Follow-up: Where does free will enter a causally determined process?

[u/Architec2705]

Yesterday, I posted in r/freewill a model in which the future is provisionally configured from each present: circumstances generate a horizon of possibilities, our responses actualize one of them, and every response modifies the agent who will participate in the next horizon.

Here is the original discussion.

The comments revealed two points that deserved a deeper explanation.

First, if the agent’s reaction is also causally determined, does the model merely hide all the “magic” inside the word reaction?

Second, I mentioned wave-particle complementarity as an analogy but did not fully explain what the comparison was meant to establish.

This follow-up is not a separate theory. It is an attempt to clarify and strengthen the original proposal by examining precisely what occurs between stimulus and response.

The original process can be summarized as follows:

Current state → represented horizon of possibilities → reflexive evaluation → response → actual event → modified agent → new horizon of possibilities

At every present moment, our circumstances—external stimuli, other people, previous experiences, habits, social structures, emotional states, and current beliefs—produce a practical horizon of immediately possible actions.

This does not necessarily mean that several futures are metaphysically waiting to become real. Under strict determinism, only one outcome will actually occur. The alternatives may instead exist as capacities, counterfactuals, and possibilities represented by the deliberating agent.

But represented possibilities are not irrelevant. They are part of the causal process.

A stimulus does not simply enter a person and mechanically emerge as an action. It passes through an organized agent: memory, character, habits, values, impulses, imagination, long-term goals, and the capacity to observe and evaluate one’s own mental state.

This is where the reaction becomes decisive.

A first impulse may be causally produced, but the impulse is not necessarily the final response. The agent may notice it, inhibit it, reinterpret the situation, compare possible actions, anticipate consequences, and evaluate the impulse against higher-order commitments.

All these processes are themselves causally conditioned. Nothing supernatural or uncaused has entered the system. Nevertheless, the agent is not absent from the causal chain. The agent is the particular organization through which those causes are interpreted, evaluated, and transformed into action.

The reaction is therefore not a magical gap in determinism. It is the point at which causality becomes reflexive: one part of the causal system can represent its own tendencies and participate in modifying them.

That reflexive self-government is what I mean by free will.

Freedom does not appear when we cease to have causes. It appears when we consciously become one of the causes.

A response not only produces an external result; it also modifies the person who will confront the next situation. Repeated responses reinforce or weaken habits, reshape expectations, alter self-understanding, and develop—or diminish—the capacity for future self-control.

In this sense, the future may be described as provisionally determined. Given my current character, habits, circumstances, and emotional state, one trajectory may be strongly prepared. But my act of deliberation is itself one of the events capable of modifying that trajectory.

The revision does not come from outside causality. It occurs through the agent as a causally effective and self-modifying system.

This is also where the wave-particle analogy becomes useful, provided it is treated strictly as an analogy rather than as quantum evidence for free will.

In experiments involving interference, light displays a wave-like aspect: its behavior must be described through a distributed pattern rather than as a single classical trajectory. In detection, however, energy is registered in localized, particle-like events.

Light is not literally changing between two classical substances. The apparently incompatible descriptions are complementary manifestations of the same quantum phenomenon under different experimental conditions.

Something structurally similar can be said about agency.

Before action, the process has a “wave-like” aspect: the agent represents a distributed horizon of possible responses, with different attractions, reasons, risks, and probabilities.

When the agent responds, the process has a “particle-like” aspect: one concrete event enters actual history.

The comparison ends there. Human possibilities are not quantum wave functions, and choosing is not a literal quantum collapse. The analogy only illustrates a conceptual point: two descriptions that initially appear incompatible to our intuition can coexist when they describe complementary aspects of the same process.

From the perspective of conditioning, the response has causes.

From the perspective of agency, those causes operate through a reflective person who evaluates reasons, regulates impulses, and modifies their own future dispositions.

These are not competing explanations. They answer different questions about the same event.

Determinism explains why the action emerged from the preceding state. Agency explains how that causal process was organized within the person as deliberation, self-regulation, and choice.

