Do you believe in free will?

[Angrboda]

So the question is thus; At what point were you able to exert a force upon the universe that changes the future. Was it at conception? The sensory development in the womb? The formation of the ego?

I think there is a critical error in this statement which gives it a form of a loaded question. You use the term "changing the future", which means that the future is in some sense predetermined - that there is a set course from which it may or may not deviate. In a question regarding free-will vs determinism, you are already presupposing determinism.

This I think is a fundamental error. Neither determinists nor free will theorists are proposing that determinism is in error. Both accept determinism fully. Where free will comes in is assuming that decisions and choices are determined by a law or laws that are not in the currently accepted set of natural laws. A free will is every bit a part of determinism, it's just that these specific choices are determined by something whose behavior and laws, for lack of a better term, are "free" — meaning certain departures from the other natural laws, whose behaviors seem not to possess this trait. The problem for the free will theorist is not to refute determinism — determinism is necessary for both — the problem is to demonstrate the existence of these heretofore unknown laws, and the entities which are ruled by them. (Pineal gland?)

If something is not determined, either by current natural laws, or whatever additions are required to understand our will as free, then its behavior is essentially random, as nothing, free or not, determines its course. And this, as noted, is not free will. (As Rhythm hinted and I agree, compatibilism, the notion that determinism as defined by current natural laws does not preclude free will, usually by changing the definition of free will, is attempting to solve the problem by defining away the hard bits. But the hard bits are the part we find interesting. If a used car salesman offered you a tired old but truly free will, or a shiny new compatibilist free will, most of us would opt for real free will.)

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A stickier question, at least for the compatibilist, is what is meant by "I". It's a shortcut to say that whatever is in the brain is the I, because it's not — there are many things in the brain that are not the I, and some, Buddhists, contend there isn't even an I. Equating the brain with the I is largely handwaving, albeit handwaving which many materialists have fought hard to sell.

There are a number of peculiarities which stick out as anomalies, urging us to go deeper. For example, other people, particularly spouses, seem to know us better than we know ourselves; they have palpable facts about our "I" that we do not, even though under conventional analysis, their knowledge should be a subset of ours; we have first person knowledge, and more of it — and yet when they predict what we'll do in spite of ourselves, it's like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Other things like the introspection illusion, wherein we think of other people using different evidence than we do in reasoning about ourselves, but yet our concept of what a "self" is, is not correspondingly adjusted. Bias blindspot is another. There was an experiment in which people were retrospectively assessed on how happy they had been over a period of time. During that time, they had also been intermittently queried. It was found that the retrospective assessment of their happiness systematically deviated in the positive direction. Are you the you that is happy now, or the you that will remember having been happier in the future? Simply leaving the "I" an undefined part of the brain is simply insufficient. Certainly the brain "causes" the I, but the brain is not the "I". The "I" is an idea in the brain.