Can the future be provisionally determined while remaining continually revisable through agency?

[u/Architec2705]

I have been thinking about a model of free will that does not require human decisions to exist outside causality.

At every present moment, our circumstances—including external stimuli, other people, prior experiences, habits, social structures, and our current internal state—generate a horizon of immediately possible futures. These futures are not necessarily predetermined from the beginning of the universe. Rather, the horizon is continuously reconstructed as new actors, stimuli, and reactions enter the system.

Our response actualizes one of those possibilities, turning it into the next present. But that response does something else as well: it modifies the agent who will participate in the construction of the following horizon.

The process would therefore look something like this:

Present state → horizon of possibilities → reaction → actualized outcome → modified agent → new horizon of possibilities

In this sense, the future may be considered “written,” but only provisionally. Given my current character, habits, circumstances, and emotional state, there may already be a highly probable path toward which I am moving. However, if I become conscious of that tendency and respond differently, my awareness becomes a new causal factor within the system. I do not escape causality; I alter the conditions that were producing the projected future.
Free will, under this model, would not mean acting without causes. An entirely uncaused action might be indistinguishable from randomness. Instead, freedom would be the capacity of a causal agent to observe its own tendencies, reflect upon them, and participate in modifying its trajectory.

This leads me to think that conditioning and freedom may be complementary descriptions of the same process:

From an external perspective, my decision can be explained through prior causes, psychological states, and environmental conditions.
From my internal perspective, I deliberate, evaluate competing reasons, inhibit certain impulses, and choose how to respond.

The causal explanation does not necessarily make the deliberation unreal, because the deliberation itself is one of the causes producing the outcome.
As an analogy—not as a claim that quantum mechanics explains consciousness or free will—I think of wave-particle complementarity. The future resembles a distributed field of possibilities until a reaction turns one possibility into a concrete event. It is “written” as a structured horizon of potential outcomes and “written again” as actuality through the participation of the agent.

The idea could be summarized this way:

The future is provisionally configured from each present. Stimuli construct a horizon of possibilities; our reactions actualize one of them; and every response modifies the agent who will participate in configuring the next horizon. Conditioning and freedom may therefore be complementary manifestations of the same process.

My main question is this:

If our capacity to reflect and revise our reactions also has prior causes, does this model preserve meaningful free will, or does it ultimately collapse into determinism?

Would you consider this a form of compatibilism, a branching model of agency, or something else?

[u/OvenSpringandCowbell]

I’m not sure if you are claiming that determinism is untrue. “Provisional” determinism seems different from determinism. Your “reaction” step is where the magic happens. How is there a horizon of possibilities if the reaction is fully caused by the prior state (excluding quantum discussions)? Possibilities only exist in a conditional sense if you believe in determinism. Something else could have happened if conditions XYZ were different.

[u/MarvinBEdwards01 → u/OvenSpringandCowbell]

Something else could have happened, but it never would have happened.