You wanna know about free will? No? Well, too bad I guess.

 Here's a good mainstream take. You can watch him define the terms, then stop.
 https://www.youtube.com/embed/C7YSy-Mr-d8

 Turns out both determinism and free will is impossible. Maybe that deserves a bang. Impossible!

 To have free will, determinism must be true. For you to determine your actions, determinism must be true. If determinism was false, your will would have no ability to affect the future.
 The properties that make up [you] have to have specific effects based on the youness of the [you]. Just like the mass of a billiard ball determines the transfer of momentum.

 But wait, there's more. Later he gets into, "imagine a computer with the initial state of the universe programmed into it." Haha, lol. Logically impossible. The universe can't compute itself due to computational overhead. The computer has to be bigger than the universe, which is impossible by definition. Existence can't be bigger than Existence, that's not how logic works. That's a divide-by-zero level howler.

 The future is completely determinate but completely indeterminable. At a cosmic level, the future is unknowable, and the only exception is going to the future and looking at it. Using a space analogy, telescopes don't exist at the cosmic level. You have to personally walk over there and see with your own eyes. Determinism can't be meaningfully true if the future is indeterminable.

 But wait, that's not all.
 He claims free will vs. determinism has all sorts of implications. Haha! Nope! Doesn't have a single implication! None! Zip!
 These sentences get bangs. Perhaps, again, the earlier one deserves a bang too.

 To be precise, every implication of determinism is exactly identical to the implications of free will. Technically known as libertarianism.

 If someone commits a crime of his own free will, he should go to jail. (Or rather get executed, but same diff.)
 If someone commits a crime because it was determined by the universe, he should to to jail. (Get executed.)

 If he freely chose, he needs to be physically prevented from freely choosing the same thing again. Nobody deserves to have to live around him.
 If it was determined by implacable fate, he needs to be physically prevented from being compelled to do it again. Nobody deserves to have to live around him.

 If it quacks like a duck, it is a duck. Libertarianism is identical to determinism.
 If that makes no sense, it's because neither determinism nor libertarianism make any sense.

 You can't be free to be somebody else. You are you, not someone else. You will make your choices, not someone else's choices, in the same way a carrot is not an ocean liner.
 You can't be predicted. The only way for an observer to find out what you're going to do is to watch you do it. Determinism implies libertarianism.

 There is a bit of a mystery in that there are some exceptions. There are things which are, in practice, predictable. Very curious. Nobody can explain.

 I think the libertarianism vs. determinism debate is a deliberate distraction. A prospiracy. Nobody planned it. It was such an obvious move it doesn't need planning, but it is intentionally, consciously maintained.
 Despite everything, some things are predictable. Rather a lot of things in fact. Explaining how has a very high chance of being extremely powerful.
 And embarrassing. And they don't want you to have power.

 Sadly I already have the power and have no motivation to go and explain it verbally. [Lunar path only] is sufficient.



 Mortals have instincts about free will. Qualitative intuitions. These are largely about physical chains, and applying them to cosmic ontology is misuse.
 The fundamental is that you can tell when what you call your [free will] is hitting interference. The turbulence feels like something, and your resulting impulses are adaptive ways of clearing the interference. If something can vary like this, it obviously can't be any kind of cosmic law. (You should recognize [cosmic law] as a redundant phrase. I just said [some kind of ordered order], but one of the words was greek, while another, latin.)

 "Am I, the contingent entity [me/you/self], part of the causal chain? Is the contingent outcome contigent on my internal psychic events? If so, I am [free]. If not, I am not." This is a scalar. You can be more free or less free.
 You can't be more deterministic or less libertarian, that's a binary. Assuming they're even coherent enough to be a binary.

 If believing in determinism makes you feel constrained, you're delusional, and you're about to direct an adaptive response at something that cannot respond to you or adapt. (Do you like repeating words without equivocating? I like it. Because english is crud.) 

 P.S. [Living] is not a real property of physical objects. A physical cat and a physical rock are not qualitatively different. You can if you want define a category and project it onto them if you want. I believe I have a post about handles and definitions somewhere...

https://alrenous.blogspot.com/2021/12/definitions-examples-religion-ravens.html
https://alrenous.blogspot.com/2022/01/definitions-examples-bowls.html

 You can define life as anything that has a definable goal which it will attempt to secure. Typically it goes recursive. Living things have a goal of staying alive, on account of the fact that anything that doesn't try to stay alive lost the capacity to strategically direct energy long before we were around to see them.

 Alternatively you can define [living] as referring to consciousness, which is not physical. However, this has the consequence of labelling you dead when you're asleep.