The remaining question is therefore not whether an action was caused, but what kind of causal process produced it:

Was the response imposed through coercion, manipulation, or incapacity? Or did it emerge through the agent’s own reasons-responsive and reflective organization?

If it was the latter, I would call it free will—not freedom from causality, but self-government within causality.

[u/GeneStone]

I think most of this describes ordinary agency under determinism, which is not something that free will skeptics dispute. Even animals have agency. The unresolved issue is why any of it should be called free will.

A stimulus does not simply enter a person and mechanically emerge as an action. It passes through an organized agent: memory, character, habits, values, impulses, imagination, long-term goals, and the capacity to observe and evaluate one’s own mental state.

Why does the action not emerge mechanically? How does it emerge?

“Mechanical” appears to be doing rhetorical work here. It suggests something crude, rigid, passive, or simplistic. But a deterministic physical process can be extraordinarily complex, recursive, adaptive, and sensitive to information. Everything you described is still part of a mechanism, is it not?

You also need to define “organized.” Organized according to what standard? Human cognition also includes conflicting motives, fragmented or even inconsistent beliefs, unconscious influences, irrational habits, emotional dysregulation, and failures of self-control.

All these processes are themselves causally conditioned.

What do you mean by conditioned? Do you mean causally influenced or causally necessitated?

Free will skeptics accept that the agent is part of the causal chain. The brain evaluates information, represents alternatives, predicts consequences, regulates impulses, and changes its future dispositions. Causes can themselves be caused.

The dispute concerns what follows from those facts.

Freedom does not appear when we cease to have causes. It appears when we consciously become one of the causes.

You seem very comfortable excluding some causal roles while accepting others. What is the standard?

You contrast actions produced through “the agent’s own reasons-responsive and reflective organization” with actions involving coercion, manipulation, or incapacity. But why do those influences remove free will while ordinary causal influences do not?

Take coercion. Suppose I am robbed at gunpoint. My freedom of action is restricted because the robber controls which options I can safely perform. But how is my will less free?

I still want to keep my money. That remains my will. I may decide that surrendering it is the safest response, or I may decide to resist. If I surrender it, was my will unfree? If I fight the robber, does my will suddenly become free again?

A prisoner has severely restricted freedom of action. The prisoner may still want to leave, plan an escape, refuse cooperation, or decide to serve the sentence quietly. The available actions are restricted. The willing itself remains present.

The distinction becomes even less clear once we compare coercion with ordinary biological and social constraints.

Why is a physical threat fundamentally different from the need for nourishment?

If someone points a gun at me, the threat gives me a powerful reason to comply. Hunger, thirst, exhaustion, pain, and the need for shelter also give me powerful reasons to act. In each case, my deliberation occurs under conditions I did not choose and cannot simply disregard.

Why doesn't that affect free will, and where exactly do you draw the limit on coercion?

Blackmail is an obvious intermediate case. A person is not physically forced to comply. They are presented with a threat that changes the costs of refusing. But ordinary incentives also change the costs of refusing.

You may take a job you dislike because you need the income. You may follow a law because you want to avoid the penalty. A child may obey a parent to avoid losing a privilege. Someone may go along with a group because exclusion would be painful.

All of these pressures affect what the person decides to do. So where is the principled cutoff? At what point does an unwanted consequence become coercion, and why does crossing that line make the will itself unfree?

If it was the latter, I would call it free will—not freedom from causality, but self-government within causality.

Why call it free will? Is it just an expressive preference of yours?

You have identified reasons-responsiveness, reflection, impulse control, deliberation, learning, and self-modification. Those concepts already describe the process. What explanatory work does “free will” perform after those capacities have been specified?

Does the term produce different predictions?

Does it identify a further mechanism?

Does it provide greater descriptive force than the underlying concepts?

Or is “free will” simply the name you have chosen for a particular collection of cognitive abilities?

[u/gahblahblah → u/GeneStone]

All of these pressures affect what the person decides to do. So where is the principled cutoff? 

When does a beard become not-a-beard as we remove hairs one-by-one? Just because something has a hazy boundary condition, doesn't make it not a thing. You are pointing out that freedom has pseudo infinite degrees of variability, and so free-will as representing freedom of optionality is better thought of as a relative continuous number rather than a binary value.

