It seems like you mostly refute common arguments for why free will doesnt exist, as opposed to providing compelling arguments for why it does exist.

I personally think that possessing the ability to do otherwise doesn't imply free will exists, but that there is an inherent randomness to determinism. I see determinism as defining the likelihood of certain decisions being made, not necessarily what choice WILL be made. It defines the thought processes that lead to certain things being chosen over others.

I think that, free will exists according to your parameters, sure. But I don't really agree with your parameters. But this then just comes down to, what does free will even mean? Its a semantic debate, and I remain completely convinced its entirely a semantic debate based on that article.

Good read though.

I'm starting to feel that these discussions are meaningless, due to the nature of such words meaning different things to different people. You can only really prove free will or determinism is correct according to what you define them as. Such terms are so hard to pin down..

I also appreciate that this is written in a way so that it can be understood by those who aren't academic vermin. Nice to read a philosophy post without the pretentious wank.

Your premise relies on the idea that unpredictability in behavior proves free will however the philosophical idea of indeterminism states that the random fluctuations of quantum mechanics can mean no free will while also being unpredictable.

My thoughts. You are restricting Laplace's Demon without justification. You called the demon "the ultimate predictor." A reasonable interpretation of that would be that if something is necessarily true from known information, then the demon will know it. I think this would have been the correct understanding of the demon for the situation. Instead, you have gone with the interpretation that if something is algorithmically provable from known information, then the demon will know it. A given program will halt or it will not. One of those is necessarily true. It is not algorithmically provable. That doesn't, in any reasonable sense of the word mean the program is free.

Second I think you fail to show an infinite computational medium. Perhaps a person with an infinite lifespan in an infinite universe would have an infinite computational medium. And so a question like "will he ever take x action" might be undecidable. However, If you restrict the scope to a given timeframe. "will he kiss that girl he likes today", you are restricting your focus to a finite period of time, and a finite space (i.e. a sphere of space 1 light-day in radius). You lose your infinite computational medium, and suddenly you have a decidable problem.

>So what’s wrong with this line of thinking which is so drawn to molecules and such? Consider the following question as an analogy: Are apples red? Suppose we all agree that apples have color.

And so on. Uh... rigid designators. Taxonomy. Humans are lazy. Oh my god. Bertrand Russel would take you to school on this example like a boss, perhaps like so: 'Of course we mean to speak within a certain generally-accepted range of experiences - possibly limited to only humans, and even then, not definitive, for what of the colorblind? We refer to a sense impression. The simple phrase "it is red" is the peak of a pyramid of unstated assumptions, agreements, and limitations!'

Honestly. Go ahead and try changing a bunch of those molecules and see what happens to "red" back up at the top of that pyramid. Change the molecules in the human eye. Change the molecules in the human brain. So many ways to disrupt the vaunted "red" that are not on the scale of "red," and you want to use it as an analogy for why focusing on the wrong scale is an error, with an eye towards suggesting that various scales possess magical independence from each other.

Yikes, dude. I sincerely hope you do not cavalierly engage in "independent scale" surgery on yourself with confidence that your various "rednesses" will not be affected. That would be a very bad idea. Don't do it. Some "rednesses" are not as lazy and tolerant as others. "Alive" seems like a pretty broad one at the outset, but you might want to do some research on how many "independent and irrelevant scale" changes can disrupt it quite definitively.

>It is caused by many small parts, but only when taken together all at once. And that’s the same thing as the whole person. So my thoughts and actions are deterministically caused by me. The molecules of which my brain is made are deeply irrelevant to this fact.

So it's caused by many small parts all at once, but the molecules aren't even some of those small parts? They're irrelevant small parts? Even though we can measure changes in them as apparent partial causes of actions and partial consequences of other actions?

You're asserting a mind/body divide here baldly. Where's your argument? Where's your evidence?

>If a molecule were the relevant cause of my action, this would not be true in the same way.

