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?
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.