights, the underlying objectification remains. Under a public health quarantine model, an individual is no longer detained because they autonomously chose a wrongful act and bear proportionate responsibility for it. Instead, they are contained because they are treated as an unsafe vector of harm, structurally identical to a carrier of a contagious virus.

Treating a human being primarily as a vector to be neutralized for collective safety instrumentally uses the person. Basic desert functions not as a justification for punishment, but as an indispensable upper bound on state power, dictating that the state may only intervene to the exact degree an agent's past moral choices warrant. Stripping away basic desert removes the only mechanism that requires the state to treat citizens as moral agents rather than hazardous biological entities.

This framework is further undermined by an internal inconsistency regarding its own foundational principles. A core premise of skepticism relies on the principle that ought implies can, asserting that agents cannot be held morally responsible because they lack the literal capacity to do otherwise than what determinism dictates. Yet if causal determinism rules out basic desert on these grounds, then the state, its policymakers and society at large are equally determined in how they respond.

Skepticism cannot coherently condemn retributive justice as morally unjustified or cruel while simultaneously maintaining that no individual possesses the moral agency required to act. By the skeptic's own foundational axiom, the institutional actors executing public health policies could no more choose a different verdict or system than the criminal could choose a different action.

If the skeptic attempts to escape this contradiction by redefining terms like "injustice”, cruelty”, or "harm" as shorthand for inefficient utility management, they fall into a self-defeating trap. Stripped of authentic moral agency, concepts like "undesirable outcomes”, safety”, or "societal harm" lose all normative force, reducing the skeptic's critique from a moral objection to mechanical noise. A skeptic cannot indict the cruelty of a system while erasing the very foundation of meaning that makes cruelty matter.

Ultimately, human dignity requires that an individual is treated as a moral subject (a rational agent capable of genuine choice and answerability) rather than an object, a dangerous animal or a disease vector. By replacing basic desert with systemic risk management, skepticism strips away human dignity, reducing moral subjects to complex biological mechanisms subject to administrative control.

Some of the giants in philosophy have this term called causal deviance.

It seems to imply that action is capable of deviating in such a way that thinkers might tend to believe that accidents are uncaused.

I wonder what switch will flip in my head tomorrow. What thought will arise, what desire will take hold of me, what belief will change? I can reason, make choices, and exercise self-control, but I cannot choose in advance the conditions from which these capacities and actions will arise. Even the thought “I control my thinking” is something that has occurred to me. There is no separate person in my head flipping the switches. There are impersonal, causally conditioned processes that give rise to thoughts, desires, decisions, and the very experience that someone is controlling them.

I wonder what switch will flip in my head. Whichever one the circumstances cause to flip. And whether I accept the result, resist it, or change it - that, too, is a product of these processes.

Even when I think I have deliberated at length and weighed every argument, I cannot say why one particular argument carried so much weight for me while another seemed insignificant. I do not impose that weight from above; it presents itself to me already assigned, as an imprint of everything I have inherited and experienced: my genes, my upbringing, my circumstances, my mood this morning, what I read yesterday. What prevails is whatever this entire mass of causes, arranged in precisely this way, tips the balance toward at that moment, and I become aware of the outcome only when it is already a fact. The feeling “I decided” arrives as an explanation after the event, as a narrative that attributes authorship to what has happened. And when I tell myself “I could have acted otherwise,” all I mean is that with a different past, different experiences, and a different brain state, I would have been a different person.

The very feeling that “this time, everything depended solely on my free will” belongs among the things that need to be explained, rather than among the things used to explain something else. It is an event in the brain like any other: it has causes, a duration, and conditions under which it appears or disappears. Nothing about it establishes its own origin. Split-brain patients and people under hypnotic suggestion are known to confabulate reasons for their actions with complete conviction, unaware of the actual causes. In their case, the feeling “I did it because…” is fully present and untroubled, yet mistaken. Since the brain can produce such a feeling even when it does not correspond to the actual course of events, the feeling alone cannot prove that things are different in my case. It shows only that I have a mechanism that supplies me with a sense of authorship.

The feeling that I am the independent, ultimate source of my decision is reinforced by the fact that I cannot see its entire causal history. But the absence of visible causes is not the absence of causes. When that history remains outside my view, I can easily experience myself as its starting point. In this way, the boundary of my own knowledge becomes an apparent boundary of causality. Precisely because the processes that led to my decision remain outside my view, the result appears to me as a source rather than an effect. Thus, alongside the question “Am I free?” comes another: “How does my sense of freedom arise, and what does it actually prove?”