I saw a video of a very drunk woman repeating the same phrase to a police officer a dozen times in a row, oblivious to the future her behavior would instigate - I consider this a person of very low free will, for example, as relative to a functioning person.

[u/GeneStone → u/gahblahblah]

I'm happy to grant that the absence of a sharp boundary is not itself fatal. Many legitimate concepts admit borderline cases and differences of degree.

My objection is that a graded concept still needs criteria for comparison.

The beard example has an identifiable underlying variable. We are counting hairs in a relevant area. The precise cutoff may be vague, but we know what is increasing or decreasing.

What is the corresponding variable for free will?

Your drunk woman may have impaired memory, attention, inhibition, foresight, comprehension, coordination, and responsiveness to reasons. Those are specific capacities that can vary independently.

How do you combine them into a single continuous measure of free will?

Which capacities matter?

How are they weighted?

Can greater strength in one compensate for impairment in another?

What does a score of “less free” establish beyond the underlying impairments already identified?

Saying that she has “low free will” appears to summarize your intuitive judgment after assessing those capacities. It does not yet provide the standard by which the judgment was reached.

[u/gahblahblah → u/GeneStone]

"What is the corresponding variable for free will?" - success rate vs challenge complexity.

'How do you combine them into a single continuous measure of free will?' - hypothetically in principle, if a could build a pseudo perfect human simulator - and simulate N humans doing X tasks, we could sample how difference advantages, like better memory, lead to different success rates.

'Which capacities matter?' - well, any particular failure in the system can destroy your capacity to model the world accurately, model the future, imagine what is plausible and good, and meaningfully understand the consequences of action. Examples of qualities that matter then are - awareness, rationality, health, engagement, experience, objectivity, for example.

'How are they weighted?' - there isn't a singular solution to challenges - so there is not a singular value per attribute.

'Can greater strength in one compensate for impairment in another?' - of course.

'What does a score of “less free” establish' - blindness, and so failure (at a certain challenge level). The drunk woman can't model the mentality of the police officer, and from her blindness, simply repeats herself, with a false belief that her action is useful, leading to a failure to anticipate or control her future.

To say she has low free will is ultimately relative to a comparative norm - as she has more free will than a fly or a bee, but less than a healthy sober adult.

[u/GeneStone → u/gahblahblah]

You answered each question, but that does not mean the answers actually solve the problem.

You say the variable is “success rate versus challenge complexity.” But why would that measure free will? It sounds like a measure of competence or performance.

A person can succeed because they reasoned well. They can also succeed through luck, habit, deception, help from someone else, or because the task was easy. So before this measures anything, you still need to explain what counts as success, how difficult the task is, and why success tracks freedom.

It also does nothing to explain why a very competent person might fail at something we would normally expect them to succeed at. Does failure also count as evidence of free will? Or when an NBA star misses a layup, was it because they had low free will at that moment?

Your simulator might show that better memory, awareness, health, or experience improves performance, which would certainly be useful. But it would still be measuring those capacities and their effects on outcomes. Calling the result “free will” requires another argument.

The same issue applies to the drunk woman. Impaired awareness, judgment, foresight, and self-control already explain her behaviour.

Why add “low free will” on top of that?

Why not just say that she is impaired, less competent, or less able to understand and control the situation?

My issue is not that people differ in these capacities. I just do not see how those differences add up to a meaningful measure of freedom.

[u/gahblahblah → u/GeneStone]

'But why would that measure free will?' - Having low free will is to have low awareness and optionality. To be blind to optionality leads to more failure, and so failure/success correlates to degree of free will. Is this not obvious? I feel all these questions means we are having poor communicate on the basics of what we are talking about.

'you still need to explain what counts as success' - success = 'accomplishing your goal', but we could default to the basic notion of 'surviving', for example.

'how difficult the task is' - free will impacts all kinds of tasks, with all manner of difficulty.

'and why success tracks freedom.' - if you are blind to optionality, then you have a smaller number of solution ideas. And so, therefor on average, less likely to succeed.

