Free-Will

Exactly....because an observer is a conscious being using technologies to accentuate its awareness, by focusing the mediating pattern, such as light, upon the object it wants to study.
But this has been occurring before there was life on earth...so the observe is not necessary.

Instability is part of the process.

Quantum physics exposes us to the counter-intuitive substratum of existence....contradicting the world we experience as ordered, and seemingly perfect and predictable.
We experience it after-the-fact, as the apparent that integrates randomness into its order, as an effect we can never know, nor ever calculate.

What is predictable?
For something to be predictable it basically has to show repetition of sorts, even if something changes in a cycle, this change itself has to repeat, like -

2, 2, 2, 2, 2... always the same repetition
2, 3, 4, 5, 6.... always the same change (+1 in this case)

This can become increasingly complex, like the change of the change could also be repetitive and so on.

This repetition can have a rhythm as well, something can be a superposition of different repeating cycles with different frequencies, but at the basis it must be something or a sum of things which repeat - that's when something is predictable.
What repeats itself or is an amalgamation of repetitions is necessarily stable, otherwise it would always break its various rhythms and repetitions.
The hallmark of randomness is that we find within it no rhythm, no repetition, if we would then we would isolate it and at the very least see this isolated pattern as not being random, we would even consider it to be not part of the random stuff anymore it would be deemed a thing, something distinct from the random stuff.

Indeed...

Order = predictable, repeating, consistent, rhythm, harmony,...we use so many words to refer to the same phenomenon.
This is how we confuse ourselves...delighting in it.
As if we've escaped, through definitions.

Chaos = unpredictable, non-repeating, inconsistent, noise, disharmony.

Both are energies....dynamic.
Both exist.
Both participate in flux = (inter)action - attraction/repulsion.

Chaos always repels. It cannot harmonize with anything...not even chaos.
Only order can harmonize and build unities....symphonies....organisms...elements....matter/energy.

Presuming that all is probabilistic and there is no randomness: just by being present as an observer, you are affected such that there is inherent randomness, by the act of distinguishing alone. The tool, just to see the difference between slight perturbations, has to change itself in some aspect which it is blind to at present, and perhaps to all future dates. Because of this at an extreme level, there would be no absolute predictability/probabilistic-ability to the universe (including the distinguishing-tool/self). There is a sort of atomism to Parmenidean physics.

Past is determined...immutable.
Present is what we do with this past, in relation to other, as a reaction to environment.
Future is the consequences passed on.

It is in the dynamic, mutable, present, where free-will still applies, to whatever degree that ti does.

Morality is linked with the question of free-will.

One variant of the Modern does not want to be held accountable to anyone; wants to be free of all limitations.
Morality must be made a construct of a mind. If not God's, then some other, or a collective mind, imposing itself upon the individual's 'options'.
Free to self-determine,a s if the body did not exist, or was a superficial representation of a containment, a vehicle, the mind could replace or reinterpret. Physical form, evolved for specific utilities, replaced with the purification of the body, its cleansing of determined utilities.

Morality is a private creative act, restricted only by that of another.
Even this 'limitation' is overridden with a compromise - a collective agreement based on democratic majorities.

The other variant is on the absolute opposite end of the binary nihilistic paradigm.
Morality is an expression of the individual's submission to circumstances he can do nothing about but laugh or cry at.
There's no need to even speak of what cannot be changed, so philosophies that bring forth the 'negative' aspect of this enslavement, are undesirable whining.
The 'proper' thing to do is 'yay saying', meaning a rhetorical affirmation of what one cannot change, as if it were desirable, or willed.
An 'amen' to God's Will.
The affirmation accepts the inevitable as an unavoidable aspect of the individual's essence.
Affirming and denying is also determined, escaping in circularity the insinuation of a de facto surrender to fate.

Dualism, Nihilistic absolutes, set up the binary poles of Absolute Freedom and absolute Slavery, renamed determinism to hide the fact.

Past is either rejected, or defined as god, even if other words are used to pretend secularism - progress of ideology.

In both the Mind is the mysterious entity not emanating or extending from brain, but existing in some vague noetic platonic sphere.
Mind detached from body, or mind contained by body.

The Body (physical) <> Nervous System (dynamic, interactive) <> Mind (Idea) Triad.

