Free will isn’t magic
You chose to open this post of your own free will. Nobody coerced, manipulated, or compelled you to open it. Instead, maybe your experience of reading previous posts on this blog prompted you to try another one. Or maybe you found the post’s title intriguing enough to click on it. The title isn’t manipulative click-bait: I mean every word of it, and it accurately describes the point of the post.
However, because the universe contains no magic, your choice to open this post was necessitated by prior conditions that go back forever in time. Given the past light-cone of the event that constitutes your choice (which light-cone, crucially, includes your precise state of mind beforehand), you couldn’t have chosen not to open it. The minority of philosophers who profess incompatibilism say that this fact, all by itself, makes your choice unfree.
Why? I take up this issue in section 3.4 of my book, and I encourage you to consult this SEP entry and also this one if you want even more details about a farcically complicated literature. I doubt you’ll find, in any of it, a cogent reason why your free choice to open this post required the occurrence of some indeterministic (and thus magical) event. But I’m certainly open to correction on the matter! Please email me your best reason, and I promise to discuss it in a future post.