You literally just posited that many small parts can all work in tandem, even though you rejected the possibility that molecules are the relevant small parts. This line, therefore, is something akin to a straw man. That accusation can only be perversely rebutted by the fact that we know molecules are not indivisible, and not always stable. Some molecules can "self reflect" (read: not really, because everything is connected, and subject to physical laws) and become not the molecule they originally were.

Re: undecideability

Instead of nitpicking - because it's exhausting, and I could do it all day - let me try to ask you a broader question:

If you do something that surprises Laplace's demon, how on Earth does it not also surprise you? If it surprises you, then doesn't it seem a little odd to call it "free?" It seems much more like we're just almost-infinitely-dumber demons who possess no real awareness of our own goings-on - only comforting illusions, which is a peculiar booby prize of ignorance. Doesn't the definition of undecideability you quoted make the very question you're trying to answer unanswerable? You retreat to what cannot be known to try to convince us that you know how something works.

I'm not sure if this really stays within the same philosophy. But I have 2 concerning thoughts about this. I tend to agree with the statements suggesting we have free will. However, many of the modern AI systems seem to keep improving at predicting our preferences and behavior the more data they collect, contradicting the statement of our unpredictability.

Also, the more we look at humans in larger groups rather than at each human individually, the more it becomes possible to predict the overall actions of a group. Which also contradicts said unpredictability and possibly suggests that it's controlled by a complex ecosystem of humanity and its environment as a whole. Rendering free will to be an illusion.

It seems like you're defining free will as the ability to make decisions that are fundamentally unpredictable. That's not what the vast majority of people seem to mean by free will. What people seem to mean by free will is something like they can make decisions that are not completely caused by things they ultimately never chose and/or not completely random. That's the type of free will that seems to matter to people, and it's the type that has moral implications, and it's the type that's impossible.

Humans don’t have the total self reference you talk about on 313. A computer can’t have perfect record of every process since each attempt to record or log a process must be itself recorded and logged by additional processes, ad infinitum. Humans are not aware of all our processes, down to each cell, as such a thing would be computationally impossible. However, our actual level of awareness is no more impossible than a pc showing you a task manager. Our current level of self reference doesn’t meet this requirement for undecidablility.

You already raised the correct objection to infinite state spaces. I think I can illustrate it with an analogy. Saying “Humans have infinite state spaces because we have an impression left by even very large numbers,” is like saying, “This computer has infinitely more storage space than you think. (hits with hammer) Look, it has stored the imprint of this hammer.” You’re confusing a psychological response to incomprehensible numbers with actual storage of said numbers. Also, even if you were right about humans storing a unique impression of everything they’ve ever experienced and that being equivalent to state space. That’s still nowhere close to the infinity you need to make statements about Laplace’s demon.

And you’re probably wrong about different numbers leaving different impressions. I’d bet money that if we gave you a 3000 digit number your “impression” would be the same (no measurable difference) no matter what the 347th digit is.

A trillion molecules with a trillion different possible combinations is a large number. It is not an infinite number. To Laplace’s demon, this might as well be 8 total combinations. We also have reason to believe that the total number of imaginary objects or scenarios might be similarly finite, if incomprehensibly large. I expect we have a finite list of objects and scenarios we’re determined to imagine.

I don’t understand why you think generating an unsolvable problem means that the being who generated it has an unsolvable will. Stating a paradox doesn’t mean you incorporate a paradox in your own thought process nor does it mean you have violated the genetic and environmental causes which determine your choices and thoughts.

Okay. Basic idea: free will is the ability to do other than expected, where the expect-or is Laplace’s demon. Some human actions meet this condition, because the human brain is an undecidable computational system.

I had a couple of issues.