Father (God) <> Holy Spirit <> Son (Messiah)
Messiah comes to earth to 'liberate' man from Father
Humanism (secular nihilism), denies and denounces God, the Father, by dismissing the body as illusion, as a prison.
By rejecting the body, God, the mind (spirit) is free to be whatever it wishes - paradise on earth (Utopia).
Christ, in the Christian tradition, is the one that liberates man from Himself, his past - primordial sin.
Man's rejection of the body's Will is forgiven - gaining the final liberation, which is not really so.
Christianity places a limit on Free Will, realizing the absurdity implied in their own dogma. An absurdity which is being followed to its 'logical end' in post-modernity.
Christians play a mind-game: man is given freedom to choose, but only if they choose to follow god's will.
Another choice is followed by an eternity of suffering.

Moderns trained by Marxism, convert god to a collective they call state, or Humanity.
Majority rule means a collective judgment, expressing the will of god.
Humanity is world, but it is also god creating world.
Anyone who preaching, or becoming aware of distinctions, divisions, within this collective, is threatening God - blaspheme.
God's perfection is being questioned.

How does the modern secular God decide/determine?
By reaching a consensus.
Human competitions is god's internal dialogue. Consensus is god's Will - his decree.

Choices are presented to man.
These choices are limited by past - the determinism.
The choices span a variety of degrees of difficulty, from hard to easy.

Man expresses his free-will, by making a choice that will then determine future options.
Man's choice is entirely his own, based on his reasoning, judgments.

The entire scheme is affected by randomness. There is no absolute order, no whole, no perfect repeating pattern.
Each choice is faced with a slightly altered, modified, set of options, and is never a clone, an absolute perfect copy of the previous.
Consciousness is supposed to adapt its judgment, each time, to this slight modification.
In this way it contributes to its own fate, determining later options.

Choices made, as these relate to other living organisms interacting and choosing, and within the context of an ongoing Flux of unconscious (inter)activity, is what then produces the circumstance of the next set of options to choose from.

We inherit the choices made by our ancestors, within their circumstances, and we add to this our own to pass on to the next generation, whether we reproduce or not.

There is no intrinsic good/bad, there is a choice made, based on a subjective judgment, relating to a world independent form this judgment.
This subjective judgment produces consequences, contributes to the circumstances that will determine the next subjective judgment.

Plants cannot project, into future, They are entirely reactive.
A human, on the other hand, can project. His subjective judgment is guided by a conscious and unconscious goal, a motive.
Good/Bad only make sense in relation to this motive.
Morality can be placed within this context.

Judgment = evaluation of options.
Ideal = the objective, the standard used to evaluate. We can also call it goal, intent etc.

Application is the ideal put into practice within the real, resulting in consequences exposing both the ideal's and the judgment's quality.
Cost/Benefit = consequence.

Ideal is what we use to judge every actions, behaviour, choice, intent, theory.
If it is not applied the ideal remains theoretical. In theory all ideals are equally plausible, good, perfect. When applied they are exposed to the indifference of the real.
Noumena confronted by phenomena - the idea(l) confronted by the real.
If the individual is protected from costs/benefits, the consequences of the application of its judgments & ideals, then the intervening entity, by adjusting cost/benefits, replaces the individual's ideal with its own - mind control.

The external Will by stepping in to protect the individual's will from the consequences, essentially assimilates it. The individual will accepts this, governed by the anxiety of facing the consequences of its own judgments/ideals directly.
The Noble Lie becomes a cooperative idea(l).

Football, or soccer for the north American crowd, is a good metaphor.

We have the objective world, of gravity, the forces of nature affecting the ball, and the players, randomness expressed as the ball's unexpected bounce, slight divergence, it's funny spin etc.

Then we have two teams each willing the ball toward a specific space/time area, which is also dynamic but fixed, noetically, by the playing field.
It's dynamic because its on a planetary body, a continental shelf, and every part of it is mutable, it is deteriorating, slightly shifting, at infinitesimally small speeds.
Then we have the unseen variables light, bosons, quarks....

Both sides have a specific talent with manoeuvring the ball using their body, minus their hands.
Their talents are determined genetically.  Each player adding his own to an aggregate team pool.
Cultivation of the talent has preceded, memetically.  
The meme also participates as the team's strategy - how it has evaluated all these variables in themselves and in the other team, and come to a theoretical 'best strategy'.

Then they put this strategy in practice. They apply it on the 'pitch'.
Angles, ball rotation, acceleration, all participate in the outcome.
Each player applying his judgment, freely, to adjust to all these variables in real-time, immediately.
Reaction times are also part of the outcome. How fast can each player adjust his behaviour to all these variables coming into play in an instant, when the ball is in his vicinity.
The ball's interaction cannot be measured, nor all the variables processed in time....the individual uses precedent and his senses to adjust his won course of action.

