Free will

The idea of free will has always been puzzling.

I can raise my arm right now, or I could leave it down. I feel like I am in control, but no matter what I choose, I would have chosen the exact same option regardless. Rewind the clock, and my arm will still be at my side.

But, you say, I do control my arm! My brain decides when to signal to my motor neurons to raise or lower my arm. Isn't that basically free will?

Well, what controls your brain? It's your other neurons, all of which follow a predictable physical process of activation. There is no spontaneity, no true will. Everything you do is a function of your current mental state and your environment, both of which are entirely predictable on the macroscopic level. And even if take into account quantum effects, all you are doing is surrendering yourself to complete randomness.

Which certainly doesn't sound like free will.

Free will only makes sense if you accept that humans are necessarily temporal beings. Even if you can only follow one path at any one instance of time, over time, you can raise or lower your arm however you want whenever you want. Now that starts to resemble free will.

But what if you take the story of your entire existence as one singular snapshot? All of your arm raising and arm lowering, which you did over time under the illusion of "free will," suddenly loses all of its freedom and collapses once again to the laws of causation.

But maybe that's why we experience the arrow of time. Perhaps we are beings that have free will, and the only way for free will to exist is by having time slowly unravel.

And as far as we know, time does just slowly unravel. It doesn't jump all over the place or skip forward, even if it feels like that sometimes. So rest assured: you do have free will. That should be an empowering feeling.