"Free Will" Belief/Disbelief Poll

[Edwardo Piet]

The future means that something will happen but not exactly what will happen

If the future isn't exactly what will happen then it isn't exactly the future. It is merely a possible future, what could happen.

If so then how does it mean that we don't have free will?

We don't have contra-causal free will because what will happen will happen by definition, so we can't change that. And I'm sure you already accept we can't change the past because it has already gone. And we just as obviously can't change the present either because it's already present. The moment we think we've changed the present it has already past. It passes immediately, it's passing all the time. That's what the present is.

What will happen will happen, what is happening is happening, what was happening was happening: This is all true by definition and makes free will impossible. We can't do other than what we are doing, will do or did do by definition. Whether these things are determined or not.

If you think about the present time at every moment in the smallest scale possible, it does seem that we have no control to change what is happening. But on a quantum level, time behaves differently and there might even be closed-timelike curves which could possibly allow our minds to break away from a causal chain of events.

This would mean that what we are doing isn't fully causal but at least in part acausal. That what we are doing isn't determined, or at least not fully. But determined or otherwise, what is is, what was was, what will be will be, by definition. This is a tautology. The fact that what we are doing may not be fully determined and could be more "random" or probabilistic doesn't give us any more free will than if it is fixed.