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I think there is free will, but like most things in life, it is a privilege not everyone has; many people are constrained by invisible shackles. I would wager that evil still exists, but it requires full awareness of what one is doing when perpetrating it, and so it is more rare than we think.

(Of course, this is just an opinion.)

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I share a similar philosophy... that free will is choosing between the options we recognize given by our immutable past. Who we are is mostly an accumulation of chance events and responses running on autopilot. Most moments don't matter, some nudge us in different directions, others snowball into defining our eulogies.

Hard work enables us to leverage chance events (if we recognize them) into some probability of success, but the rest is outside of our control. Life is chaotic. We're all just pieces of a big entropy machine.

It's the butterfly effect at scale.

The main counter is you're not choosing when everything is based on the proceeding event with the variables assigned at birth. Nothing is chance when understanding the universe is mechanical in a sense like a clock. Hard work is just a psychological pattern adapted from how you were conditioned with the mindset you developed by fate.

Determinism is an interesting question... we exist at a fascinating scale, in between lower orders significantly influenced by non-deterministic forces and higher orders where determinism seems to prevails.

The chemical reactions driving cellular machinery is influenced by quantum randomness, while astronomical scales seem to be entirely deterministic (though chaotic). For example, radioactive decay influences both DNA replication and planetary orbits (via heat-driven plate tectonics)... but it seems that any randomness is washed out by the sheer volume of matter at the planetary scale.

We sit right in between those orders. Our bodies are an interconnected web of non-deterministic cells cooperating to maintain higher-level order and some approximation of determinism. Obviously I can't say with certainty, but I find free will to be more likely than not.

I think there is no absolute free will. Some are more free than others. Money, mindset, and circumstance heavily influence how free your will is. Some argue you were always going to decide what you were going to decide , unconvincingly to me, but the role of the conscious mind and what it actually is, we are still discovering.

You were fated to fall into that belief by all the preceding events and variables assigned to you at birth. Full awareness in a sense makes you the perfect you. Yet, you became who you are by destiny. Evil does not exist in the sense of understanding everything is metaphorically mechanical. You have to blame the complete system when you view something as evil and which nobody every seems to do.

> I think there is free will ... many people are constrained by invisible shackles

This is a contradiction. "Free will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will

That's entirely consistent with what I said: many people don't have free will. But free will does exist.

This is an extremely articulate and beautiful perspective. How did you acquire it?

I'm probably gonna get downvotes for appearing to bask in this attention (which I didn't expect).

In this case it's based on a heuristic. I can't at all model human will so it seems reasonable to start with it as infinite (since it's so vast and appears virtually limitless, the very reason I can't model it in the first place) and model in the constraints.

edit: also, I am a Christian and that probably factors into my view subconsciously, although I am certain many non-Christian views would arrive to the same conclusion.

I suspect there's no definition of free will that isn't at least implicitly religious. It seems to me that what most people want free will to be is supernatural - something like a soul that would exempt their identity from being bound to a purely physical universe.

Jansenism emphasized on predestination and is unique in being contrary to all the religions using free will for an alternative expression. Thought it might be worth mentioning because someone might find it interesting.

It's not beautiful because it's wrong and results in people continuing to be under an illusion. The madness that continues around believing people make their own choices and should be punished is the result of this magical thinking which should be eventually classified as a mental illness. Since society hurts people who had no control and when under this horrible belief.

People will do "evil"(as harming allies) if:

1) they are unsustainable (like harming allies) - not sure can be fixed

2) Don't have enough knowledge(broken perception) to do differently.

3) ROI of doing evil is too high.

etc.

Could you point to scenarios where aknowledging non-existence of free will could help us? IMO it doesn't matter.

EDIT: Actually I think that existence of concept of free will is positive because it makes people compute choices better (even assuming free will does't exists and computation is deterministic)

The understanding of free will is an illusion has brought clarity and forgiveness into my life; towards all the persons who wronged me. I became aware to how it would be irrational to seek revenge of some sort against persons who deeply wronged me to disfigurement.

Short summary: I’m transgender and couldn’t transition when needed and to live a life of less pain because of others.

Arareness towards understanding people are who they are without any control brought me to realizing “who the best me would be” in the current situation. A person who cannot blame directly the person who wronged me. I might end my life by suicide though. So the impact of what others did to me was great and I still trumped it.

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