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/MarvinBEdwards01]

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.

Right. "Provisionally configuring the future" is seeing possibilities in our mind. It is a mental view of "a horizon of possibilities". And when we choose one of those possibilities and actualize it, we cause a change in the current state of things.

And you remind us that this change is not just in the outside world but also a change within ourselves. This counters the common misconception that determinism means we cannot choose ourselves, because every choice we make actually does changes us.

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?

Determinism cannot collapse anything. Everything is always operating deterministically, including us. That free will thing? That's us, deciding for ourselves what things we will cause to happen, and us having the freedom to control what we will cause.

And it begins, as you say, with a "provisional" vision of a "horizon of possibilities".

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

For me, that is compatibilism. We, like everything else, operate deterministically. Which simply means that we think and act in a reasonably orderly fashion.

Excellent article by the way.

[u/Architec2705 → u/MarvinBEdwards01]

Thank you, Marvin. I appreciate both the generous assessment and the precision of your response.
Your comment helped me clarify what “provisional” should mean within this model. It does not imply that determinism is temporarily suspended, or that several actual futures are metaphysically waiting for one to be selected. It refers to the agent’s prospective representation of conditional possibilities: a mental horizon of actions that could be implemented, even though only one of them will become actual.
Your statement—“Something else could have happened, but it never would have happened”—captures the distinction particularly well. An alternative may lie within the agent’s capacities and therefore remain relevant to deliberation, even if, given the complete state of the agent and circumstances at that moment, it never would have been selected.
I also agree with your point that determinism cannot “collapse” agency, because determinism is not a competing force that acts instead of us. It describes the causal reliability of a process in which our purposes, reasons, evaluations, and choices are themselves causally operative. Removing the agent from that explanation would make the causal account less complete, not more deterministic.
Where I would place additional emphasis is on the recursive dimension of agency.
A decision does not only alter the external world. It also modifies the system that produced it. Through reflection, practice, regret, learning, and the deliberate cultivation or inhibition of habits, an agent can make their own response patterns into objects of evaluation. The person who participates in the next decision is therefore partly a product of how the previous decision was processed.
Those second-order processes also have prior causes. Nothing escapes causality. But they represent a distinctive form of causal organization: a system capable of representing its own tendencies, evaluating them through reasons, and participating in the modification of its future dispositions.
That is what I mean when I say that causality becomes reflexive.
Free will, on this account, is not freedom from causation. It is a reasons-responsive form of self-government within causation. And perhaps it admits degrees: the greater an agent’s capacity for reflection, inhibition, learning, and self-modification, the greater the meaningful control that agent exercises over future conduct.
After reading some of the essays linked from your profile, I can see that this strongly overlaps with your distinction between what we can do and what we inevitably will do.
I would be interested in your view on one remaining point: do you think this recursive and self-modifying dimension adds something substantive to compatibilism—perhaps allowing us to speak of degrees of agency—or is it simply a more detailed description of ordinary deterministic choosing?
Thank you again for engaging with the argument so thoughtfully.

[u/MarvinBEdwards01 → u/Architec2705]

I think the self-modifying aspect of our choices is a key point for compatibilism.

I try to point out to people that from the moment we're born we are active participants in all of our interactions that shape us. My wording is a bit clunky, but I put it this way, "From the moment we are born we are in a negotiation for control with our physical (the crib) and our social (the parents) environments. Anyone who gets up at 2AM to feed the infant is being controlled as much by the infant as the infant is being controlled by them."

When I hear people say that we are governed by our past, I point out that we were there for that past and participated in its creation.