The only external factor are the referees. This is also a variable that can be adjusted to.....how strict/lenient the ref is to specific actions etc.

The outcome is the product of all these unknown and known, controlled and uncontrolled variables.
Each team, contributed to by each individual's genetic and memetic parts, and each individual's judgment, and physical qualities, within a contained space/time and time period, determines the outcome.
Genetic/Memetic quality can only increase probabilities of an ideal outcome, they cannot guarantee them.

We can apply this on a field of play that has no boundaries.
Each individual judges himself, his own genetic qualities, in relation to otherness and his own circumstances in relation to his objective, his ideal circumstances.
He then formulates a course of action. The judgment is put into practice as a strategy, movement towards the objective.
What occurs to him are the consequences of this movement, based on the judgment - his evaluation of world and himself within it - relationships.
Cost/Benefit are the consequences...both expected and unexpected, measurable and random.
Free Will is the individual's adjustment, on the move, in real-time.

Blithering Genius + Aarvoll. Somewhat related to what we were discussing, covers some of the same ground but I don't think goes as far as we have. Other people thinking about the same things.

"This universe" is not "special", but only for life, considering itself "special" or a universal end.

The model produces constants as an interpretation of what can be perceived, as order.
An organism depends and constructs order. The mind is a forager of patterns, and a creator of them (art).
interpretation begins with the binary system: 1/0. In art, the visual, it begins with black/white, dark/light.
Fractions and colours are the combination of these starting mental abstractions - interpretations of patterns.
Chaos/Order is the binary interpretation of interactivity, change, the dynamic....existence.
To presume order in chaos is to project a god, a 1, in all, because an organism can only perceive order, assuming, hoping, preying that all is so. Abrahamism begins here.
Properly defining chaos to agree with the binary model would make it an absence of order, not god hidden in the foundations, as occult order.  
It worships and values what it needs. It idealizes what it is through other.
Beginning with self-knowledge the mind understands the other. This risks the assumption produced by projection: the esoteric being the exoteric - the real being the ideal, rather than the ideal representing, approximating, simplifying/generalizing the real.
The esoteric is the interpretation of the exoteric.
To Know Thyself is a way of knowing other, and just as vulnerable to misinterpretation and projection - the internal projected as a product of the lucid self, the ego.
The ego sees itself everywhere. It's a way of dealing with anxiety.
Hate/Love is the emotional context of this projection.  

All is dynamic is not a singularity = god, dynamism.
But the mind can worship it as such....and so we get the gods representing different degrees of dynamism, worshipping interactivity.
The layman, the simple man, has to remain on this level of understanding making him vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation.

=================
Monotheism lurks beneath our dualities - the singularity, split into the binary code, infects our minds.
1/0 = God/Satan...where even Satan, the evil is the product of good, of god. Chaos is complexity....order hiding, god in the machine.
The alternative is too terrifying...too counter-intuitive.
We literally believe in our own interpretations of existence: our own reactions to existence, to the unknown and unknowable otherness.
Modernity has made it into an ideology = all is subjective.....'in the eye of the beholder'. All is a construct of society, indirectly implying a rational mind, an intent with a purpose, a telos - if not god then the self...if not the individual then the collective.
Debates occur over who is the determining mind: is it some mystical absolute god, is it the majority, the collective, or is it the individual, the 'I'.