First, intuitively free will involves the possibility of any of multiple courses of action (looking in the future direction, to use the language is the article). The objection to this in the article is basically, when you’re making the choice, you’re only doing one thing. So, it doesn’t make sense to say there are multiple possibilities open to you. To the contrary, we can say that at time t1, it is possible that at time t2 I am doing A, or that I am doing B, whereas at time t2 it is only possible that I am doing 1.

But I don’t think that matters much, since the project is still interesting.

Second, key to establishing that the human brain is an undefinable computational system is the claim that the brain has infinite state spaces. This is supported by the fact that we can conceive of the natural numbers, which are infinite.

I’m not convinced that this means the human brain has infinite state spaces. We never conceive of each natural number itself. What is true is that for any of we can conceive of any of an infinite number of sets of numbers, but each of those will be of finite size. It is also true that we can think such terms “as infinite”, and various associated ideas, “1-to-1 mapping onto the natural numbers” for instance, but everything we’re ever actually thinking is finite.

Basically, it’s possible to represent some facts about infinite sets with finite information, which seems to be what we actually do.

As an additional comment, the article also contained a discussion of human decision-making being self-referential. It’s a bit long, but you may want to check out this talk by Jenann Ismael, in which she makes the self-referential aspect of decision-making key to an account of free will.

This is an excellent thread, lots of great comments. You can’t even begin to untangle the semantics of free will, without first clarifying the concept of an embodied “I”.

I just don't really see why unpredictability should be identified with free will. Seems like a very superficial way of thinking about it. I don't really think there is a possible definition of free will that is both coherent and non-trivial.

It’s all pachinko

Hey bro this is a great paper and I’m gonna spend some time to try an see if I can find where it’s wrong but in order to do it right I’m gonna have to go point by point and really think about your argument.

I started with “Infinite computational medium” It seems that being able to think of any number is something that a human might be able to do. When I think more about it though it seems like our “dumb” AI can do a similar thing. ChatGPT can handle really any string of words and provide answers for them. You could give it potentially any number or string of letters to work with. So this isn’t unique to us. This doesn’t refute what you say but I imagine this could be relevant later.

I will myself to not read it.

I read the summary and the excerpts of the pdf, but didn't notice the answer to how free will works.

If a set of neurons fire because they're in a situation, and I lift my finger, at what point has free will created the energy to make that happen?

Said another way, if Free Will it didn't create energy, the physics of the system would have kept it proceeding in the non-finger-lifting path, but free will changed that.

That sounds like an infinite energy source, which would be admittedly neat.

Thanks for the link to the site and the pdf contained therein.

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Superficial attempt to shoehorn a bad position into logical language. You don't need to be out here pushing the idea of free will, we've had millennia of religious zealots and other "intellectuals" trying to figure out how to make this illogical and unworkable position work, and we've already figured out a bunch of ways to dress it up in ways that hide the issues. We don't need you regurgitating arguments that are as old as time and easily debunked. Think harder, go deeper. There is no binary between free will and no free will. Having no free will is functionally and experientially identical to having free will.

My favorite Internet talker says there isn't, so your paper sucks.

I find arguing over free will to be a little pointless, because determinists tend to be people who simply don't understand the concept of emergent properties. It's why things like "the ability to do otherwise" that you mention don't really matter to them - if the universe is at base random and chaotic rather than deterministic, it's still not something that you have control over. Basically, free will is not a property of the universe at a basic level - it just emerges in certain complex systems. It's like "life" or "consciousness" in that respect. But emergent properties are difficult to explain, and a lot of people would rather disbelieve in them rather than admitbto the reality of something they don't understand. Hell, I've seen people argue that consciousness and even life are illusions rather than face having to admit that the world contains things science can't easily explain.

I just found this your post in my email, and the mention of "free will" caught my interest as it can dissimulate in such curious ways. Coming from a phenomenological background, I'm sensing the thinking in your paper is very deeply based on von Bertalanffy's General System theory, which is derivative of theoretical Thermodynamics and — as such — is a particular type of temporality characterized as synchronic. It also appears you’re further delimiting temporality as the notorious "arrow of time,” which only moves forward with its implicit assumptions of “free will” based on definitions of an independent self. This is compared to general synchrony temporality that functions as the “infinitely, eternalized equal sign” that metaphorically can be thought of as a digital video file that can be played forwards and backward.

