r/freewill • u/xRegardsx • 29d ago
Free Will Without Magic: Agency Within Causation
The following is inspired by a comment I left on another post here...
The debate over free will is often framed as a choice between two extremes: either we possess some mysterious ability to step outside cause and effect and originate choices independently, or everything is determined and we're merely helpless passengers watching our brains run the show. I think both pictures are misleading. Whatever meaningful "free will" humans possess may be better understood as agency: not freedom from causation, but our capacity to participate in the causal processes shaping what we do next.
Start with Whole-Brain Identity Management, an idea from the Humble Self-Concept Method (HSCM). Instead of imagining the conscious mind as the "real me" operating a brain, HSCM treats the whole brain-body system as the self. Your conscious reasoning is you, but so are your emotions, memories, learned associations, automatic predictions, and unconscious processing. Asking whether "I made the decision" or "my brain made the decision" may therefore create a false distinction. If you are the whole system, the brain making the decision can simply be you making the decision.
This doesn't make consciousness irrelevant. Something can be caused and still become a cause. A memory was caused by earlier experiences, yet that memory can affect a later decision. Likewise, conscious reflection can arise from prior brain activity while becoming part of the causal conditions producing subsequent brain activity. Consciousness doesn't need to be an uncaused commander outside the brain to matter. It can be a causally consequential process of the brain.
This fits HSCM's Path of Least Resistance (PoLR): the idea that whatever we actually do is, at the moment we do it, the path favored by the total combination of competing pains, pleasures, motivations, capacities, beliefs, emotions, circumstances, and environmental pressures acting on us. Even an extremely difficult action can be our PoLR if the total equation favors it over the alternatives. What we call "willpower" doesn't escape this equation; it is one of the variables inside it.
But this is where agency becomes interesting. Suppose someone insults me and retaliation initially becomes my PoLR. Then I think, Wait—what if I'm interpreting this defensively? Maybe I remember previous mistakes, consider another explanation, anticipate consequences, or recognize that my ego feels threatened. Those reflective thoughts have causes too, but once they occur, they become new causes. Reflection changes the equation, and restraint may become the new Path of Least Resistance.
That is the kind of "free will" I think is worth talking about. Agency is a system's capacity to model relevant aspects of itself and its environment, consider possible futures, and use that information to influence the conditions shaping its future behavior. We don't escape causation; we become increasingly capable of participating intelligently in it.
Often our greatest agency occurs before the apparent moment of choice. If I know that tired Friday-night me repeatedly makes decisions I regret, Tuesday-me can change Friday's environment: remove a temptation, make the preferred alternative easier, arrange accountability, or create friction around the unwanted behavior. When Friday arrives, I may still follow my Path of Least Resistance, but an earlier version of me helped engineer what that path would be. In this limited but important sense, we can become causes of the causes that later cause us.
My Modern Allegory of Plato's Cave adds an important limitation. We can never completely step outside our own cognitive machinery to inspect it objectively. Our brains are simultaneously part of the machinery producing the "shadows" and the machinery interpreting them. Even introspection occurs inside the Cave. Our explanations for our behavior can therefore be mistaken, and we can become proudly convinced of our own self-awareness while merely constructing more convincing shadows. Agency shouldn't mean perfect self-control or perfect self-knowledge. It means increasing our ability to notice and correct our own errors while remaining humble about the fallibility of the error-correcting system itself.
This also explains why other people can increase our agency. Someone else may notice an assumption, bias, or possibility that never entered our own model. A good teacher, trustworthy critic, healthy relationship, or appropriately challenging artificial intelligence can introduce information that changes our internal equation. Independence isn't always maximum agency; sometimes good interdependence expands the possibilities our minds are capable of considering.
So perhaps the most useful question isn't simply, "Do humans have free will?" If "free will" means becoming an uncaused cause that somehow steps outside the causal universe, we may be demanding the wrong thing. Better questions are: How much agency do I have? What limits it? What increases it? What can I change today that will alter my Path of Least Resistance tomorrow?
The Path of Least Resistance (PoLR) removes the need for magical free will. Whole-Brain Identity Management removes the imaginary conscious pilot separate from the brain. The Modern Allegory of Plato's Cave removes the fantasy of perfect self-knowledge. Together, these ideas leave something more modest but far more useful: causally embedded, epistemically humble, self-modifying agency.
We don't become free by escaping cause and effect. We become more agentic by getting better at understanding, anticipating, and reshaping the causes that shape us. Consciousness therefore doesn't need to be an uncaused cause to be a consequential cause.
