Maybe this has come up before, but I still wanted to ask. Lately, I’ve been a bit confused about whether we really have free will or not. I’m not religious and I don’t really believe in metaphysics. I’d probably call myself agnostic. I’ve just been questioning life more than I used to, and this thought keeps popping into my head.
Do we actually have free will? Like, can we really choose things the way religious texts say we can? What made me think about this is how predictable the micro world seems to be—but when you go deeper into the quantum level, things get really chaotic and complex.
On top of that, as people, we’re constantly shaped by what we go through, and it feels like our reactions and choices get more limited over time.
What do you think about all this?
I don't think that being predictable means a lack of free will. The only time something would be truly non-predictable would be when it was entirely random, acting against itself and with no regard to stimuli or other factors. Not even all but the maddest of humans, and even then not always, are even close to that. Therefore humans will always be predictable to some extent. That says nothing about free will or the non-existence of it.
Recognise the absurd nature of life in general, and your life in particular, and that you could choose to leave it at any moment and run away to be an intinerant ant herder if you truly wanted to. The structures of socoety around us, and ties and connections we build limit our ability to want to drop everything and be free. But humanity is a balancing act, without connections and actualisation in the perceptions of others we're no different from a tree.
I also think that we're a long way from definitive answers on this since we have little to no idea about consciousness, and free will naturally seems a facet of that.