While I certainly don't mean to be negatively critical, I should mention this notion of "radical free will" vs. "situated freedom" articulated by the Economic Philosopher Charles A. Taylor. Particularly since I'm sensing your image of temporal Asymmetry is a negative dialectic of the diachronic existential temporality Heidegger attempted to explicate as his “care structure of comportment” in Being and Time he was deriving from Henré Bergson's “Durée” and his colleague Heisenberg articulated as the “uncertainty principle.” But, of course, Heidegger didn’t complete his masterwork as he hadn’t sufficiently thought through temporality; instead, he brought the Nietzschean shift to psychological understandings of temporality in an age of “post-truth” into sharp relief that your writing about. At least, that’s my sense reading your paper.

More to the point is that phenomenologically your notion of Temporal Asymmetry is very reminiscent of Emmanual Levinas' notions of Time and the Other that fleshes out synchronic temporality as derivative of existential diachrony — where the future is unknown and arises from what his colleague, Maurice Blanchot, articulated as the Infinite Conversation from which all notions of an independent individual with free-will are “always, already situated in” as “the there” — which both thought of as the “Impossible of the Possible.” Personally, I understand this as what Martin Burckhardt refers to as the "dividual" that must be considered within the context of the "Psychology of the Machine,” meaning the rational edifice’s digital metaphysics of Modernity.

Having "said" that, I think you're quite right in noticing how digital metaphysics simulacrums dissimulate as rational machinations without any inherent notion of value, and “as such,” always require human discrimination to give them meaning (which is not to side-step the arguments of AI's achieving sentience — just for all practical purposes, they are currently "dumb" assistive tools that extend human “creation ex nihilo.”) And that humans are always required to make choices without totally understanding the implications of their choices; more importantly humans are not “fated things” as we live in an open filigree of coherency full of possibility, which I think is what you’re articulating as Infinite Computational Medium; and that this design of coherency is a reflection of our inherent antilogy. What I think is possibly missing is understanding how the notion of an independent self is a kind of artifice reflecting the shifting from “rappresentare to representatio” in the Renaissance, which becomes the Cartesian subject/object split. As you continue investigating your question, you may want to consider how the independent individual exercising free will is always derivative of the community background from which the “dividual” sense of self arises. And, more importantly, how our continued transition into Modernity’s digitalization, as Social Media and the like, continues to bring this into sharper relief.

When was this published?

The first time I tried tickling myself, I expected to experience the urge to laugh. Not experiencing that urge violated my own expectations. However, I would not say that I freely chose to not experience the urge to laugh.

I wrote the last sentence with an expectation of what my behaviors and their experienced outcomes would be. My prediction was as reliable as one might expect, yet I feel like my choice free, or at least more free than the earlier not-experiencing of the urge to laugh.

Since I can observe myself, but resolutions of expectated observations seem orthogonal to my sense of freedom, I doubt violations of expectation say much about free will one way or the other.

What about operant conditioning? Do people have "free will" if their behaviors are unconscious incompetence or unconscious competence? What about trauma responses for folks with PTSD?

If someone is outside their window of tolerance, the prefrontal cortex goes offline and their lower brain regions take over. The person experiencing it feels like their body "took over" until the prefrontal cortex comes back online. Sometimes folks have enough bandwidth to consciously practice a regulation exercise to help their prefrontal cortex come back online faster, but it takes training and practice to accomplish. (See polyvagal theory: Stephen Porges and Deb Dana)

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I agree with you when you say

> One of the central criteria for free will is “Could I have done otherwise?” But because of a temporal asymmetry in human choice, the question makes no sense.

