On Free Will

“Siddhartha is a strange man, and he expresses strange thoughts. His ideas seem crazy.” -Siddhartha, Herman Hesse, 1922

Just a brief thought here. This is, as far as I know, OC to me. In proof of the existence of free will:

If, as is the primary argument of non-religious mechanism, all actions are inevitable, just events set in course by physics, then it is plausible to assume that at some point in human advancement (assuming we don’t kill each other to death in some way), we will create a device or algorithm capable of predicting all future events, by analyzing past ones, and solving the open-system problem. At which point, obviously, we would actually have proven free will, given that any person who sees that they are determined to one particular action by this device could simply choose to set themselves on a path towards the noncompletion of this event, disproving the mechanistic prediction.

Of course, this still leaves theistic mechanism intact. God’s actions can’t be predicted by a machine. (Noting that God is still not deterministic, making free will existent regardless, just not for us) But that’s metaphysics, so I’m going to leave it alone.

TL;DR: Free will exists because humans are stubborn and oppositional.