There seems to be a lot of philosophical discussion around free will (like does it exist) as opposed to everything being determined by previous conditions, including the apparent coincidence of you reading this.
Arguments for determinsim overlook the fact that our brain capacity is limited, so we don't remember the conditions that led us here. And it’s the main argument for the existence of free will. The illusion of free will is based on incomplete knowledge. We just don't remember why we do things. Practically everything we do is repetition of stuff we learned as kids or in school, It's how culture persists. We learn the actions that maintain some cultural aspect, but our limited brain capacity makes it superficial, so we cut corners and call it art. We come in in the middle of the movie and don’t know how the plot developed. We think of the cause of the cause as linear: A butterfly in Brazil flaps it's wings so a mosquito carrying a virus is deflected enough to become a meal for a bird that survives to migrate back to Canada and so forth. The movie "The Matrix" showed it as individual strands, but it couldn't be. It must be 3D because everything is connected to everything. Maybe like a hay bale with tangled strands or even a solid monolith, with no wiggle room anywhere and nothing evolves.
If we had access to something like the Hindu Akashic Record, which is a list of every event that ever happened (whew), then we could easily see how things develop,(where Jimmy Hoffa is buried, who groomed Jack Ruby, etc). It's probably good that we don't because if we did, we'd have to somehow be immune to the fatalism that goes with it. Yay stupidity!
The way we cope is by using pointers or envelopes that contain more envelopes and more detailed info. Then we don't have to open the whole can of worms/furnace, just check the label. and we don't have to constantly re-examine every aspect of trauma or even bliss (we got better & current things to do) so the labels fade. Sometimes frustratingly, sometimes mercifully.
There is an awareness that there are things we don’t know, and it bugs some people. The part that bugs is addiction to endorphins that are produced when we do something right, like eliminate a threat to the addiction. So we chug along making lists and collecting data expecting to eventually stumble onto a grand unified theory of everything. Or maybe our kids will or somebody someday. But honestly that’s not likely w/o a lot of genetic tinkering to improve recall. Before genetic science it was thought possible through meditation and study. Before that it was religious magic where someone could just plug into it with the right incantation. The Bhagavad Gita works too.
I suspect that if we ever access determinism it’ll be through the latest big thing: AI. We as a species, or even conscious beings, have been trying to find it since we learned to congratulate ourselves for our successes. It’ll be the gateway to eternal ecstasy (probably for sure) unless it reveals all the fatal events that people blithely try to ignore, like plastic pollution, entropy, climate change, desperate dictators believing they have to nuke their worries away. Don't worry though.
I’m a great believer in ignorance, because I aparently have no option. Having just come in the middle of this movie, I like to call it free will and I’m pretty sure this is how it works: Total access to determinism is yet to be discovered. All we really have are some models that indicate some kind of (at least partial) continuity of cause & effect (in the way of physical properties like waves and particles, atomic decay, gravity, etc) . Maybe AI will put something together some day, but for now there's no proof for either absolute free will or absolute determinism.
So (feel free to) take your pick :)
My favorite description of god is: He who is completely Unknowable, Inscrutable, Indefinable, All powerful, All knowing, immutable, irreducible, undetectable, on & on. so that God is essentially everything we Don't Know. The more we define him, the more we miss the boat.
It is what it is.
(existentialcomics.com)