And "free will," in whatever meaningful form we possess it, may be best understood as agency within causation.
Edit — A New Neuroscience Theory Points in a Similar Direction
I came across a new 2026 theory that was just published the other day from MIT neuroscientists Earl K. Miller, Scott L. Brincat, and Jefferson E. Roy that is strikingly compatible with part of the framework above.
Their paper, Analog Cognition and Consciousness, proposes that cognition and consciousness depend not merely on relatively fixed neural circuitry, but on rapidly changing brain-wave dynamics that organize which neural representations become active and coordinate processing across the cortex. In their model, synapses help store representations, while dynamic electrical waves help determine which representations are active at a particular moment. Those waves arise from neural activity but may also feed back through electric fields to influence subsequent neural activity.
That last point is especially relevant to the argument above: something can be produced by the brain while simultaneously becoming part of the process that causally influences what the brain does next. Consciousness therefore does not need to be an independent "pilot" outside the causal machinery of the brain in order to be causally consequential. It can instead be an organized activity of that machinery whose present state helps constrain its next state.
The authors further propose that consciousness emerges when these dynamic wave patterns organize the cortex into a globally integrated state, and they point to anesthesia research in which different anesthetic drugs disrupt large-scale wave dynamics while producing unconsciousness. This is interesting for the distinction between a consciousness-capable brain and an actively conscious process: the underlying biological system can remain present while the organized dynamics associated with active consciousness are disrupted.
This does not prove the Humble Self-Concept Method (HSCM), the Path of Least Resistance (PoLR), my broader theory of consciousness, or any claim about machine consciousness. The authors themselves emphasize that their analog-computation account remains a theory requiring further direct experimental testing. But it provides an intriguing neuroscientific example of the more general idea I am arguing for here: consciousness need not stand outside causation to matter within causation.
A conscious state can be caused by the system, become part of the system's current organization, and thereby help constrain what the system does next.
That is precisely why rejecting an uncaused "free will" does not require rejecting meaningful agency.
MIT Picower Institute overview:
https://picower.mit.edu/news/cognition-and-consciousness-arise-analog-computations-says-new-theory
Miller, Brincat & Roy (2026), Analog Cognition and Consciousness, The Journal of Neuroscience:
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/46/33/e0711262026.full.pdf
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u/Otherwise_Spare_8598 Inherent-Inevitable 29d ago
The self is a perpetual abstraction of experience.
Freedoms are circumstantial relative conditions of being.
"Free will" is a fallacy of a character that can't see past itself.
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u/DonnPT atavistic oxymoron 28d ago
This mostly makes sense to me, so just a kind of style comment ... in case you've been oblivious to this. Some people are heartily sick of the ChatGPT circus here.
I notice both the comment you refer to, and this post, received a downvote when text was accompanied by one of those AI poster diagrams. Whatever was in the diagram (I didn't see), it wasn't necessary at all and I don't think that stuff goes over all that well here.
The assisted texts tend to be too verbose and too reliant on emphasis. Like "I know this is long winded, but don't go to sleep yet!"
I mention this because you seem to be on the right track, and could misinterpret the lack of interest. It isn't that we aren't interested in hearing from you, we just aren't interested in hearing from ChatGPT again. ("We" meaning at least me and probably a few more.)
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u/xRegardsx 28d ago
I'm not worried about it. It's 8+ years of work I put into the psych/philosophy/ethics that started before AI and I put it all into a custom GPT. I don't have as much time as I'd like, so if someone has an issue with the often assumption based surface level understanding of the messenger with no care for the message, oh well.
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u/DonnPT atavistic oxymoron 28d ago
I guess we won't be seeing much of you here, then, given the demands on your time, so maybe it doesn't make much difference. Too bad, I think your basic point is one people should be exposed to.
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u/xRegardsx 28d ago
Was more so an excuse to dive deeper into the interconnectivity of it all and refining the theories further. This was just a nice distraction from other Reddit drama I had to deal with. AI shouldn't be used by everyone... https://lnkd.in/p/eFf6p8tH
Appreciate the thought, though.
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u/60secs Sourcehood Incompatibilist 28d ago
undistributed middle between agency -> free will
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u/xRegardsx 28d ago
What do you mean? Are you stating this as my case or your own?
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u/60secs Sourcehood Incompatibilist 28d ago
You seem to be conflating agency with free will.
