Deterministic Long Form Argument 1

[ScrappyMarcus]

By “free will” we mean the power to have truly done otherwise in exactly the same universe up to the moment of choice. On that definition, free will collapses.

1) The dilemma of physics:
Either the brain is deterministic or it isn’t.

If deterministic, your every “decision” was fixed by prior states of the world plus the laws of nature—stretching back before your birth. Given the same past, the same choice follows: no genuine “could have done otherwise.”

If indeterministic, injecting randomness into neural activity doesn’t create freedom; it just adds noise. A roulette wheel in your head isn’t you in control.
In neither horn is there room for the kind of authorship libertarian free will requires.

2) Neuroscience undercuts authorship:

The brain moves first, the story comes later. Neural activity predicting a choice appears before subjects report deciding; the conscious “I choose” is a lagging narration, not an initiating cause.

Choices can be read and nudged. Decoders can forecast simple decisions seconds before awareness, and stimulation/drugs can tilt preferences, emotions, even moral judgments. Alter the brain; you alter “you.”

Damage rewrites the self. Lesions, tumors, seizures, anesthesia, and degenerative disease systematically erase or transform memory, personality, impulse control, and belief. If a soul were steering, why does a millimeter of damaged tissue derail the helmsman?

3) Psychology reveals post-hoc confabulation:

Priming, framing, and context shift choices without awareness; people then invent reasons that feel authentic but are demonstrably after-the-fact.

Split-brain phenomena show an “interpreter” module fabricating coherent motives for actions triggered elsewhere. The sense of agency is a construction.

4) You didn’t choose the chooser:
You did not choose your genes, parents, childhood, culture, traumas, IQ, or the developmental timetable that wired your cortex. These uncontrollable factors shaped the very machinery that “makes” your choices. Holding you ultimately responsible for outputs of a system you did not author is metaphysically incoherent.

5) Compatibilist rebranding doesn’t rescue desert:
Redefining “free will” as “acting according to one’s motives without external coercion” keeps everyday talk intact but concedes the deep point: your motives and character are themselves products of causes you didn’t choose. That may justify practical responses (deterrence, rehabilitation), but it doesn’t ground ultimate moral desert or the theological edifice built on it.

Conclusion:
Our lived feeling of willing is real, but it’s an experience, not an explanation. The causal work is done by prior brain states shaped by biology and history; consciousness narrates after the fact. Determinism gives you inevitability; indeterminism gives you randomness; neither gives you the authorship libertarian free will demands. The honest verdict is stark: there is no free will.