Persistent Infection –Pure and Positive Nihilism revealed as residual effects of psychosomatic, and spiritual disease (Mind/Body dis-ease)
"Free-Will is an illusion" they say... a way of accusing, of casting blame.
This can be turned around to say, with equal psychological validity, that determinism is a way of excusing self, and evading responsibility.
The underlying illusion is the existence of an absolute, as more than a mental construct, given symbolic, semiotic presence – a noetic construct retained in ambiguity and projected outward using symbols, sounds... words.
All words defined and understood as absolutes are noetic and if they are then projected as existing outside the mind then they are truly illusions.
An artistic mind is required; a courageous spirit – a flexibility of discernment between representations and represented, the real and the ideal.
Free-Will is not an absolute, but a representation of a degree describing a relationship between the immutable, determining past, and the unknown, immanent future, placing the individual in the shifting middle, the dynamic present/presence; a conduit, a lens, focusing this determined past, in the fluctuating present; a presence of (inter)active order/chaos, yet to be determined.
The mind is the judge, the directing ‘will’ that responds to the fluctuations, and makes a choice it has to live with becoming what will be a determining past.
The choice affects the future to whatever infinitesimal degree, setting up the next set of options. This is what differentiates the animate living, from the inanimate, the non-living. It is memory informing actions.
Genes/Memes are such memories encoded and expressed as DNA, or through Language. Body is the representation of this immutable past, inherited as simplified/generalized memory, reacting in accordance with this recollection within the turmoil of existence – every reaction causing a counter, gradually modifying it.
Mind evolves to streamline the process of adaptation. Mind adapts quicker to the fluctuating interactivity. Circumstances are determined but how they manifest in the present is not. The myth of absolute order is hidden here... as a residual of Abrahamic spirituality, and the infantile spirit confusing its dualisms, and binary thinking, the method evolved to deal with the world for the world itself.
How the mind adjusts, wilfully directing the body is the extent and limit of its 'free choice'.
Its options are limited, determined by interactions out if its control, by the immutable past, but which one it will take is entirely its own. This choice is its responsibility. It will affect all future options and, subsequently, its fate.
A tiny amount of power within an unfathomable existence – man before the gods bows and hopes, and bargains, and pleads. The expansion of this pool of options available to him, is what power is. A gradual increase, based on how well he judges and chooses. Past made presence, projected into future.
The triad of higher consciousness, as opposed to the lower duality of past made present with no sense of future. A plant is entirely determined by circumstances, it is its past (DNA) made present, reacting to the fluctuations according to the memories of its past (it's genetic programming)... a lower organism is slightly more free, it can choose to contradict this programming if the circumstances call for it, and so we climb up the scale towards increasingly more sophisticated beings who wave deeper and wider projections of future, and more knowledge and understanding of past, benefiting from this with more options, more freedom - also a burden, a care, an anxiety the inferior do not suffer.
This absolutist either/or dualism, this binary code many minds are trapped in results in paradoxes and errors in judgment, that are far too subtle to be noticeable, but accumulate, resulting in grave mistakes the individual must excuse himself from, or entirely blame himself for, leading to psychosis.
There is nothing absolute means everything is dependent, contingent on the choices and interactions of other... and 'will' must be properly defined as the focus of the inherited past, in the present, towards an unknowable future.
The absence of absolute implies an absence of absolute order, not the rejection or denial of any and all degrees of order. It implies the inclusion of chaos, also properly defined as randomness and not as an occult, hidden, yet to be discovered, secret order, an order only the chose, the worthy few can appreciate... similar to the Abrahamic God, of the Jewish/Christian/Islamic faiths: a god 'hidden' in all, underlying all, yet to be discovered in all, but believed in entirely.
Nihilistic residue permeates Modern psychologies. They think they've overcome it because they've renamed the noetic concepts they persistently use to cope.
A few prefer to deal with an impending madness by completely dismissing all reason, and all order, as illusory. If the presumed absolute is absent then all is levelled down to an undifferentiated whole, governed by chance and idealism. The mind is preserved as the divine arbiter: if there is no 'external' absolute Will, no god, then the human will take its place.
Man declares himself a god, because he is unable to cope with the alternative: uncertainty, the unreasonable. The Abrahamic God is replaced by universal order, or by the narcissism of reacting to one's own feebleness, announcing for all to hear, hoping something will be convinced, that 'man' is now god, and if not the solitary man then mankind.