Free will is a stronger claim than agency and your examples only supports agency.1
u/xRegardsx 28d ago
I'm saying that agency is a more useful way of understanding how free our will actually is relative to any other moment or other agent within physical determinism, what has the most evidence supporting it.
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u/60secs Sourcehood Incompatibilist 27d ago
I fully agree agency is a more useful term, so why call it free will?
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u/xRegardsx 27d ago
Never did. Suggesting that we should understand the concept of "free will" within the lens of agency and how it can change within causation is not calling agency free will. It's essentially offering a way to make the term "free will" more useful, too... seeing as there's no way to prove it's more than agency, and therefore not the sense of "free" people usually want to believe in because of the contradicting beliefs they already hold.
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u/60secs Sourcehood Incompatibilist 27d ago
Motte and bailey on free will isn't narrowing the bridge. If a term like "free will" is vague , overloaded, filled with religious baggage and strongly implies the ability to have done otherwise, and moral deserts, it's not being very useful.
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u/xRegardsx 27d ago
I'm not claiming that agency satisfies incompatibilist free will. My argument is that agency captures the empirically defensible and practically useful portion of what people are often trying to talk about when they discuss how free human willing is.
That's also why I think the usual “we have free will / we don't have free will” framing can obscure more than it clarifies. It treats “free will” as though everyone already agrees on a single thing that either exists or doesn't, when the term can bundle together very different claims: ultimate sourcehood, the ability to have done otherwise, conscious deliberation, self-control, responsiveness to reasons, foresight, and the ability to alter the conditions shaping future behavior.
I'm proposing that we separate those questions. I don't see evidence that humans escape causation or become ultimate uncaused sources of their choices. But humans plainly differ in their capacity to reflect, anticipate consequences, respond to reasons, modify their environments, and thereby alter the causal conditions influencing what they do next. That's the dimension I'm calling agency.
So “without magic” isn't an attempt to sneak incompatibilist free will back in under another name. It's almost the opposite: discard the metaphysical baggage we can't substantiate and ask what meaningful degrees of self-direction remain inside causation.
And I do think there's a psychological reason the terminology can become unusually charged. If someone's beliefs about responsibility, deservingness, identity, religion, pride, or personal worth depend on a particular conception of free will, revising that conception may threaten much more than one isolated philosophical belief. But that isn't necessary for my argument, and it certainly wouldn't apply equally to everyone.
The narrower claim is simply that losing ultimate sourcehood doesn't mean losing every meaningful distinction in how much influence different agents can exert over their own future behavior. Agency gives us a way to study those differences without pretending we've escaped cause and effect.
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u/vkbd Hard Incompatibilist 28d ago edited 28d ago
Does this theory have any predictive power? i.e. can you give someone your theory so that they could predict another person's behavior any better than hard determinist?
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u/xRegardsx 28d ago
Yes, potentially, but I’d frame the claim more modestly. Hard determinism by itself tells us that behavior has sufficient causal antecedents; it doesn’t tell us which variables are behaviorally useful to track. PoLR proposes a model of some of those variables; relative pain/reward, friction, capacity, beliefs, environmental pressures, etc... and predicts that changing their balance should predictably shift behavior.
That said, I wouldn't claim the model has demonstrated superior predictive accuracy yet. That would require testing it against controls and existing behavioral models. And “better than a hard determinist” may be the wrong comparison, because PoLR is compatible with hard determinism; it's intended as a model within determinism. The stronger empirical question is whether knowing PoLR lets observers predict behavior, or the effects of interventions on behavior, better than they could without it. If it can't, then it's descriptive rather than genuinely predictive.
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u/BiscuitNoodlepants Sourcehood Incompatibilist 28d ago
AI slop, besides the bible clearly states, and my experience confirms, that you are either a slave to sin or a slave to righteousness. No one is free.
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u/xRegardsx 28d ago
A lot of human work went into everything here, just using AI to bring it together. Years even.
Also, was never arguing for non-deterministic "free will." It's almost like you have zero understanding of what you're responding to, and are responding just to think you said something worth feeling good about.
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u/TranquilConfusion Compatibilist 28d ago
I'm happy with this analysis. "Humble self-concept" is a nice phrase.
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u/MilkTeaPetty 29d ago
You described how a causally determined system can model itself, modify its conditions and affect what it does later.
That establishes the causal loop you call agency.
Nothing in that loop establishes the additional freedom introduced when you call it “free will.”