Gloaming Crackle

In essence, to suggest that there’s free will is to suggest that there’s objectively more to us than the matter and energy we’re built out of. As special and wonderful and complex as our systems are, I don’t really see much basis for the conclusion that we’re somehow removed from the causal framework that involves and guides all the other masses in the universe. All our matter and all our energy comes from somewhere. True, it’s gotten to be where it is through a set of reasons so complex as to be untraceable; still, unless you start throwing in something mystical that elevates us above the material plane, that’s pretty much all we’ve got to work with.

That said, there’s not much we can do about the situation, mind, body we’re handed other than the best we can. As it turns out we’ve been wired to be generally curious, self-checking entities with the capacity to make decisions based on a complex web of personal biology, experience, reason, and current circumstances. That we’re wired this way for a reason, and that to an extent our choices would seem to be inevitable based on the infinitely complex circumstances behind them, shouldn’t be taken as damning or directive, as those circumstances are so complex and so much of them is outside our conscious control that really for practical purposes “free will” is as good a sketch as any. It’s that abstraction that makes us people, rather than a bunch of polygons depicting gritty reality.

Lack of control over lack of control doesn’t exactly equal self-control. I guess it’s close enough for practical purposes, though.

EDIT:

Not necessarily. There are plenty of philosophies of free will that are based off of the inherent randomness of quantum mechanical shit. I don’t know how valid they are, and while it is most likely the case, I don’t think it’s completely safe to say that the laws of the universe would prohibit free will from existing (seeing as how we do not, you know, fully understand the laws of the universe).

That’s an interesting point: subatomic wacky shit.

I don’t see where that really ties into human psychology, though, where all our decisions do have some basis, conscious or not. I don’t know if anyone’s capable of acting completely randomly. Even flipping a coin and following its result is a deliberate decision. Hell, it’s more deliberate than a lot of decisions we make.

Though the subatomic wacky shit might well play some role in the mechanics of consciousness; getting this stuff running at all. That’s a pretty strange phenomenon itself.