We're trapped in a linguistic gulag... between the either/or binary 'logic', and our own abstractions establishing absolutes: 1/0. We are trapped within the limitations of our own minds, within our own noetic constructs taken literally, and not as figurative representations. We cannot think of an alternative to the absolute freedom of will, or its absolute absence = positive/negative Nihilism.
Stuck in art, in interpretation, we confuse the interpretation for the interpreted.
How could we not when the brain evolved this dualistic method to conceptualize fluctuating existence?
It requires an advancement in thinking, an evolution in cognition, similar to the one that advanced from consciousness towards self-consciousness – perceiving 'self' as part of otherness – world.
If we reconnect the words to reality we can proceed to perceive the representational essence of what they imply.
Free = independence. Since absolutes are absent, this does not mean absolute freedom.
Will = focus of aggregate energies called 'self'. Since the 'self' is unknown, and control over the body is also incomplete, there is no 'absolute will'.
Some pronounce Will as being Nil, to escape personal accountability, and their own role in their own fate.
Others pronounce Will absolute free, a One, to shame self, and/or other, as part of a manipulative effort to control self and/or other.
As always, truth lies outside this absolutist either/or dichotomy; fluidity lies outside the 1/0 binary representational system. There is no absolute ORDER, as there is no absolute CHAOS, but there are fluctuations of the two, as we experience it daily.
Only able to conceptualize order, we lean towards one side of the spectrum (one pole): absolute ONE, ORDER.
Those who lean towards the other extreme are motivated by self-hatred, fear, a desire to ridicule the opposite extreme by exposing its representational essence, forgetting that it is simply the opposite extreme.
Past is nature... the determined/determining – immutable.
We cannot change the past, but only know and understand it... imprecisely and incompletely, as there is no omniscience. Past manifests as presence, meaning it appears, and we are also part of this apparent. Because there is no omnipotence this appearance is not completely known, and cannot be completely controlled.
Presence is what we call – Flux = fluid, fluctuating, presentation of this determined past. Past is continuously being added to in the present; present is the ‘liquid,’ mutability of this past.
What do we mean by ‘willing’? We mean the reaction to this past made present/presence, to whatever degree we know and can control 'self'.
Will is expressed as choice: determined past produces choices, made present (presented, appearing) to the mind, as a product of this relationship of mind/body (noumenon/phenomenon, Idea(l)/Real).
Will directs what it knows/understands and controls; every choice, is a direction, taken, determining subsequent choices – in conjunction with all other choices and interactions occurring simultaneously.
Most choices are predetermined genetically. We call those instinctive, intuitive.
Plants, and Animals are reactive, in that they do not need to know nor fully understand but can react according to genetic programming.
Man, becoming self-aware, can circumvent, and contradict these automated reactions, increasing his 'freedom' from past; not entirely breaking free but stretching the options made available (made apparent). With every increase in freedom options multiply.
There is no absolutely free will, but neither is there will absolute un-free, and/or absolutely determined. Again… the truth lies in the middle, or outside this binary paradigm of bipolar absolutes.

Body/Mind
Phenomenon/Noumenon
Real/Ideal

Will = focus of organism's aggregate energies upon an objective.
Energies refers to processes, participating in a developing unity - dynamic.
The mind need not be aware nor totally in control.

Freedom = independence. Non-Dependence.

Free-Will refers to mind emerging from body, either in agreement or in disagreement with it.
Body = manifestation of past as presence - appearance.
Body is the determining past made present.
Mind is the this body adjusting to an ongoing, dynamic, existence. The application/expression of past, in the present.
The mnid's reactions add to the past determining future. Its reactions, choices, wilful direction, becomes part of the past, determining the options available to the same organism in the future.
Self = a continuum of unbroken memories - experiences (interactions) stored as data.
DNA = past memories encoded biochemically - genetics.
Semiotics = past memories encoded symbolically - memetics.

Mind = experience/knowledge directing actions.
Body = instincts, impulse, determining actions.
All organic actions are expressions of wilful choices, whether they be conscious and/or unconscious.

Only the human species can develop a mind that can control or usurp physical impulses; only the human species can control and/or usurp genetics using memetics.

Mind is a fluid (inter)action with a fluctuating reality, in accordance or contrary to the body's automated reactions.
Nihilism begins from this point, calling it 'liberty', and 'salvation'. It implies a detachment of mind from body, a liberation from past/nature, as much as this is possible.
It is ideal/ideology liberated from the determined/determining past - meme directing genes, rather than genes extending memetically - eugenics.
It is expressed by multiple 'liberating' ideologies, each proposing and promoting a specific ideal future man.
The degree to which this projected, imagined, theoretical ideal man is contrary to precedent, to past/nature, determines the degree to which it is nihilistic = theoretically negating, contradicting past/nature.
Language, symbols/words, are its point of detachment. the noetic point of inversion.
along the nervous system, language begins to surgically detach mind/from the limiting body - the ideal from the despises restricting physical.

Because order manifests as matter/energy, it is randomness which is worshipped, as chaos is what contradicts/nullifies order, producing the endless interactivity we call Flux...change.
It worships chaos as continuous change, and tries to negate all order, especially all man-made and maintained order.
Nihilism is always revolutionary, negating everything that stops or attempts to control/direct Flux.
The inversion identifies change as the revolutionary act, when in fact ti is order which is revolutionary.
Change occurs whether we like it or want it, or not.
Nihilism despises all human attempts to slow or control change.
Just like their definition of the concept 'nihilism' they worship the opposite of what they truly are.
They are the Nihilists calling all who rebel against their projected artifices, 'nihilists'. Similarly, they identify as rebels, when the true act of rebellion is the establishment of order in a cosmos tending towards absolute chaos.
It is the male spirit that promotes the truly revolutionary resistance to chaos, exposing these rebels as nothing more than effete spirits siding with the strongest power.
The movement towards absolute chaos is what we experience as linear space/time: from a near absolute point of order, we call big Bang, we experience existence as a momentum towards increasing randomness/chaos.
So, it is order that requires effort, agon, to be created and maintained, and not chaos. Change happens, attrition occurs.
We experience this attrition as need/suffering, and we struggle to maintain our organic order, against an ongoing relentless momentum.

