Hybrid theory between freewill and determinism

[bennyboy]

I believe that we are pre-wired to make every decision that we make. But I believe that we have some control over the wiring. So in that sense, I do believe that we have an ability to make our own decisions, but we have to wire our minds to think and act in accord with those decision before we have to make them.

To illustrate, imagine that your mind as a whole is a train company. Your subconscious is like the board of directors. Your self-aware conscious is not the CEO though, but rather its the train conductor. We think that our conscious is in so much control, but it really isn't. Of course, the more educated you are and the more healthy you are mentally and physically, the more control you have as an engineer. But I would liken that control to just being able to know how to run the train safely and smoothly, not choosing its course. Like how an engineer slows down when going on tight turns. But lets say that the train conductor has years of experience and knows of better routes or smoother and more efficient routes. If we start consciously becoming more and more aware of finding paths of least resistance then it will have a domino effect that will eventually lead to your subconscious "re-routing" your train tracks, or decisions.

So in general, I believe that if we're more and more self-aware of our subconscious thinking, then we're more able to lay out the train tracks with more and more input from our rational conscious, rather than our irrational subconscious. I believe that is the essence of why we humans hold onto so many bad ideas, our subconscious minds have way too much sway over our rational, right her right now, self-aware conscious has. We hold onto bad ideas, because at some point in our evolutionary history, that bad idea had some kind of evolutionary advantage or was an accident that just stuck. We just shoehorn those bad ideas into "logical" and "rational" seeming views. Like voting for Donald Trump

Of course, none of this is taking into account brain damage or other irreversible maladies that could occur in the brain. Like people who voted for Donald Trump

You are using the language of duality.  Unfortunately, this begs the question.  If the conscious mind is different than deterministic brain function, then of course there's the possibility that some or even much of our behavior is not deterministic.  If part of the human experience rests outside our dependence of the human brain, then we may have free will, as well. But this isn't really an explanation.  It's a statement of a world view: i.e. that consciousness somehow transcends the mechanism of the brain.

Put it like this: the question is whether the "conductor" of the train is an agent somehow separate from the rest of the train, or whether it is just part of the train (say, a computer).  If you think the former,  you'll have to say what mechanism is responsible for the conscious agency, where it exists, and so on.