What You (Want to)* Want

IMO free will is only the guarantee by God that he won't be messing with our program while it's running. Ie. He won't use His debugger to change our state, or make us do things that are not in our programming. Free will is us programs running NOT under God's debugger.

This is not to say that we don't have a say in our ultimate wants, assuming we can't change them. Perhaps we (our soul) still decided on them originally.

If you're desires are not too weird, you can certainly find a fixpoint such that what you Want-To n times> Want is the same as what you Want. I'm not seeing any paradox here.

You can do whatever you want, but the wanting is the hard part.

Once you realize what something truly requires, the interest usually dries up.

TFA says this is the wrong model, and tries to get closer to something else. But it's right enough that it's helped me to avoid huge amounts of wasted effort and forced me to consider what I truly want.

I probably don't have much to contribute, but I wanted to share some thoughts on the concept of free will Paul seems to brush against.

I found the concept of free will at odds with my opinion that the brain and physics are very deterministic. But one thing the "free will doesn't exist" people tend to forget, is that the brain rewires and changes itself.

You are destined to do what your brain is wired to do, but doing anything rewires your brain. Some say even thought is able to rewire your brain. The number of possible brain states at T+n increases exponentially. So our constant reconfiguration of the brain is our way out of determinism. That is, free will does exist in a completely deterministic universe [1]

I shared because maybe someone can suggest some reading material along these lines from someone much smarter than me. But for now, I enjoy the idea that I have complete freedom in a very ordered universe.

1: there are some interesting corollaries to this idea. One among them is that the interaction between other entities with similar free will (other people) increases the complexity even further. We are agents of chaos.