By happenstance, your particular configuration of atoms from stardust conceptualized you. Each indivisible thought forming in your mind is a product of your environment and experiences with which you had no control over from the very beginning. You did not choose your genetics just in the same way you did not choose what your favorite color is, what to put on your grocery list, the next show you’ll stay up late to watch, and whether you got out of bed or chose to sleep in that following morning.

The laws of physics has already pre-determined you are reading this article. An argument against this is that in your mind you believe you have a variety of options with what to do with your time or what site to browse, but there is no evidence to prove you would have done otherwise. The range of future outcomes of the ostensible alternatives are fundamentally inaccessible, and therefore a useless assertion. Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is already absolutely certain. But unlike the most awarded film of all time, we do not have access to theoretical multiverses to influence a probable future. The present-day reality we know determined by Newton’s laws of motion is also system of philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena concerning cause and effect. The subtlety between our robust, macroscopic experiences intervening with the microcosm of our constantly modulating decisions and thoughts and vice versa makes it difficult to reconcile with polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace’s demon.

Such is The Problem of Pain within humanity in author C. S. Lewis’s obsequious reflections and

“So it is with the life of souls in a world: fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once limits within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any such life is possible. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.”

If the commonwealth were to adopt fatalist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s amor fati from The Gay Science or the deterministic assertion made by Albert Einstein echoing philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World As Will And Idea, it would imply a greater predicament on the subject of civilized morality and prosperity. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, the concession of ethics is developed by the protagonist’s ability to experience time loops while unable to change their outcomes. The Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut’s sci-fi novel, an alien race with the innate ability to simultaneously see the past, present, and future, pities humans and their delusional notion of free will.

“Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or avoided.”

It is likely that from an outsider’s perspective, free will is a manifestation of righteous agency. The universe is not interested in the self and nowhere is this particular phenomena explicitly measurable, so we are simply here to observe. Contrary to the leading belief that annulling our idea of “free will” would degrade social ethics, acceptance is credibly freeing and aligns with compassion to ourselves and others. This does not excuse responsibility from murderers, thieves, or wrongdoings that occur since humans still possess the power of conscious thought whether free will exists or not, and that separates us from the animals that may also come to do you harm. Neuroscientist Sam Harris in his book Free Will postulates several paradigms that exemplify this illusion. Striking a balance between the difficulty, if not impossibility of understanding the underlying causes of human behaviors is not a symptom of free will, but merely a product of our evolutionary course since the beginning of time. The fundamental ontology remains an ongoing process of our grasp on reality, one of which is cultivated and refined to convey our intuitions. We are nonetheless capable of tapping into the best possible version of ourselves and should go on making informed judgments.

Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder made a YouTube video on free will (below) that was the inspiration, or my “willing” force to write this article. Hossenfelder says to think of your life as a story which has not yet been told and make the best of your thinking!