I think that free will is a useful concept that feels true and useful, more true and useful than the alternative of “already written”.

I’ll give the example of watching a recording of a basketball game where I already know the final score. I am watching the deterministic process of things unfold, shots being missed, fouls being called, players getting tired. But at the end of the day, I know that the score will be met, even if that means one team hits 15 three pointers in a row and the other team misses layup after layup. It will happen.

And yet, a coach can say useful things about the deterministic side of things, things like “you’re not turning your hips enough” and “see how the defender turns his head here and there is the possibility for an entry pass?”

But nobody really has anything useful to say about the extra knowledge version where the interplay of actions and decisions is taken off the table. You’re left with inanities like “I guess the home team is going to get hot in the second half” and things like that.

Choosing between which version is more interesting and useful, it’s the deterministic, free will one. (I know that determinism and free will are often put on opposite sides of the debate, so I think it’s interesting that in this thought experiment they are on the same side, against a sort of omniscient pre determination.) Believing in free will let’s us talk about habit formation and deciding who you want to be as a person and all that stuff. It’s William James’s Right to Believe. In a debatable situation, we’re allowed to throw our beliefs behind the worldview that gives us more of a chance of success.

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> There can be no such thing as multiple possibilities which are truly in the present, since we are doing whatever is possi- ble in the present. So any talk of multiple possibilities is referring to the future, not the present.

This doesn’t follow at all. Firstly, if we accept that the present has only one possibility then different possibilities can exist in the past as well as much as in the future (ie they can’t). Secondly, multiple possibilities can exist in the present, if we accept the many worlds hypothesis. It is not necessarily the case that there is only one present.

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I liked the paper. It's a fascinating subject for me, and the one thing my wife and I really disagree upon (and she's a Jungian). I always say "You have all the free will in the world to do the one, exact thing you'll actually do". In my belief, "that one thing" is already written in stone, it just hasn't happened yet but it's the only thing you will do.

Don’t tell me what to do! I have free will.

/joke

Spinoza's rock?

Thanks for sharing! I really enjoyed reading arguments from a position that differs from my own. Maybe unsurprisingly, I didn’t find them compelling enough to change my view and I’ll briefly touch on why.

One of the central aspects of your argument is scale – ignore the micro-level interactions and just discuss things at the relevant level. And you decide “agents” is the relevant level. As you put it “The little mechanical parts that make up a human body are not the relevant sources of those decisions.”

This ignores the undeniable link between brain chemistry and decision making. Hungry? High cortisol levels in your mother during pregnancy? Just dropped acid? Damage to the VMPFC (…or any part of the brain)? Tired? Chronic overstimulation of dopamine receptors? Stressed? You cannot say that the brain is irrelevant to decisions, as decisions are produced in the brain.

The fact we deliberate is also not evidence of free will. Deliberation is taking into account available options, weighing them against some decision making criteria and selecting a decision. Computer programs do the same thing – we just call it calculations instead of deliberation. The difference is we assume deliberation has some “freedom” somewhere in it, whereas calculations don’t.

But where is that “freedom”? The available options are limited by my external environment and my decision making criteria is based on my brain state at the time and history leading up to that point. Past decisions that impact my current situation or brain state would be met with the same issue. We can following the chain back in time to a point where we obviously have no control (i.e. dictated by external factors or when we hit our “first” decision which would be based on our brain state we had no control over forming – genes, in utero environment, situation we were born into, etc).

We certainly make decision that are our own and unique to us. We have “personal will” but I fail to see where the “free” part enters in. Assuming “the agent” as the level to discuss free will and ignoring the neuroscience (that is responsible for it) just begs the question.

The key here is that Laplace's Demon doesn't know what an "otherwise" is. The Demon has no notion of possibility, no notion of an ability (something that "can" happen or that we "can" do). The Demon always knows what will happen and what we will do. If we want to know what will happen we can ask the Demon. But if we ask the Demon, "What can happen?", the Demon will not know what we are talking about. The Demon, being omniscient, has never had any reason to evolve the notion of a "possibility".

