Part 1
When I retire, and have more free time, I’m going to expand on this topic considerably. But for now I’m just sharing a 3-part premise.
There is a convincing argument against the idea of free will, and some very bright people argue that there is no such thing. I, on the other hand, believe we do have free will… but it is limited.
Go to the ‘free-will’ tag on my blog and you’ll see that I’ve shared this and other related idea before.
Right now I just want to put down a list of premises which, one day, I’ll defend, but for now, here they are:
- Consciousness is emergent. It is the product of excess processing time beyond what’s needed for survival.
- Free will is not fully free. Both the environment and more importantly our hardware affect our ability to think freely. Don’t believe me? Try to make a challenging decision when you have an agonizing tooth ache.
- Limited free will is also emergent and comes with consciousness. Despite the fact that there are constraints and limits to how free free will is, it’s still more free than no free will.
Consciousness is at the crux of the argument. Consciousness does not have a physical position in our physical world. You can’t point to a part of the brain and say, ‘there it is’. So arguing against free will based on physics falls apart.
Looking at an MRI or other brain scan after asking someone a question and being able to predict their answer before they say it is another argument against free will. However, that doesn’t tell us how our brain came to that decision, it only shows that our conscious mind doesn’t react or even necessarily fully understand our unconscious mind… but there is still an unconscious mind that made that decision. Deciding to discuss the conscious and unconscious mind as two separate things is a false division that is useful to talk about, but the reality is, we are of one mind… Even if we ourselves can’t fully grasp how our own consciousness works. 
Two things are happening in the MRI argument that are faulty when used in an argument against free will: First, there is a free will decision that happens, even if it’s before our conscious mind knows. Second, the fact that our hardware limits the decisions themselves and then also how we rationalize those decisions based on our (limited) decision-making, does not negate the fact that we still made the decision.
Well, there you have it, I said I wasn’t going to expand on these premises and I already started to. The thing to realize is that just because our free will has considerable limits, and constraints, doesn’t negate the fact that we are still making choices that are truly ours.
We have limited free will but still freer than not having free will at all.
Comment by Manuel Are on LinkedIn:
This is a solid middle-ground take—and honestly, it’s the most defensible position in the free will debate right now. Total free will is naïve. Zero free will is lazy. Limited free will is where the evidence actually lands.
The strongest move here is rejecting the false binary. The fact that your brain has constraints doesn’t mean you’re a puppet. It means agency operates within boundaries, not outside reality. Pain, wiring, and context shape decisions—but they don’t outsource them.
That said, the argument leans heavily on emergence without fully cashing it out. Saying “consciousness has no physical location” is rhetorically powerful but philosophically risky—critics will say that lack of localization isn’t proof of non-physicality. If this ever gets expanded, that’s the pressure point.
Still, the core insight holds:
Predictability ≠ absence of choice.
Constraint ≠ coercion.
Limits ≠ meaninglessness.
Free will doesn’t need to be infinite to be real. It just needs to be enough to make responsibility, growth, and moral learning make sense—and this argument lands there.