So lets look at free will, if you ask people to argue for or against free will you will get a lot of people pitching on either side. Lets stop though and imagine what happens when you start treating those people who claim humans do not have free will as if they don't have free will. Take their agency away. Well, they get pissed right off, pretty much without exception. Whether you say you believe in free will or not you act as if you have free will and everyone around has free will too.
We get angry when people wrong us and argue they made a CHOICE. That's why we are mad, unnecessary suffering happened. We have laws. Why have laws if people can't choose outcomes and states? Are all the people claiming there is no free will advocating for the removal of all laws?? Without freewill laws are immoral, as are regulations, and values, and norms. Without free will everyone becomes a victim, its the ultimate victimhood stance and if actually truly believed by a person is very destructive. I say truly believed, not this pandering lip service, "we have no free will but I will be very angry if you take my agency away." hypocrisy.
Now to say our will is perfectly free is the height of silliness. What does a perfect being, omnipotent and omniscient lack? The answer here is limitation. As far as I can see limitation is very important for consciousness. Every structure is also a guide and a cage and demand to conform. To build anything one must lower the potentiality of what you are forming from. Giving structure imposes walls and limits. As a last thought, you can't break the bones of an octopus but you also cannot expect an octopus to hold itself rigid. So obviously our will is caged in some ways. Caged by time, Caged by our bodies, Caged by a need for fuel, caged by death, Caged by a need for community. Even caged by fundamental inequality and the laws of the Universe.
Which means we both have free will and don't have free will. We ave the capacity for choice and our choices are sacred to each individual. But we are also acted upon by the universe and must conform to patterns larger than ourselves or risk annihilation. This is very hard, the body and mind have invented a lot of subconscious and and semi autonomous responses to well pretty much everything. These response patterns can go awry or mislabel something causing a person to have a blinding sense of rage they have limited control over. As the anger rises they can choose to isolate themselves, try and fight it head on, give in completely, or resist some what. They might not even realize its happening, could be a dive for mood stabilizers moment like some sort of superbowl touchdown, Grab the meds before the counter goes down and we get a super saiyen killing spree!
Those are all choices though, yes they are getting more and more limited and shitty by the moment, we are rapidly closing down on a bottle neck of "forced action". This is where the law steps in and says insanity, the person could not have been reasonably expected to solve this problem in time and they were no longer the personality we commonly associate with them. Lots of gray areas here, but these moments where truly free will has left us are always prefaced with a rapid erosion of choice. It is in this erosion of choice though that we find many choices.
So whether we truly have free will, its the same as the god argument, definitive proof my be forever beyond us. However we all act out having free will and thus with our actions believe in it (very important point), and we recognize a difference in faulty programming that leads to excusable criminality.
at the very least our civilization depends on us all acting as if we have free will.
Excellent ideas @ktrey this is exactly what I expect to find by writing these type of articles(I guess I can call them that).
Invitation to thought... I happen to agree with this view very much.
A refreshing take (for me at least) on defining our obvious limitations.