Between immutable past (nature), and unknowable future (theory, idea/ideal), lies what we experience as existence (flux, dynamic).
Existence can also be called 'reality', and can be included in the triad, past/present/future in the concept 'world'.
A proper definition of words, referring to concepts, begins by attempting to reconnect them to experienced reality.

The triad past/present/future can be redefined as nature/interactivity/ideology, or placing it within organic contexts as body/nervous system/mind.

Freedom implies a degree of detachment, just as power does not mean omnipotence but measures a degree of weakness, and knowing/understanding does not describe omniscience but a degree of awareness and comprehension.
Absent absolutes means the words used always refer to a degree, and a 'degree' represents a fraction, corresponding to the binary 1/0, in mathematics.
We always claim a superiority, not an absolute, even when we use the concept to project a level of knowledge, comprehension and certainty that nobody can challenge.
Even when we use the word 'truth' we do not imply an absolute, unless we are a feeble-minded nitwit, over-compensating for a deep-rooted insecurity, by 'declaring' an absolute when none can be proven, nor shown.

A conviction beyond a 'reasonable doubt' is presented as an absolute certainty, given precedent.
It's all about precedent, the past, determining presence, the present, the apparent.

To properly understand how 'free-will is possible, and to what degree it is possible, we must define the words properly, and by 'properly' I do not mean subjectively, or arbitrarily, nor ideologically...but by reconnecting concepts, these words represent, to an external phenomenon, or an external relationship of phenomena.
We also call these relationships 'meaning'.
Truth is a claim that we are aware of a superior 'truth', not an absolute one, given that all is fluid (in flux) and due to the often ignored and denied factor of randomness (chaos properly defined).
There would be no necessity for higher consciousness if all were ordered and so determined, unless we claim consciousness is a voyeuristic, ploy, or a test, or a cosmic hoax, hiding divine masturbation.

We can place 'will' as the focusing of a living organism's aggregate energies - both the known and unknown.
This 'focus', implies control, which implies awareness, so immediately we recognize that this 'wilful' focus is imperfect, requiring training, and self-knowledge, to increase in strength.
Will is exposed as referring to an non-absolute process.
If we turn to 'freedom' then we can define it as 'independence' or a degree of non-dependence on otherness.
I've used the concept of 'indifference' to describe the outward expression of power, and of independence - something we all recognize as confidence.
Confidence is a degree of indifference, independence from the possible outcomes - whether this is a product of having access to other possibilities or due to a reaffirmation of one's won abilities, is a qualification of confidence.
What matters is how confidence displays a degree of indifference, concerning the consequences.
Females intuitively sense this and are attracted to it - it displays a quantity of possibilities that is independent from the particular. This is why a female on your arm is a sure way to attract feminine attentions.
The 'bad boy' factor...as opposed to the more desperate 'nice guy' strategy, compensating for the lack of options by a increase in submissiveness.
We can see here the essence of 'respect'.
Why is the 'nice guy' so respectful towards the female of his obsessive focus?
as I've defined 'respect' it is based on anxiety - fear of a potential loss; whether this loss is of 'life' (physical threat), or a loss of companionship (psychological threat), or simply a denial of wisdom, such as that given by a mentor. The kind of potential loss, indicates a threat, which produces anxiety - compensated with 'respect'.
if we become aware of what self-respect is, we can admit to the underlying anxieties it hides, concerning potential losses.

We can now see how 'freedom' is also imperfect and never absolute.
So,what do we mean by 'free-will'?
We certainty do not mean absolute liberty, independence, controlled by an absolutely powerful 'will'.
The dilemma of 'free' or 'determined' will, is not a dilemma between absolute 'one' and absolute 'nil', no more than the nurture/nature debate is not about absolutes.
It's about degrees of freedom and determination.

Freedom means choices.
Increased freedom implies more choices, more options.
Absolute freedom implies infinite choices - which is idealistic nonsense.
How do choices increase, representing an increase in freedom?
Through strength/power.
how does strength/power increase?
Through a correct evaluation of choices; through higher awareness; through training.
Each choice increases or decreases all subsequent options.
Wrong choices decreases future choices - it shrinks options. This means you become more dependent.
Correct choices increases future options - it multiplies them. This means you become more independent.

