this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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You have free will, but you also have chains that bound you.
Starting from the social order, you need money and other social relations (friends, family, bosses) to literally survive in the modern world - you're not omnipotent.
Then you have the cognitive chains - stuff you know and understand, as well stuff you can invent (or reinvent) from your current knowledge - you are not omnipresent.
Then, as a consequence, without these two, you cannot be (omni)benevolent - you'll always fuck something up (and even if you didn't, most actions positive towards something will have a negative impact towards something else).
All these are pretty much categorically impossible to exist - you're not some god-damn deity.
But does this mean free will doesn't exist?
Hardly. It's just not as ultimate a power or virtue as some may put it. Flies or pigs also have free will - they're free to roll in mud or lick a turd - except for when they're not because they do it to survive (cool themselves or eat respectively).
We humans similarily eat and shit, and we go to work so we have something to eat and someplace to shit. Otherwise you die without the former or get fined without the latter.
So that's what free will is - the ability of an organism to guide what it's doing, how, when (and, to some extent, even why) it's doing it, according to its senses and sensibilities. It's the process with which we put our own, unique spin on the things in our lives.
Being an omnipotent, omnipresent and (omni)benevolent would in fact remove the essence of what free will (with all its limits) is, because our actions wouldn't have any meaningful consequences. It'd all just be an effective (what I'll call negative) chaos - a mishmush of everything only understandable to the diety.
So in fact, the essence of "free" will is that it's free within some bounds - some we've set ourselves, some we're forced with (disabilities, cognitive abilities, physical limits, etc.). Percisely in the alternative scenario would "free" will cease to be free - because someone already knows it all - past, present future, local and global, from each atom on up. There's perfect causality - as perfect as a movie. You can't change it meaningfully - any changes become a remix or remaster - they lose their originality.
With the limits on our thinking which cause us to be less-than-perfect, they cause a kind of positive chaos, one where one tries to do their best with what they have on their disposal - as they say, you get to know people best at their lowest. Similarily, everyone gets corrupted at a high enough power level - some just do it sooner than others. So surely, at an infinite power level, not even someone omnipotent, omnipresent and (omni)benevolent all at once would be able to curb this flaw.