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this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2026
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What does it mean to truly have free will?
Your brain is billions of electrically-reactive cells and interconnections, and your consciousness is electrical impulses shimmering around those cells in a more or less stable way.
A belief in free will implies the belief that you essentially have control over the physical mechanism that makes up you. A brain may not be a fully deterministic machine in the sense that a certain input condition may not always result in the same output, but it seems like a stretch to say that "you" both directly result from and directly control that mechanism.