It's closer to external predisposing factors steering me towards that conclusion.
For the most part, I've been good at not letting anything get between me and what I want. I'm very young and have a fair amount accomplished in my life. My only barrier I see hindering me is that I'm too concerned with going to fast and am prone to overlook some of the simple pleasures in life
any evidence to back that up? im inclined to trust my senses over a theory unless its backed by a lot of evidence. and there is evidence of free will.
imagine a machine that tells you the future. the machine predicts you're gonna pm me in 5 minutes. you can break the machine by refusing to do it. and vice versa if the machine predicts otherwise.
The machine is what would skew the probability and ought to be factored into it's prediction. To not do so would make it a shitty predictor. If it did it's job, it'd factor it giving you that data into it's answer, and following that the answer would come true. It'd just be guessing based on liklihoods otherwise.
In my opinion (solely that), free will is a manifestation of the ego. We believe we have control from being able to see our own past (through a skewed, everchanging lens with a tangential point of reference, but that's another point entirely) and assume that this gives us control of future outcomes. We're really quite automatic, but we also are control freaks that need to believe that we're important and steering our own fates. In reality, our thoughts make themselves and we're just along for the ride no differently than any other animal, purely conditioned and nudged by our original schematic tweaked by a past we cannot change. Everything we do is because of smaller things adding up to it, predisposing it, not choice. Just like how we cannot change the past, we cannot change the future, and believing that we can simply is from us being ignorant of said future.
Everything we decide on can be dissected down into how that choice was made for us. Who you'd most recently spoken to, what mood you were carrying from prior events, what you ate an hour ago, it's all just a complex equation of factors too numerous for us to account for all of. From my viewpoint, too much tends to seem too predictable and expected to be otherwise.
In many ways, the notion of choice and chaos being real is akin to thinking magic isn't trickery and voodoo isn't science.
Well, I believe I posted a few things in the past on this very thing. Newcomb's paradox and whatnots. The one interesting thing is that from one's own perspective, it seems you have free will only because you cannot predict your own decision until it's made, sort of. Third parties can witness the casuistry to formulate a deterministic-looking path of decision making, but not the individual themselves. Something like that. I'm undecided on the issue, personally, right now. ;)
Chris Langan's "Resolution of Newcomb's Paradox". (Yeah, it's the author of the CTMU.)
WW3 stated: source post
control is a hard thing to define. what we do know is that we work towards gettinf what we want. and we make decisions based on what we want.
What we want isn't really up to us either.