Why don’t my actions feel pre-determined?
If determinism is true, then your actions do feel pre-determined! They feel exactly as they’d feel in a deterministic world. But what you’re probably asking is why, if determinism is true, your actions don’t (usually) feel coerced or compelled. Take your decision to read this post. Nobody forced you to read it. You don’t suffer from the strange compulsion to read every blog post there is; no one does. Rather, the post’s title simply made you curious enough to click the link. Your decision felt ‒ and was ‒ uncoerced and uncompelled.
Think about it: If your decision to read this post was coerced, compelled, manipulated (or the like), then someone must have “pulled your strings” or you must have been the grip of a strange compulsion. But, of course, neither of those things happened before you decided to read this post. Instead, your decision was necessitated by all the things that did happen beforehand. The point bears repeating: Necessitation by prior conditions isn’t the same as ‒ and needn’t feel like ‒ coercion, compulsion, or manipulation.
