The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?

There is no resolution to that contradiction. The concept of a “free will” is absurd, and arose because of the psychological illusion of choice. It is a rationalization of how we feel as we exist in the world.

This realization can be difficult to process. The illusion of free will is intensely persistent, even after we’ve accepted that fact. Personally, I try to focus on the higher-order positives that come with this understanding: increased humility, greater compassion for others and oneself and equanimity via acceptance.

I had once strived to grok Zen Buddhism. I think shedding my belief in free will brought me much closer than drugs, meditation or reading religious texts ever did.

If I hallucinate prismatic shapes overlaying everything, it does not follow that there is some non-physical phenomenon which is responsible.

“It is obvious that the world is covered in prisms. It’s obvious that those prisms don’t fit in my eyeballs, therefore the entire scientific edifice is mistaken and we need a metaphysical explanation for my experience.”

>If it’s my choice then doesn’t that mean it’s determined in some way? In which case it’s not free.

It is free in the sense that it's determined by the essense of you (your journey in space-time) - as opposed to some external factor (e.g. someone making a machine that makes you take a certain choice without it having anything to do with your experiences).

It's not some "action at a distance" that has nothing to do with you, your past, your experiences, etc. If that was the case, it wouldn't be _your_ will (whether free or not).

It's free as in not determined by external factors. Factors pertinent to who you are (like where you grew up, your friends, your parents, your experiences and so on - that is, your space-time history) _are_ pertinent to who you are. You can't separate from them, and I wouldn't call separating from them "free".

So it's not free as in "random" or as in "independent of your history deliberation by something external to your body (e.g. a soul) that's unaffected by your past".

WILL, a kind of abstract but measurable power. We don't know exactly what it is, where it is contained, or how it works, but we can intuitively point to somewhere in our world and say, "that person has lots of willpower" or, "that action required lots of willpower to pull off". So it's defined about as well as consciousness is at the moment.

FREE is a loaded word; It can mean free as in no cost, or free as in without restriction. These are interrelated; Restrictions increase cost. Resources diminish restrictions. But no action in the universe is completely without cost nor restriction.

Even when you generate power you're not creating it from nothing, you're extracting it from one form into another, more usable to you. After use it transforms into yet another, waste form, economically unviably unusable to you personally, but not any kind of "absolute waste". One being's waste is another's food.

Even the most powerful systems in the known universe are subject to restrictions of the physical laws. Humans have long theorized the existence of god(s), systems that transcend all limitations. But they have never been observed scientifically. Every system previously thought "ultimate" in any way has been discovered to be a measurable part of our universe. Currently the most "ultimate" thing challenging our comprehension are black holes. Compare them to god(s): They cannot be seen directly. They are the most powerful things we think might exist. They affect everything around them. We know almost nothing about them, besides how they affect the universe.

So then what is FREE WILL? We can intuitively point to instances of it, and it seemes to be some kind of power that facilitates change in the universe. Humans seem to have more of it than other animals, on the basis that we've changed our world in more numerous and complex ways than any other animal. It might be an energy source we can draw from, like the Sun or black holes. Something we're not sure where it's coming from, yet. Once we discover the exact nature of it, what revelations about our universe might we achieve?

Consider that at one point in the evolutionary history of life on this planet, the Sun was this magical, invisible, distant, ambient energy that some organisms learned to harness with a process later named photosynthesis. Plants probably still don't understand the nature of the Sun, but their proliferation of the surface has allowed us to thrive and understand it. And for most of our civilized history we only knew it's a cyclic point energy source that makes everything go more alive when there's enough of it, and increasingly dead when there's too much of it.

Is the Sun an illusion? Of course not. Is free will an illusion? Of course not. We just don't know what it is, yet.

Christ I was clearly tired when I wrote this. Apologies for the horrible grammar.