Of what is the will free?

Most assertions about freedom of the will sit on a determinate manifold.

The world is classically describable in deterministic terms, not factually, contemporaneously, though. This helps in many fields, like engineering.

In this framework, time is a separate dimension from spatial dimensions. A closer estimate is merging into space-time. Things could be determined here, though relative to each other in the description. The most evidenced theory is quantum mechanics, where the mechanics of reality aren’t mechanistic.

Ergo, the basis of a determinist formulation of free will does not fit the evidence and is incorrect. One could have knowledge of the future — in fact, we do — but it’s indeterminate and partial knowledge.

Our means of knowing or epistemology of the universe is incomplete; our ontology or knowledge of the universe is incomplete; and the universe’s self-interaction or theoretical self-definition or ‘knowledge’ is incomplete.

This quantum indeterminacy gives precision only in probabilities, not certainties or completeness. So, the future is eternally indeterminate, and no complete system knowledge is possible.

However, the current knowledge state can give relative predictive models for future states of worldlines in the universe or reality — not complete and comprehensive models.

So, we can’t know the complete future, and the future is indeterminate based on the best theoretical frameworks: We’re left with the knowledge, though incomplete, of the universe and indeterminacy fuzzing out any willing anyway.

I think the idea of a will is incoherent, too. It implies a self doing the willing, which somehow detaches from physical law. If someone is to somehow know the future, then this changes the previous future.

The act of information embedded into that kind of mind from a future that once was going to be changed the interactions in that mind for future decisions (changes an aspect of the system), which changes the informational universe as a total system.

This becomes a change from the old future to a new future. When that new info enters, you’re dealing with a minutely different person with a subjectivity in that universe. It’s all the same single system, however.

It’d lead to a different universe. The data in that head is now different than the one with ignorance. And the ‘knowledge’ would no longer be sure. So, you couldn’t have acted in any other way, probabilistically.

Or you can take the dogma route to avoid that by asserting a soul or a supernatural self doing something willing. This implies rhetorically, “Of what is the will free?” It’s a Get Out of Jail card in Monopoly.

Yet, the roll of the dice in each iteration of the universe leads to a new possibility every time. It’s one universe, but not necessarily the same one each time.

But even the premise is that it couldn’t be any other way; the universe is probabilistic. Could you be any other way? It could be a wide array of ways. If we have free will, we must extend this to the cosmos as a whole, as we are part of the universe, and math shows that one system is unified.

So, subjectivities in the universe would have to have a universe with laws allowing a degree of free choice and then inheriting this freedom from the universe, which would mean the universe is, in some manner, freely willing. Yet, this willingness would mean a supernatural element to the universe’s identity (definition), as it violates its laws.

The only other option, then, would be a universe with mathematical principles with degrees of freedom and constructed into them a non-computable component in which human willingness could be accessible in an extramaterial sense bound by physical law and emergent and convergent with the universe’s non-computable facets.

Continually, we merely continue to fight for a concept that failed, with continual rejiggering; we are failing, in general, and work from scratch rather than first principles.

Subjectivities follow from the organization of the universe, not a ‘self’ thus there’s nearly no option upon which the will can be free, especially with it requiring both a ‘will’ to exist supernaturally and a ‘self’ to manifest extramaterially.

Subjectivities can have varieties of information for extrapolations about the future as a ‘knowledge’ or a partial informational predictive framework about the arrow of time at the tip and the tail of the arrow, though these do not will, but flow and the informational framework influences the flow of information in their locale of the information, which, in turn, changes the total information framework of Nature with each transformation.

That’s a different style of conversation than a magical ‘self’ and supernatural ‘will’ and so on: It’s grounded in mathematical principles of existence and a clear subjective experience ‘screen’ in an otherwise bland Nature — the total of all.