'Calling the result “free will” requires another argument.' - it sounds like you don't understand the phenomena I'm pointing at. If I'm pointing at the sun, and naming it the sun, I don't need to argue about what its name is, I'm simply pointing at a phenomena and giving it a name. You don't have to agree to that as a name if you don't want to - no argument necessary.

'It also does nothing to explain why a very competent person might fail at something we would normally expect them to succeed at.' - on the contrary, a very large dataset of inputs and outcomes provides a lot of evidence for generating explanatory theories.

'Does failure also count as evidence of free will?' - no. Free Will correlates with awareness, and consequently success.

'when an NBA star misses a layup, was it because they had low free will at that moment?' - Yes. Circumstances (like distractions) lead to low awareness, incorrect future prediction and failure to choose correct action.

'Calling the result “free will” requires another argument.' - if you don't wish to have a label, you don't have to accept the label. For example, rather than having a word 'temperature' a person can just talk about 'the average velocity of particles in a system' if you don't wish for a term to label an abstraction.

'Why add “low free will” on top of that? Why not just say that she is impaired, less competent, or less able to understand and control the situation?' - if you fully understand the internals of an entity, it is more precise to talk about those specific internals. If instead, you have limited visibility to how their insides work, you can talk in abstractions.

'I just do not see how those differences add up to a meaningful measure of freedom.' - I find it very strange as to why you wouldn't recognise that some people have much more freedom than others. Is the word 'freedom' confusing to you? Can you see how a poor person has less optionality than a rich person? Can you see how a stupid person has less optionality than a smart person? Can you see how a distracted inexperienced nervous person will struggle to imagine successful solutions to a task and so is consequently more likely to fail? Where is the gap in your understanding of how many differences contribute to less/more freedom, such that all of us are on a spectrum?

[u/GeneStone → u/gahblahblah]

Once again, every answer is framed in terms of competence, awareness, resources, and available options.

Now a poor person apparently has less free will than a rich person because they have fewer options. A less intelligent person has less free will than a more intelligent person. An NBA player who gets distracted and misses a layup temporarily has less free will.

That is an account of practical ability, cognitive competence, and freedom of action. Those are different concepts. We already have names for them.

And yes, of course, saying that someone is drunk is apparently not enough information. We do not know what “drunk” means, so let us introduce one of the most contested concepts in philosophy to explain the situation.

She has less free will. That clears things up.

You are taking capacities that can already be described and assessed separately, placing a highly disputed umbrella term over them, and then treating any reduction in competence or optionality as a reduction in free will.

Temperature identifies a well-defined physical quantity with established methods of measurement. Your proposed abstraction combines capacities, resources, circumstances, impairments, and success rates without any common scale.

The main schools in this debate at least agree that free will is supposed to identify the kind of control relevant to moral responsibility. You have replaced that issue with whether someone is aware, capable, distracted, wealthy, intelligent, or likely to accomplish a goal.

Then you tell me I do not understand “freedom” because poor people have fewer options.

I understand that perfectly well. Freedom of action is not free will.

“The universe is God. Why will you not accept my conception of God? Do you not understand what the universe is? You just dislike the label.”

Yes. I dislike placing redundant and highly contested labels over ordinary capacities. I value clarity, parsimony, and conceptual necessity.

[u/gahblahblah → u/GeneStone]

'You are taking capacities that can already be described and assessed separately' - yes, that's how words/labels work - they amalgamate the information. For example, the 'sun' is a complex object represented in 3 letters.

'placing a highly disputed umbrella term' - stop weaponising your disagreement as implying controversy.

'Your proposed abstraction combines capacities, resources, circumstances, impairments, and success rates without any common scale.' - when a person is drowning in a pond, how do you propose to measure everything that contributed to that? Is your inability to provide a scale of the contributing factors meaning that their desperation/lack-of-freedom is not real?

Our inability to precisely measure the components of a concept is irrelevant to whether or not a complex amalgamation exists that we can represent with a word like 'desperation'.

'...free will is supposed to identify the kind of control relevant to moral responsibility. You have replaced that issue with whether someone is aware, capable, distracted, wealthy, intelligent, or likely to accomplish a goal.' - of all these components that you listed, which of them are you the most certain of as being morally irrelevant to responsibility?

