Philosophy

On Free Will

October 24, 2025

I am a hard determinist. If you don’t know what that is, hard determinism is a position which states that all choices, thoughts, and actions are deterministic products of factors beyond our control: genetics, environment, brain chemistry, and the precise state of every particle in the universe leading up to each moment. Put more simply, I believe that everything in the universe is determined by a causal chain that started at the first cause; no one has any true agency regarding who they are or what they do, and nothing within us is actually determined by ourselves.