It is only because we are not omniscient, like Laplace's Demon, that we have evolved the notion of possibilities. The notion of possibility has these qualities:

1. A possibility exists solely within the imagination. We cannot drive a car across the possibility of a bridge. We can only drive across an actual bridge.
2. A possibility is an essential token for certain logical operations, such as planning, inventing, creating, and choosing. Without this token these operations become impossible. For example: We cannot build an actual bridge without first imagining a possible bridge.
3. Most possibilities will never happen. We may expect one possibility to happen, but we never expect them all to happen.
4. As soon as any possibility is realized, we cease calling it a "possibility" and immediately begin calling it an "actuality". A possibility is the opposite of an actuality.
5. There is a separate language and logic used when speaking in the context of possibilities versus the context of actualities. We smoothly switch from one context to the other when triggered by certain words. For example, when speaking of what "can" happen we are in the context of possibilities, but when speaking of what "is" or "will" happen, we are in the context of actualities.
6. When we know for certain what will happen, we do not use the word "can" or "possible" or "able" and other similar words. It is only when we do not know for certain what "will" happen that we switch to the context of possibilities and use words like "can" or "ability" or "could".

The choosing operation, like addition or subtraction, requires at least two inputs before it can begin. The inputs are called "options" and are logically assumed to be possible to choose. If we believe that we cannot choose an option or that we cannot carry out an option, then it is excluded for not being a "real" possibility. But any option that is choosable and realizable is considered a real possibility. There must, by logical necessity, be at least two real options before choosing can begin.

We must conclude from this that there will always be two inevitable outputs from every choosing operation: (1) The single option that we "will" choose and (2) at least one other option that we "could have" chosen but would not choose.

Thus, "could have done otherwise" will always be true, even though "would have done otherwise" will always be false.

Whenever we discuss what we "could have done", we are switching from the context of actualities to the context of possibilities, which leaves the real world behind and enters the imagination, where all possibilities exist. We are no longer speaking of what we "did" choose to do, but instead we are returning to that point in the past, where we had two or more things that we "could" choose to do. We may even be introducing to this imaginary scenario new possibilities which did not occur to us at the time. The point of this exercise is to evaluate our prior choices in order to make better choices in the future.

Breaking hard determinism unpredictable chaos

Complete Free will sounds too daunting

Plot Twist- ChatGPT wrote this.

It may be that determinism is robust, but that wouldn’t mean that our deliberative processes don’t affect our behavior. Could be that what we experience as removing us from determinism is just as bound by determinist principles as anything else.

I think free will isn't real. Therefore, it was inevitable that I think that.

I'm not convinced by either the part with the apples or the temporal asymmetry.

I thought the point of asking if you could have done otherwise is to highlight that you cannot choose that which does not occur to you. Or that if a door was closed, you could not have gone through it on will alone.

And the apples seems like you're setting up an analogy and writing those against free will as making a mistake.

The apple reflects specific wavelengths into our eye, a cascade of neurons is triggered. We experience red. Just like we experience agency and a kind of "free will" in how we feel about ourselves.

Claiming free will is real, rather than something we experience, is what introduces the scale shift.

I think that it's correct to use a "backward-looking" point of view: after all, we have to draw conclusions about the future on what has already happened.

However, not in the conditional sense of "what could have happened", or "could I have made any other choice?". To me, not only is that inherently unknownable, but it just confuses what is a very simple matter, that things happen for previous reasons (causes), and nothing happens without either a known reason (not free will) or unknown randomness (which is not free will either).

So, take any decision process that is claimed to be a "free will" process, and just work backwards. Ask why that decision was made. Either the acting party knows or doesn't. i they know, voila, there we have out determinant reason (cause). A different reason (cause) would have led to a different result.