In a lawful and orderly universe in which events have prior causes, people can still make uncoerced choices that society attributes to them and judges to varying degrees as their own. Is this what people mean by compatibilism? Probably.

But the question is what this conception of free will actually establishes.

If we acknowledge that our choices emerge from physiological and neuronal processes of which we are largely unaware, together with a lifetime of environmental influences shaping our verbal and nonverbal behavior, then acting according to our desires is hardly evidence of ultimate authorship. It means that the decision was consistent with the desires, dispositions, and thought processes we happened to have.

What we consciously experience as deciding may amount to little more than, “The thought I noticed before acting was this,” or, “In retrospect, my decision seems consistent with similar decisions I remember making.”
Neither observation establishes that we are the ultimate originators of the processes that produced our decisions.

There is no origination, no genesis, no miracle of thought. There is a causal process, much of it outside our awareness, that produces the thoughts, desires, and decisions we experience as our own.
So perhaps the issue isn’t whether compatibilism has changed its meaning. Perhaps it’s whether the kind of freedom compatibilism defends is the kind of freedom people imagine they have in the first place.

Found out about determinism when i was 12, went away for awhile, fast forward to, I’m 16 now and recently an episode has hit me in late July and it’s taken away all joy in my life

I have pretty bad adhd and ocd, this combo has been debilitating and makes me feel suicidal

Knowing I can’t trust my thoughts anymore im stuck with the idea that I will have panic attacks over this and it will stress me out, the belief that I will panic over it is crushing me and it always manifests, don’t know what to do and I don’t think my life is worth living anymore

My days consist of constant rumination, the only time I find peace is when I can semi convince myself a form of libertarian free will exists, knowing how the brain works now I’ve convinced myself I’ve already been wired to suffer and it’s painful, I don’t know if it will get better and I think death is the better option now

I’ve researched all the theories of consciousness, orch or, IIT, etc

Please I ask every determinist from now on, do not spread this knowledge, do not speak of this knowledge, other people will suffer and I think if the masses found it we won’t radically change our government institutions to be morally righteous it will just cause mass panic.

Don’t know how I can get better anymore, Im getting on an antidepressant soon, praying I won’t slip up causing anyone in my personal life to realize this truth and suffer with me

I don’t have a depressive personality but I’m extremely insecure in my genetics and reviewing how shit my childhood development probably was, as long as it’s not in my mind life is great but I can’t get it out

A person says, “I think,” “I desire,” “I decide,” “I act.” Language presents every action as a relationship between a doer and what is done, between a possessor and what is possessed. If there is a thought, there must be someone who thinks. If there is a decision, there must be someone who makes it. If there is a will, there must be someone who possesses it. But does this grammatical structure reflect reality, or merely the way we have become accustomed to describing it?

In the Buddhist philosophical tradition, we find a radical answer. Buddhaghosa, in his Visuddhimagga, treats the doer and the experiencer as concepts belonging to conventional language. When we analyze what we call a person, we do not find an independent subject behind actions and experiences, but a multitude of interdependent, conditioned processes.

This idea can be expressed even more radically: not only does free will have no independent ultimate source, but there is also no separate possessor of free will.

Consider an ordinary decision. A person experiences a desire, considers the possibilities, hesitates, weighs the consequences, and finally chooses. At first glance, it seems obvious that someone is performing all these activities. But upon closer examination, we find only impersonal processes.

Where, among all this, is the independent decision-making subject?

If we look for it in desire, we find desire. If we look for it in thought, we find thought. If we look for it in a decision, we find a process of deciding. If we look for it in self-control, we discover mechanisms through which some impulses regulate others. Nowhere does a separate possessor appear, standing outside these processes and controlling them.

Of course, someone might say, “But all these processes are mine.” This is precisely where language once again creates the illusion of a possessor. The word “mine” indicates that these processes belong to a particular organism and its history. But it does not prove the existence of a separate owner of experiences, just as the term “whirlpool” does not prove the existence of something separate from the water and its movement.

A whirlpool has a shape, duration, and consequences. It can draw in a leaf, alter the movement of the water, and disappear when conditions change. But there is no independent whirlpool that possesses and controls the movement of the water. The whirlpool is the organized movement itself.