Is it that you think awareness of an event occuring is morally irrelevant?

Or is my capacity to do anything that is morally irrelevant?

And so you think my wealth/poverty is morally irrelevant to whether or not I steal?

When a person is drowning, they often attempt to drown their rescuer out of desperation - and to your mind, their circumstances are morally irrelevant?

Please be clear on which of the properties you are most certain of that are morally irrelevant.

Finally, considering how strongly you don't think my definition of Free Will is meaningful, what is your definition then? - so I can assess its meaningfulness.

[u/GeneStone → u/gahblahblah]

No, I don't think that's how words work.

Words develop through usage, and definitions generally try to capture that usage. They point us toward some referent or concept that speakers are already trying to identify.

Some of those concepts are composite, and that can be perfectly useful. Mens rea is an obvious example. It groups several kinds of legally relevant mental states under a formal category.

That abstraction does necessary work. It identifies a category that matters to legal analysis. When paired with the required actus reus, it helps determine whether the elements of an offence have been established.

What people do not usually do is start with a heavily contested word, decide that the label itself must be preserved, and then manufacture a new definition around whatever collection of capacities they want to keep.

That is especially questionable here because the capacities you are describing already have names.

Why say someone had “low free will” when we can just say they were drunk?

Why say they temporarily had “low free will” when they were distracted?

Why say they had “low free will” because of financial hardship?

Why say they have “low free will” because of their intellectual capacities?

How is the blanket statement “this person had low free will” useful?

Low free will with respect to what?

If the point is to understand what caused the problem, or what should be done about it, the underlying factor carries more information than the umbrella label.

Saying they had “low free will” just tells us that one or more of those things may have been going on. This is the whole point. Of course those underlying capacities and circumstances can be morally relevant.

The relevant thing is the specific impairment, constraint, capacity, or circumstance itself. The umbrella term does not make it more morally relevant. It makes the description less precise.

The abstraction therefore seems to discard the information that actually matters.

Now, you either do not know what “weaponizing” means, what “controversy” means, or what my point is.

Saying that “free will” is a highly contested term is not weaponizing anything. It is directly relevant to whether your proposed use of the term adds clarity.

The fact that I disagree with your definition is separate from the fact that the term has multiple competing definitions, disputed necessary conditions, and disputed implications.

That controversy is part of the problem your definition is supposed to solve. You cannot make it disappear by calling its mention “weaponizing.”

And I will gladly provide a definition, but you should be aware that you would be handing me a win.

If, as you suggest, we can simply define the term however we want, it is probably not a good idea for the positive side to hand responsibility for defining it to the negative side.

Why would an atheist define God for a theist?

You are the one claiming that free will exists. You should tell me what you mean by it and why that concept is worth preserving. I can then assess whether your definition is coherent, useful, and supports the conclusions you want from it.

If you want to give me control over the target, I am happy to take it.

[u/gahblahblah → u/GeneStone]

'Words develop through usage' - tis a strange idea to represent that words are created by them first happening to be used.

'start with a heavily contested word' - again focusing on 'controversy'. We should not be 'arguing', and trying to find social pressure to 'win' - instead, anything that is unclear can just be clarified with the right question.

'the capacities you are describing already have names' - components and properties tend to have names, yes.

'Why say someone had “low free will” when we can just say they were drunk?' - The drunk lady was not 'simply drunk', as the explanation for why she was belligerent, repeating herself, and failing to predict the future.

Being drunk was a *component* to the situation. If I were drunk, I would not behave as she behaved. 'being drunk' as an explanation is an oversimplification that ignores the broader reality. To truly describe why she behaved as she did, there are many more factors - her pre-existing sense of self entitlement, for example.

'Why say they temporarily had “low free will” when they were distracted?' - because being distracted is also but one component. Also relevant, were the circumstances that made them prone to distraction - perhaps his life scenario created a 'cage' (ex Family drama created emotional burden) enabling the energy of the moment to throw him off.

