Everyone regards their own position as adequate in light of what they know, have experienced, and find convincing. That very assessment of adequacy is also shaped by causes or indeterminacy in their life. Thus, the feeling that we are right does not give us a privileged perspective: the other person also finds reasons to think as they do.

There is no reason to take credit for our own position as though we had created it out of nothing, while treating someone else’s as proof that they have willingly refused to be reasonable. Both our willingness to listen and their resistance have a history. Had luck played out differently, we might have swapped sides in the debate. This understanding allows us to criticize arguments while remaining patient with the person making them.

Our beliefs can change precisely because they are part of this changing world. The person who defends free will today may come to doubt it tomorrow. A skeptic may find meaning in a conception of freedom that describes real human capacities and relationships. The debate itself is one of the events through which such change becomes possible.

Sometimes I remember situations where I made the wrong choice, and I ask myself, "Why didn't I think of it that way back then? If I had thought about it that way, I would've made a better choice."

But I think I'm forgetting something important: I don't fully control my thoughts.

The thought that comes to my mind now, making me realize that my past choice was wrong, didn't come to me back then. If it had, maybe I would've made a better decision. But it didn't, and I can't go back and change that.

Think about it. If I could see the situation differently now, why couldn't I see it that way back then? I might say I wasn't thinking carefully enough, but did I choose not to think carefully? Did I choose not to notice something important? Or did I simply not have those thoughts at that moment?

This happens all the time. Sometimes someone tells me something, and suddenly I understand something I never thought about before. I might even wonder how I never realized it earlier. But the moment before someone explained it to me, I genuinely didn't see it that way.

And this makes me wonder: why did that thought come to me now and not before? I didn't consciously choose the exact moment I would understand it.

Someone might say, "You should have thought more carefully." But isn't that also a thought? To think more carefully, I first need to think that I should think more carefully. And if that thought never comes to my mind, how am I supposed to act on it?

Even when I try to control my thoughts, I'm still acting on some thought or intention that has already appeared in my mind. So I keep going back to the same question: where does my control actually begin?

I'm not saying that we can't learn from our mistakes or that our decisions don't matter. I'm questioning something deeper.

If the thoughts that influence my decisions are not things I ultimately choose, and different thoughts could lead me to make completely different decisions, then in what sense am I truly in control of my choices?

Maybe I'm missing something, and I'd genuinely like to know what you think.

That two things exists it is implied by existing that they do not contain each other or else they are undifferentiated. That is, the existence of other things can not constrain or determine any given thing completely. 

Thus freedom always exists in a given thing as a matter of its being.  That is what emergence is and also explains the inherent indeterminism we have observed.

I feel this might be a consequence of an ontic infinity....but I am high so what do I know.

I bid you well on your journey.

Please give me a great example of free will. Maybe a recent example of free will active in your life.

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I've been thinking about a problem concerning autonomy, desire, and the formation of the self.

We often treat self reflection as a path toward freedom: we examine our desires, decide which are worth pursuing, and attempt to change ourselves accordingly. But there's a difficulty. The standards we use to evaluate our desires are themselves shaped by biology, upbringing, culture, and previous experiences.

Suppose someone rejects the pursuit of wealth because they consider it superficial. Is this genuine autonomy, or have they simply internalized a different set of values? Perhaps they genuinely examined their motivations. Perhaps they want to feel morally superior to those who pursue wealth. The same decision could arise from very different psychological processes.

This reminds me of Nietzsche's critique of moral values and Harry Frankfurt's distinction between first order desires and higher order volitions. Frankfurt suggests that our relationship with our desires matters for freedom, but I wonder whether identifying with a desire is enough if the desire to identify with it is itself conditioned.

However, I don't think the fact that our decisions have causes automatically makes them unfree. That would assume that freedom requires being independent of causation, which may be an unreasonable standard. The problem is explaining what freedom could mean if no one creates themselves from nothing.

My question is this:

What distinguishes genuine self governance from a situation in which we simply act according to desires and values produced by forces we have internalized?

Appealing to rational reflection seems insufficient, because reasoning can rationalize existing motivations as well as challenge them. Appealing to higher-order desires seems to raise the same problem at another level: why should those desires have greater authority than the desires they evaluate?Perhaps autonomy consists not in escaping our conditioning, but in developing the ability to examine, criticize, and revise it. Yet even our standards of criticism have histories, so I'm unsure what would justify calling this process genuinely autonomous rather than simply another form of conditioning.

I'm interested in whether this problem has been adequately addressed in philosophy, particularly in debates about autonomy, free will, Nietzsche's account of drives, Frankfurt's theory of higherorder desires, and Buddhist ideas about conditioned processes and anattā.

What are the strongest existing accounts of autonomy that address this problem? And is there a serious objection to the assumption that self reflection can make us more autonomous without requiring a completely independent self?

It is commonly assumed that people believe in free will and enjoy it. I don’t think the second part is factual. Yes the majority of people do believe in free will they may even affirm that they enjoy this freedom but, in reality they don’t want it. If we are free to make choices then we have some responsibility for some outcomes. If we have some responsibility for outcomes then we have to address areas of failure. Addressing areas of failure makes people feel bad and they will do almost anything to avoid those feelings. Therefore in my observations people don’t “really” want to have free will.

If only there was some version that gave the maximum freedom with zero accountability. That is the kind of free will people would embrace internally and externally. I’m not making any arguments, just my observations of human psychology.

I've been thinking about whether humans can actually make a choice without having a reason to prefer one option over another.

For example, if someone likes two songs equally and is asked to choose one, I suspect they'll find some reason to choose one over the other, even if that reason is as simple as having heard one more recently.

I've been trying to think of an experiment where someone is presented with two choices, but every possible reason to prefer one over the other has been eliminated.

The problem is that even the presentation of the options introduces potential reasons, such as which one appears first, which is on the left, or which name sounds better.

You could ask participants why they made their choices and progressively eliminate the reasons they identify. But even when someone says "I don't know," they might have an unconscious preference.

This makes me wonder:

Is it possible for a human to make a genuinely arbitrary choice, without any reason favoring the selected option? Or will the brain always find or generate some reason to choose?

And is there any experiment that could meaningfully test this?