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?
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....