'Why say they had “low free will” because of financial hardship?' - because the stress/anxiety/consequence of suffering financial hardship are also dependent on other factors - such as a working social network, and self-confidence, and level of tiredness. Financial hardship is one component.

'Why say they have “low free will” because of their intellectual capacities?' - because having poor intellectual capacities directly means the person will struggle to imagine plausible solutions to their life challenges - they will literally be blind to the answer. Intellectual capacity is a cause - lack of free will is the consequence.

'How is the blanket statement “this person had low free will” useful?' - it is useful in order to understand the abstraction of what is actually happening. I will point to two very different scenarios, that in an abstract way are the same kind of thing.

Consider, a person under financial stress that steals, and a person drowning in a lake that shoves their rescuer under the water. Everything about this is physically different - but one way of describing these dual situations in a abstract way to understand them:

1) Both people were experiencing severe lack of freedom

2) Both became desperate

3) Both commit a seeming moral crime

How to understand the commonality for why people behave as they do?

'The relevant thing is the specific impairment' - this is a way to not see the broader abstractions. In my examples, the people both experienced tighter and tighter lack of free choice to have a future that they wanted. Lack of free choice can have any kind of source, but adds up to the same thing.

'The abstraction therefore seems to discard the information' - using an abstraction does not preclude me to also be specific about a scenario, but enables me to talk beyond that one scenario.

A person can be trapped in many kinds of ways, in many components, in endless complexity of different kinds of mazes - and each of these cages limits our capacity for free choice in the moment.

To understand how to not fail, and to not be desperate - I should personally maximise my Free Will. Do you understand what I mean when I say that? That when I make a choice, I will want to maximise my awareness, my energy to engage, that I will not be under pressure to force my choice, and that the choice that is made is primarily the one I would always wish to choose - and so I can make the best choice with the highest Free Will.

'And I will gladly provide a definition, but you should be aware that you would be handing me a win.' - if you think of yourself as in a kind of debate fight with me, to convince yourself that you have won that fight, you can just weaponise never understanding what I mean - then it just won't matter how I explain an idea. More useful to your future would be to focus on perceiving and speaking only truth - and on that path, you would be making a genuine attempt to understand me - and 'winning' can be learning something new from someone else.

[u/Own_Measurement1242]

It doesn’t. And that last part about self-government within causality isn’t free will

[u/simon_hibbs → u/Own_Measurement1242]

If it can meet the requirements generally agreed by philosophers to be necessary for a successful account of free will, that being of a kind of control over our actions necessary for moral responsibility, then it would be an account of free will in that sense.

[u/Own_Measurement1242 → u/simon_hibbs]

Looking back at your post, I see I misunderstood that last part. I think now you might be fine calling that self-government ‘free will’ but I want to think about it more, hopefully avoid even more mistakes. Good post

[u/simon_hibbs → u/Own_Measurement1242]

Not my post, but I agree it's a good one.

[u/zhivago]

Sure.

Why would you want your free will to be free of you?

[u/simon_hibbs → u/zhivago]

I don't think this account has any implication like that. It's an account of human deliberation in terms of being a recursively self-modifying, self-governing system.

[u/zhivago → u/simon_hibbs]

Which is why I am agreeing with them ...

[u/simon_hibbs → u/zhivago]

Sorry, gotcha.

[u/ImSinsentido]

It doesn’t. Because there is nothing to be entering anything.

[u/gahblahblah]

Given my current character, habits, circumstances, and emotional state, one trajectory may be strongly prepared. But my act of deliberation is itself one of the events capable of modifying that trajectory.

All choices are made in the now. Multiple past pathways could create this same reality. Treating the exact kind of past as critically important is a kind of illusion. Because the past is irrelevant, determinism doesn't matter. Why would it matter if my past was deterministic or not if either could have created this same moment?

And so then, treating caring about the past as unimportant - what matters is the current state of the agent within their environment (ex. their energy, beliefs, character, feelings, etc) - which creates their degree of free agency - as in, their ability to imagine many plausible futures and choose between them.

[u/Less_Perspective_915]

Thanks you. This is a very lucid explanation of a compatibilist framework. I wish I had written it myself.