The self is not the possessor of the stream. It is a name for a particular organization of the stream itself.

The experience “I am the one who decides” belongs to the same stream. It arises, persists, and disappears depending on particular conditions. Its occurrence does not prove the existence of an independent author, just as the occurrence of the thought “I am immortal” does not prove immortality.

There is no contradiction between saying that an organism exercises control and saying that this control has no independent ultimate source. Control can be understood as a relationship between processes rather than the action of a separate internal controller. Some processes regulate others without anyone needing to stand above them.

Similarly, we can speak of freedom when coercion, threats, or physical restrictions are absent. A person who can move is freer than a person who is tied up. But this freedom is a relationship between the organism and its circumstances, not evidence that an independent possessor of will exists.

The implications for moral responsibility are particularly important. When someone causes harm, we usually regard them as the ultimate author of their actions. We assume that they could have been someone different, that under exactly the same circumstances they had the freedom not to do what they did. Hatred and the desire for retribution are often built upon this assumption.

But if behavior arises from impersonal conditioned processes, then we do not find an independent doer who created their own character, desires, and abilities. We find an organism with a particular history, acting according to the conditions in which it finds itself.

This does not mean denying the harm caused or the need for protection. A dangerous person can be stopped. Behavior can be changed through education, treatment, restrictions, and social conditions. Society can encourage beneficial actions and prevent destructive ones.

But these measures no longer require the idea of someone who deserves suffering as the ultimate, independent author of evil. They can be justified by their future consequences.

Here, compassion takes on particular significance. It is not a justification for cruelty, but an understanding of cruelty's conditioned origins. The same causal dependencies through which hatred arises also allow compassion to arise under different conditions.

Of course, compassion itself is not independent of causes. It too has its own history. No one draws it from some free, unconditioned source. It arises through upbringing, experience, understanding, and encounters with the suffering of others.

In this sense, there is no privileged observer standing outside what is happening. There is no separate doer, no separate experiencer, and no independent possessor of free will. There is thinking, feeling, deliberating, effort, choosing, and acting. There are organisms interacting with their environment and with one another. There are consequences that become causes of further consequences.

The terms “self,” “doer,” “experiencer,” and “agent” remain useful in ordinary language. They allow us to distinguish between people, describe their behavior, and organize our shared lives. But the usefulness of a term does not prove the existence of an independent entity behind it.

There is no one standing behind life and living it. There is only living itself - an impersonal stream of conditioned processes in which even the thought that someone possesses it arises.

It basically goes like this: 'If you don't believe other people have free will, then why are you trying to convince them of this, if you don't think they have the free will to change their belief?'

If you've ever studied pickup/seduction, one of the first things you learn is that attraction is not a choice. Which basically means that if there's a chance somebody might be attracted to you (which there may not be), if you can present yourself in just the right way, they *will* be attracted to you, whether they want to be or not. Knowing this, how dumb would it be for somebody to then ask, 'But if they can't choose whether to be attracted to me, why would I even bother to approach them?'

And the same holds true here. If there's a chance somebody's belief can change (about free will or any other topic), if I can craft the right talking points in just the right way, they will be forced to accept my argument(s), whether they want to or not. After all, it's hard to reject a claim when there's overwhelming evidence for it staring you right in the face. For example, you might not believe me if I tell you that some dude is boning your wife. But if you then find a used condom that he accidentally left on your bedroom floor, you're probably not going to just be able to brush that off.

Edit: To clarify a little further, since it'll ultimately be up to the universe whether you accept my arguments or not, what I'm trying to do is convince the universe to change your mind. (or, if you want to get really pedantic about it, the universe is trying to convince itself. This stuff gets pretty mindfucky if you contemplate it deeply.)

Also, there's sort of a related question we often get asked when talking about deterring bad behavior. Someone will inevitably ask, 'How can we deter somebody's behavior if they don't have the free will to change?' And the answer is similar to how we can build a levee to deter water from flowing in a certain direction. Does water need to have free will in order for us to change its behavior?

If free will were fully free in the strong (uncaused, self-originating) sense, then one of the things an agent should be able to do is terminate it, suspend it, or step outside it at will. The fact that the sense of agency, the feeling of choosing, and the ongoing stream of decisions cannot simply be switched off on command suggests that the process is running according to its own dynamics rather than being under complete, unconstrained control by the agent. In other words:

You can choose within the framework of decision-making.