On the other hand, the acting party might have no idea why the decision was made, so that can hardly be called free will. It just happened as if the decision had fallen out of the sky (randomness).

I really think it's that simple an issue. For any decision process there will be a series of "why" questions to determine how one chose this or that decision. Determinism or randomness (where randomness simply means we don't yet know the deterministic cause due to lack of knowledge).

1. I don't think unpredictability is a great definition of free will. Its incomplete imo.

2. The compatiblist definition seems what ur closest too, and this seems like a reasonable free will. Most philosophers believe in compatibalist free will.

3. Libertarian free will is absolute nonsense on par with believing in fairies and only a thought in peoples heads because of religious indoctrination. This requires being able to do different if you hit replay... as you correctly state is nonsense.

Redefinitions of free will are kind of useless imo... as ur simply not talking about what others are. Theres way too much baggage on the term free will causing equivocation on redefinition. Whats the point of redefining free will to some infinite state space predictability stuff that has nothing to do with what others mean... why not use a different term to define a different concept? I think the reason is because we piggyback off the baggage of the term "free will".

Theres issues with scale of predictability as well. Example quantum systems and reality may be fundamentally probabilistic, but for any actual mental decisions and things at human scale they fundamentally aren't probabilistic and are predictable. Similarly unpredictable numerous potential neuron states does not mean unpredictable decisions or actions. Also human action is fundamentally highly highly predictable in many ways, our inability to predict things does not mean they are unpredictable. I guarantee when ai can better measure brain states it can certainly predict our outcomes almost perfectly. As neural nets will make this trivial.

If ur definition relies so heavily on predictability, what happens to your "free will" when ai or a psychologist predict your behavior. Do mentally ill people or people with bipolar have more free will because their actions are fundamentally more unpredictable?

I think there is also massive problems with ur infinite state space claims. Taking the amount of neurons then just adding them as a binary is insanely wrong... thats not how neurons work even remotely, or math, or brains, or physical space. Its akin to saying theres 2^^999999999999999 atom combinations in my body... therefore i have infinite potential of body forms i can take. Its preposterous imo. Theres also assumptions like every neuron can interact, despite that obviously not being even close to true as neurons can only interact with the few in their proximity. Also theres the issue of equating mental representations of physical numbers to a binary brain state, as if our understanding of the number 1 = brain state neural binary 01.. this is not what numbers or how our brain represents them. Then there is the issue of even if i grant all this... that immeasurably large number of neuron combinations is still not infinite... its unreachable... BUT its fundamentally NOT infinite.

Maybe i just don't understand what you mean... but then again thats another problem with redefining words with a lot of baggage.

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Scientifically, I think it's hard to argue free will as everything that will ever happen was set in motion from the beginning of time. Every action is just a reaction to something that was set in motion. However, philosophically, I feel free Will exists, but possibly is not able to be proven.

That being said. If we have no free will, but you believe we do have free will. You had no choice as that in itself is your predestined belief.

If we do have free will, but you believe you don't have free will, you are trapped by your belief into a thought process that is closed to all the possibilities in life.

To me, the belief in free will allows for accountability for one's actions and to take control of your destiny. If I am wrong and I don't have free will, I will never know and will have walked the path I was meant to walk.

Humans have free will, but only when observing themselves thinking about free will. That was easy, next!

The real compatibilist objection wouldn't be "you could have done otherwise if you had reasons/wanted to/something", it'd be "you could have done otherwise, period, the natural way we define the word "could", incorporating our uncertainty about our own and each other's thoughts and actions". I think you go into this, but your arguments are way, way too long and complicated when a few words would do the trick.

But did you choose to be born? Did you say somewhere in the ether “hey I’d like to be born” and then you were born? If not, than either by fate or design it was determined you’d be here. The foundation of your existence on earth was determined, not chosen.

Free will is the argument people make hoping that it’s the individual that makes evil decisions toward others, not the design of fate itself.