Dependent/Independent from what?
From both the past (immutable = determinism) and the present (flux, fluctuating = change).
The alter also has detrimental side-effects, making it more difficult to proceed towards increased freedom....but that's another issue.

Only a degenerate modern, infected by Nihilism, would approach words in this either/or psychology based on binary logic, and dualities.
Either to 'punish' those who choose other than what he did (trying to reinterpret and mask an error), or to evade personal culpability, hiding all sorts of psychological motives.

If we reattach the words to the real, in the concept of ‘free-will,’ then 'free' means independent, and 'will' means the focus of energies, or the directing of momentum/movement, towards an objective.
How these combine and manifests in real-time is as ‘choice’.
‘Freedom’ is a measure of the will's choice of objectives – its options. These can never be absolute, because absolute ‘free-will' would mean infinitely accessible options, implying an absolute Will, and absolute consciousness (omniscience), which is another way of saying 'God', in the Abrahamic sense of the word.
But neither can it mean the opposite absolute extreme, of no-choice, implying that choices made are not really those of the organism, but that all choices have been pre-determined, or that the 'choice' is really one of 'no-choice', similar to the Christian use of the concept: a self-negating pseudo-choice, choice, or 'pseudo-independence' which can never be practiced, so a dependent, independence. In practical terms meaning that you are given an option, no sane mind could or ever would choose... so there's really one truly rational option.
In Christian contexts this means that you are 'given' choice but you will be punished for choosing in a way that contradicts a Will that overrides your own.
In-between these pretentious, hypocrisies founded on word-games, is the real, just as the state we call 'existence' is in-between the abstractions of absolute order & absolute chaos.
There are choices available, but they are limited not only by the determining past, manifesting as presence in the form of options, but also by all the interactions occurring when they are made available, or when they become apparent.
The measure of power of mind and of body, is the quantity & quality of options accessible to an individual, and its ability to take advantage of an option – sometimes you may become aware of options you are mentally and/or physically unable to choose.
Every choice is accompanied by a predisposition which may be contradicted, and every choice made determines all subsequent options – the individual participates, to whatever small degree, in the world which determines the future; every choice made participates in what determines the future.
The individual is neither innocent nor guilty, in any absolute sense. The degree of his/her culpability is equal to his presence, or equal to the space/time (possibilities) he encompasses physically – the body appropriating a part of space/time.
Every choice is minuscule when compared to the entirely of Cosmic Flux, but it is not absolutely insignificant. Its power can be multiplied by its affect on other minds and the choices they are inspired to make – Butterfly Effect.
The tiniest disturbance on a snow covered peak, can cause a devastating avalanche on the foothills.

Free-Will is the acceptance of responsibility, and its allotment across the living, and the dead.
It is a brutal accounting, because it absolves nobody from whatever small part he/she played in the emergence of the present.
Ignorance is denied its cleansing innocence.
Whether you know it or not, or you acknowledge it or not, and whether your part is large or small, your every choice participates in the determining of the future.
Every choice a weave in a tapestry receding into the past, and participating in the determination of subsequent options.

Past manifesting as present, means that the present is for the future its past.
Every generation contributing to the creation of the future.
The living wilfully, and the non-living with their automated interactions, following paths-of-least-resistance.

It is the conscious that can accept responsibility, because unconscious patterns have no will.
Denying will its freedom is an attempt to escape responsibility, and like Job suffer what one has no part in creating...but can only submit to, and surrender, accepting this surrender as inevitable.
Absolving the individual of all culpability is part of Abraham and Marxism, and it is what is currently called the culture of victimhood.
All are 'victim' of a Will, and like Job they must accept their allotted fate begrudgingly...complaining all the way.
Culture of Victimhood is the culture of complaining about what one can do nothing about.

With the death of God, there was nobody to blame except one another.
Moderns, absolving themselves of responsibility, use one another to accuse and unload the responsibility they cannot accept.
God is converted to a vague otherness, forever condemning the individual to a fate he has no part in creating.
Salvation in innocence, cynical denial.
Blaming others of what one denies in himself.
Why complain when it is all inevitable?
The bible advises to accept one's fate, like Job did. Accepting one's fate is inevitable.

Surrendering to an external Will, is a part of Abrahamist psychosis, the very definition of desperation in one's own degeneracy.
Abraham, the unifying icon of the Abrahamic triad, is a figure exemplifying wilful surrender.

