Freewill exists…kind of

I do not think humans possess absolute free will. Not because every action is predetermined, but because every choice exists within a bounded space of possibilities.

Our thoughts are limited. The number of thoughts we can have may be unimaginably large, but it is not infinite. We can only choose from options that our minds are capable of representing and conditioned towards. Anything outside that boundary is not a choice at all — it never even enters consideration.

A person living 500 years ago could not choose to become a software engineer, design artificial intelligence, or build a quantum computer. These possibilities were absent from their conceptual world. Their choices were constrained by the limits of the knowledge, technology, language, and imagination available to them.

The same principle applies to us.

We often assume that we are freely choosing among all possibilities, but future generations may possess concepts that are currently inconceivable to us. There may be ideas, technologies, and forms of thought that lie beyond our cognitive horizon in the same way that modern computing lay beyond the horizon of a medieval scholar.

If that is true, then our freedom is fundamentally constrained by what we can think. And because we do not choose the boundaries of our own cognition — our biology, culture, education, language, and historical moment — we do not choose the full menu of possibilities from which our decisions arise.

This does not mean that choice is an illusion. We clearly make decisions. But those decisions occur within a restricted landscape and are localised.

A useful distinction, then, is between universal free will and local free will.

Universal free will would mean the ability to choose from all possible options. Humans do not possess this. There are possibilities we cannot access, conceive, or even recognize.

Local free will, however, is the ability to choose among the options currently available to us. This form of freedom may exist, but it is not absolute. It is bounded by the limits of thought itself.

The question is therefore not whether we are free, but how large the boundaries of our freedom really are.