Philosophy

There's a lot of schools of thought on this.

One to consider is that every time we make a decision, the universe basically does an instant mitosis. You find yourself in one of them. This would be a sort of non determinism, and if this school of thought intrigues you, that's a good keyword. This is the Many Worlds interpretation.

Conversely, there's the Block Time model, which kind of asserts through relativistic fuckery that all time exists. There is no now (only a relative now), and yeah, you have no free will whatsoever.

I tend to favor a blend of Block Time and non deterministic ideas. I think we have free will that operates on a sort of plane of possible actions which limits our will, and that we (consciousness) are just a really, really, really small facet of some larger dimension that is being crushed through a higher dimensional black hole, and some really hard-for-us-to-wrap-our-heads-around shit is getting full-on Allegory of the Cave'd into what we experience as consciousness.

So I think we're sort of conscious, I think we're sort of having free will, but I think we operate within confines that we can't see which limits our free will. We're kind of just along for the ride.

There are a few possibilities for how the universe ultimately functions:

• Determinism - under determinism, every event is the direct-and-only-possible outcome of the causes that preceded it. Everything that is or occurs is ultimately due to the unfolding conditions initially set by the big bang. What set those conditions though?
• Stochasticism - everything is, at root, random. If QM effects don't directly impact the macro world (is an electrons "choice" of up or down spin a butterfly's wings upon the larger system it entangles into?), then at the very least the initial conditions of the Big Bang were randomly set.
• Super-determinism - not only is everything deterministic, but so are seemingly stochastic processes. Maybe there are infinite universes with every possible starting condition? Maybe every quantum event splits the multiverse onto various paths were each possible outcome is taken? (This is basically what I believe.)
• Will - there exists an object which can "choose" things without any calculation process. It simply "decides" something, but this isn't a random process. It will usually choose the same outcome giving the same coniditons, but not always so it isn't a purely deterministic object either. We have to treat this like an Oracle, that is mathematically, it's a thing that spits out answers but has no internal process we can understand. This object could be God (divine will) or something inside some or all acting beings in the universe (free will).

This problem with Will is that it's undefinable. Look at the axioms most mathematicians use: ZFC, the (Z)ermello-(F)ranco axioms plus (C)hoice. We can do math with or without Choice, both make sense, but we can't prove that you need it or not. And the axiom of choice is purist expression of Free Will that I know of: either you are allowed to have some undefined means of selecting one item from (possibly infinite) sets, or you must have a definite (calculable) means of choosing. Free will, or determinism? Even math can't decide!

I tend towards Daniel Dennett's views on this. The universe is fundamentally deterministic, but we can act as though we have free will.

Because whether that will is possible or not kinda doesn't matter. Did you make any choices today? Yes, of course you did. But who are you? You're a product of the universe, a complex system of neurons and physics that generate a consciousness that we don't really understand.

I've never really understood any argument for free will, because I've never really understood exactly what they mean by 'free will'. Take me through it, exactly what does it mean if you 'make a choice'?

Wow this is such a big topic, every time I come to explain my reasoning....I give up, there is just too much to cover.

My opinion: Short answer is yes we have free will!

Very compressed longer answer:
I have read a lot from various points of view; and very broadly, the "no free will" camp has a lot of post-hoc rationalization to explain away why things happen.
For a while, I was leaning to the "no free will" camp, but so many arguments end unsatisfactorily.
So to boil it down to the most basic reason why I think we have free will. We feel like we do, and there is no compelling evidence to show that we don't. There is currently no predictive power to say what anyone will do given any situation; at best we can give a probabilistic group of possible decisions, but this is not predictive this is just a chaotic model that we know the constraints of.

I really could go into more detail....

Look at the works of B. F. Skinner

Free will is an illusion, but it doesn't need to invoke a deterministic universe or anything so esoteric

The reality is that we're born into societies that shape us. We can do great things with the personal agency that we have, but we will always be constrained by the things we're taught, the things we're not taught, and the world around us

It's neither good nor bad, it's just a part of life. It's all about what we choose to do that matters

All we can do is our best

I think every system is deterministic as much as it can be defined and reasoned. Macro world is working with deterministic principles in my opinion. A robber steals something due to maybe greediness or starvation etc. reason and they're being judged with reason to protect the safety of people and order.

But I cannot say the same thing about the micro world. Because even science can't reason and explain it too much when things goes quantum mechanics. We just make it "serving" for our goals. Like using a useful stuff which we don't even know how it works.

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.

Free will does not exist in a biological sense. If you get hit in the head in a car accident, and you get brain damage, you can be a changed person. That is not free will. Sexual activity is an example of the lack of free will. That is why we have teen pregnancies when such pregnancies, according to a certain consensus, doom the people who are pregnant. That is why we have abortion.

Christian theologians for centuries debated whether we have free will, or predestination. They asked profound questions which are answered by science. Asceticism or discipline helps us try to deviate from our animalistic tendencies, but, so far, death is the ultimate predestination.

Oh, and ignore all religious ideas about free will

You're not going to get anywhere listening to fairytales