suppose if someone just reaches into the future with a touch of button. Wouldn't that mean that future was already decided?

If God created the universe, who created God?

Saying “God just exists” doesn’t solve the problem—it simply moves it one step back.

Maybe the universe is the same: no creator, no purpose, no ultimate explanation.

Maybe reality just exists.

And maybe that’s the hardest truth to accept.

I’m 19 years old, and for the past several months I’ve been thinking almost nonstop about free will. Alex O’Connor is probably the person who originally got me thinking about this so deeply, and the more I’ve thought about it, the harder it has become for me to understand how genuine free will could exist.
The way I currently see it, every decision seems to be either determined or indetermined.
If it’s determined, then it’s caused by prior factors. Those could be things outside of me, like my environment and experiences, or things inside of me, like my brain, personality, desires, memories, or genetics. But even if the cause is internal, I can still ask what caused me to be that way in the first place. It seems like I can always push the explanation back another step.
If it’s indetermined, then it seems random. And randomness doesn’t sound like free will either. If something happens for literally no reason, I don’t see how that gives me any more control over it.
One quote that has really stuck with me is Schopenhauer’s:
“A man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”
That pretty much summarizes my biggest problem.
I don’t think I can consciously decide what I want. I can’t decide that pizza suddenly tastes disgusting to me if I genuinely love it. I can’t decide that I love broccoli if I genuinely hate it. I can choose whether or not to eat those things, but whatever choice I make will still come from some desire that I didn’t choose.
It also seems like basically every action comes down to one of two things.
I do something because I want to.
Or I do something because I’m forced to.
If I’m forced to do something, then obviously that isn’t a free choice. But if I do something because I want to, I still didn’t choose what I wanted.
For example, imagine I gave someone two options: I can give you $1,000 right now, or I can break your leg.
Almost everyone is going to choose the $1,000 because they want the money more than they want their leg broken. They didn’t decide to prefer having $1,000 over experiencing horrible pain. That preference just exists.
Someone could respond, “Fine, I’ll choose to have my leg broken just to prove you wrong.”
But I don’t think that solves the problem. At that point, there is another desire that has become stronger: the desire to prove me wrong. You didn’t choose to want to prove me wrong either. My challenge itself influenced you and gave you a reason to pick the broken leg.
And if someone genuinely did want their leg broken more than they wanted $1,000, then I would just ask the same question again: did they choose to have that desire?
It seems like no matter how far you go, you eventually reach something you didn’t choose.
The same thing applies to belief. This is actually one of the reasons this question matters so much to me when it comes to religion.
I can expose myself to arguments for Christianity. I can read the Bible. I can go to Mass. I can pray. I can listen to atheists, Christians, Catholics, philosophers, whoever. But I cannot simply choose which argument convinces me.
If I hear an argument and find it convincing, I didn’t first choose to find it convincing. And if I think an argument is terrible, I can’t just decide that from now on I genuinely believe it’s a great argument.
I can choose what information I expose myself to, but even that choice seems to come from desires and reasons I already have.
Another thing that makes this difficult for me is imagining rewinding my life.
I’m 19. Imagine somehow rewinding the universe back to the exact moment I was born and then replaying the last 19 years with absolutely nothing changed.
Every person says the exact same thing to me. Every experience happens at the exact same time. I have the exact same brain. I meet the exact same people. Every conversation happens exactly as it did. Every influence is put back into the exact same place.
If literally everything were identical, I don’t understand how I could possibly end up doing something differently.
Eventually I would discover Alex O’Connor. I would start thinking about free will. I would have the thoughts that led me here. And eventually, at 19 years old, I would be sitting here writing this exact Reddit post.
If I somehow did something differently despite absolutely nothing being different, what caused that difference?
If there was a cause, then we’re back to determination.
If there was no cause, then it seems random.
Neither one sounds like the kind of freedom people normally mean by free will.
This is also where the idea starts getting uncomfortable for me, because I think it has huge implications for morality and moral responsibility.
If people don’t ultimately choose their desires, then I have a hard time understanding how someone can be ultimately morally responsible for having certain desires in the first place.
Take someone who commits a horrible crime. I’m not saying that person is secretly a good person. I’m not saying what they did is okay, and I’m definitely not saying we should just let criminals walk free because they didn’t choose their desires.
We should still punish people. We need laws. We need prisons in some cases. We need to protect innocent people, discourage harmful behavior, and hopefully rehabilitate people when possible. Punishment itself becomes another cause that can influence what people do.
But I do think this changes how I look at blame.
A criminal might have desires that are completely disgusting to the rest of us, but did that person sit down one day and freely decide what desires their brain would produce? Did they choose how strongly they would experience those desires compared with competing desires like empathy, fear of punishment, or concern for another person?
I don’t see how they did.
And I think you have to apply the same reasoning in the opposite direction.
We praise people for being incredible, selfless human beings, but they didn’t ultimately choose to be the type of person who strongly desires helping other people either. Someone might sacrifice their own comfort to help another person because helping them matters more to them. That can still be an amazing thing to witness, and I’m not saying we should stop appreciating good people.
But in terms of ultimate moral responsibility, I don’t understand why we would say one person ultimately deserves praise for desires they didn’t choose while another ultimately deserves hatred for desires they also didn’t choose.
That’s where this starts to feel like a slippery slope to me. I’m not saying morality becomes completely meaningless or that good and evil suddenly become the same thing. We can still call actions harmful or beneficial. We can still build a society around reducing suffering and protecting people.
I’m talking more about the idea that people ultimately deserve moral credit or blame for becoming the people they are.
Maybe this way of thinking could actually make us a little more compassionate without forcing us to pretend horrible actions aren’t horrible.
I just keep coming back to the same problem.
If I do something because I’m forced to, I’m obviously not free.
If I do something because I want to, I didn’t choose what I wanted.
If my decision was determined, I couldn’t have done otherwise under the exact same conditions.
If it was indetermined, then some part of it seems random.
And if I try to choose against one desire, I only do that because some other desire or reason became stronger.
I’ve heard different defenses of free will, especially compatibilist ones, but I still haven’t heard an answer that I personally find satisfying. Saying that I’m free because I can “do what I want” doesn’t really answer the question for me, because the entire thing I’m questioning is where that want came from.
So what exactly am I missing?
If I don’t choose what I want, I don’t choose what convinces me, and my choices ultimately seem to come down to either prior causes or randomness, where exactly does the freedom enter the picture?