You cannot choose to abolish the framework itself, or to stop the appearance of choice from arising.

That limitation indicates the will is constrained by deeper conditions (neural, psychological, causal, or otherwise) that the will does not itself freely select.

This does not prove that ordinary, everyday agency is an illusion. It does, however, undercut the stronger claim that the will is an entirely independent, self-starting power. A power that cannot exit its own operation is, by definition, not absolutely free. It is free only within the limits of the system that generates it.

The same point appears in other forms: you cannot freely choose your deepest desires or the fact that deliberation occurs at all. Those constraints are evidence that what we call free will operates inside a larger set of conditions it did not create and cannot fully terminate.

The electromagnetic field exists and its varying degrees of excitation.

But we don’t see that. We see a light spectrum, consciously interpreted as color.

And color is strictly a subjective thing.

Yet, this thing that is only capable of existing in the mind and not in objective reality, has real, objective consequences to the decisions we make about it.

So, suffice it to say - can the same be said about freewill?

By justify an action, it means a person did the best they could, so its not their fault if a better outcome didnt occur from their actions.

For example; I try to make someone dinner, but unbenownst to me, a rare heat resistant disease is present and everyone gets sick. I couldnt have known that would happen, and couldnt have prevented it, therefore my actions are justified.

I was having skeptics yesterday telling me "Nooo, we think your actions can be unjustified, even if you couldnt have done any better". If you think that, then please explain that.

Thought experiment: You are driving along a road and come to a fork where you can turn right onto road A or left onto road B. Say you turned right and driving along road A.

Determinist argument is that antecedent events influenced all your moves and you had no choice but to turn right on to road A. Non-deterministic argument is that you had free will and made a choice to turn right; that antecedent events did not cause you to turn right.

In other words, non-deterministic argument is that your action of turning right was the result of free choice and not caused by an antecedent event.

Here is my issue: The free will must have been active at some point in the causal chain. Because you ended up turning right, free will must have been active before you got to the fork and made the turn. But there must have been a reason why free will made you decide to turn right. If that is the case, will that reason why free will made you to turn right, not become the ‘antecedent’ factor that made you turn right?

Then ‘free will’ becomes part of the deterministic chain and there was never a real choice. The only way to circumvent this is if you are able to turn right as well as left and travel both roads A and B at the same time(like in a quantum superposition)

I've been told twice today that compatibilism is no longer about free will being compatible with determinism, thus the name. Free will and determinism being the things previously claimed to be compatible.

No, no, now the deal is that free will is true regardless of whether determinism is true. I've even been told those are completely independent, non-overlapping lines of inquiry in this worldview.

So, my question is, are they going to change the name then? Any suggestions? Maybe we can help them out, put our mark on the philosophical map, as it were. Opportunity awaits..

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.

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.

O God, this is not a complaint, just a question. Are You watching? Then why don't You stop the oppression? You are All-Powerful, so why don't You erase pain from the world?

​O My servant, it is not a complaint, but it is not your helplessness either. I gave you sight, not just to watch. I gave you awareness, not just to understand. You saw that oppression. Did your voice rise for the oppressed? I gave you knowledge so you could recognise the right. I gave you free will, so that, facing oppression, you could choose your role. You are not helpless, yet you look at the sky and ask, 'Why didn't You stop it?'

​O My servant, if I took every step Myself, stopped every hand from oppression, saved every oppressed one, then what would your free will be? What would your test be? What would your purpose in life be? And then tomorrow you would ask, 'O God, You gave me everything, but why did You not give me my own free will?'"

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.

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.

I see people bring up questions about moral responsibility for their actions in a deterministic worldview as an argument for free will, and I'm actually disappointed in the people who make this argument and the people who entertain it. Moral responsibility is a completely separate topic from whether or not we have free will and including it in that discussion is a distraction tactic.

The question is "do people have free will", not "if people have free will, how does this impact the Justice system."

I can't help it, but I keep being reminded of the statement "If we make slavery illegal, who will pick the cotton?". The real question here is "is slavery something we should allow?" not "how will we provide cotton to the textile industries?"

Moral responsibility questions are fine, but they do not have a place in a question about the existence of free will. Keep these two in different discussions.

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.

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