95. Do we have free will? Here is my improved answer (answer no: 2)

Free will is nothing but a decision or a series of decisions taken by a person at a particular moment, that is not affected by the wiring of the brain or the circumstances.

At every moment, a point in the time series, any person is contained within a property called circumstances.

Circumstances is defined by the vast number of external and internal variables, these variables are associated with the person in one way or the other.

Circumstances also include the environmental variables.

Irrespective of our state of mind, circumstances make it difficult for people to exercise their free will.

The more noisy the circumstance is, that is the increase in the number and intensity of the environment variables influences the increases in the difficulty to exercise the free will

There are three types of circumstances:

1. Hard circumstance
2. Medium circumstance
3. Soft circumstance

And within these three types of circumstances, individual circumstances vary in difficulty level.

Example of a hard circumstance:

A person in prison thinking about people testifying against him, most of his thoughts would already be formed by the inputs he got from his lawyers, friends and family

A person who is deciding about what to eat for lunch, he is at work and his manager’s manager at work happen to invite him for his surprise birthday lunch, here the person has limited opportunity to exercise their free will

A person trying to buy something using an ecommerce app that has robust in built algorithm to influence the person’s decisions for better profitability or featured products.

Example of a medium circumstance:

A person waiting to board their cruise with their family, wants to decide to cancel the trip due to unexpected work commitments, his decision is also influenced by his family and friends who are vacationing with him.

A person who is deciding about what to eat for lunch, at work, on a normal day, where his peers are going out to eat but he needs to stay to complete work and also to save money

Example of a soft circumstance:

A person who is deciding about what to eat for lunch, at home, on a personal day off, alone, their family is at work or school, has a lot of options. They could order a deliver, take out or go to a restaurant with a friend or even cook at home. It is relatively easy to exercise free will in this circumstance.

Free Will is already defeated by the noisy variables of the circumstances.

Now the possibility of exercising free will also depends on the current state of mind of a person.

The current state of mind of a person is dependent on many factors including, but not limited to:

1. How does the HL (Human Learning, just like Machine Learning) model of a person’s brain is trained from the conception in their mother’s womb, to the current moment.
2. The history of experiences from the conception in their mother’s womb, to the current moment, and its imprints on the HL model
3. The person’s current circumstances and environment variables and how it affects their HL model

Now, all this makes Free Will seem impossible.

Is that true?

Don’t we have any free will at all?

It depends!!

It depends on the following:

1. What is the circumstance? Is it a easy circumstance like going to a candy shop and deciding on a candy with no limitation on a budget? Again, this may not be a free will because selecting a candy very well depends on factors like previous experiences, candy wrapper design and the HL model’s liking.
2. Is there a force of passion or love or hate or jealousy or anything that is driving this decision, and if that is the case, It may or may not be a free will. Emotions comes under environment variables.
3. What is the reasoning skill of this person? Again, natural development of reasoning skill depends on their past experiences and their curiosity and intentional learning to discover and adapt a reasoning mindset.
4. Is the person trained in reasoning and cultivating discipline to adapt a certain framework of reasoning mindset, again, the effectiveness of the training could vary depending on many factors
5. What is the health of the person? Is the person suffering from physical or emotional pain? This comes under environment variables.
6. Self control and discipline, coping strategies and reasoning skills, all these are also product of the HL model and its cumulative evolutionary history from the conception in their mother’s womb, to the current moment.
7. Genetics, and how it affected the cumulative evolutionary history of the HL model from the conception in their mother’s womb, to the current moment.
8. And many many other variables……

So, in short, the probability of exercising free will is more if it’s an easy or soft circustance.

Effective training in reasoning, cultivating discipline, self control and coping strategies helps in increasing the chance of achieving premeditated free will to a greater extent. It depends on the effectiveness of the training.

For an ordinary person, who is not trained to achieve a certain goal, the probability of free will becomes slim in the face of medium to hard circumstances.

There are many many factors, vast variables that is shaping our HL(Human Learning) model every moment of our life time based on the vast number of inputs and the current state of the model.

Hence it is impossible to calculate the dynamics and determine the probability of opportunities a person has/had to exercise free will.