Marxism took over from there, proposing a surrendering to the state, to the communal Will, describing a bee-hive humanity as inevitable.
God replaced by State, representing the totality, the whole, the oneness of 'humanity'....humanity redefined and cleansed of its natural identifiers, like sex and race.
The individual would identify, in utopia, by his contributions, by his production value.
Piety was replaced by production, entering the bipolar world of Modernity and its right/left dualities.
Right = absolute order
Left = absolute chaos

Through chaos the downtrodden dreamt of change as a reshuffling of order, an usurping of established order, bringing about an inversion, or a more favourable order.

But with no free-will what was left to hope for but revelation and divine providence?
Marxists turned it into an erasure, erasing natural hierarchies, injecting in its place an innate 'goodness',similar to the Christian fallen spirit....a spontaneous justice, and fairness, only the evil stood against.
It would emerge if the 'evil capitalists' were destroyed, allowing the innate spirit of fairness and human goodness to shine through.
But they were naive and wrong....and the inevitable was not so.

The idea of an absolutely un-free will, implies that consciousness emerges as a kind of universal masochism; becoming aware of what it can do nothing about, it evovles to increase its suffering by becoming aware of the inevitable.
It's a form of self-punishment on a universal level.

The idea of an absolutely free-will, on the other hand, implies that man is god, but he still cannot admit it to himself, suffering from some sort of inferiority complex.
He is god with insecurities.....seeking validation in others.
Because the only parts of existence he can control, with his mind, are conscious beings with training in logos, he presumes logos as his divine inheritance. He can control world - meaning humans - using words, therefore, he concludes, logos is the mind of god, and he is god that still does not know it.
Man is god suffering cosmic amnesia, gradually recalling his divinity.
But are all humans gods, or are all humans God?
In the first case....a war of gods is immanent; in the latter, god has intentionally given himself amnesia, to cure his boredom....so he isn't absolute, in any case.  

Freedom is never absolute....it is always a matter of degree, dependent on the individual's awareness and strength (will-power).
The individual's choices contributes in the present - along with all other interactions - to what is becoming past.
Each choice becoming that which determines what proceeds as presence.
Dynamic present, becoming immutable past, by projecting towards the yet-to-be determined future.
All repeats, sometimes in a very predictable order...but never entirely so.
History repeats, but never exactly as it did before.

Man has never experienced the immutable, indivisible, certain, but he presumes it because he can think it....and his own thoughts are as predictable as can be.
An ordered organism, dependent and obsessed with order, would imagine a world entirely and absolutely ordered.
He wants to make his suffering mean something.....something rational.

Unable to perceive chaos - randomness - directly, but only through its effects on order - patterns - he perceives all as being ordered, yet even his perceptions are approximations, with a degree of predictability.
He calls a high degree of predictability, 'certainty'....unable to perceive any slight divergences....just as he can only perceive a Newtonian Universe, and cannot imagine its Quantum foundation.
Unable to understand anything outside beginnings and ends, he assumes that the universe has a beginning and an end.
He cannot perceive any beginning, nor an end, but experiences beginnings, every morning, or when a movie begins and ends, or when life begins and ends; he has never perceive nothingness, yet presumes it to make somthingness make sense.
He asks questions that are nonsensical, expecting an answer...or not wanting an answer, he merely asks them to dismiss the uncomfortable probabilities, preserving his nonsensical theories.
He slanders human judgement to protect his own.
He diminishes and degrades human conciousness to not expose his own as lacking...or inferior.
He ridicules and laughs at all theories and approximation, because he is unable to create his own.
He is addicted to god, or a father-figure, but idealizes the concept so as to never find one in the world....remaining, an adolescent retard for a lifetime.
He seeks himself, but has defined the concept 'self' in supernatural ways, ensuring that he will never face himself in reality, until he dies and is saved.
He defines all words in a way that ensures that he will never face them in reality...unable to face them in reality.
he demands absolutes knowing that none exist, ensuring that he can remain as obtuse and carefree as possible, until death.

Irony....he denies free-will for himself, to evade holding himself responsible in any way, but accuses others of what they are not responsible for - according to his own delusions.
If nobody has choice, then the rapist has none either....nor does the paedophile or the murderer.
All are order a.k.a. God playing with himself a sadomasochistic game of no-chance.

Book of Job...

38:1-4, New International Version wrote:

Chapter 38
Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said,
Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?
Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.
Who hast laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?
Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof;
When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

40:1-4, New International Version wrote:

The LORD said to Job: "Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him? Let him who accuses God answer him!" Then Job answered the LORD: "I am unworthy--how can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth.

Job 1:8 wrote:

And the Lord said to Satan, ‘Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?’

Job 2:9-10 wrote:

Then his (Job) wife said to him, ‘Do you still hold fast to your integrity?  Curse God and die!’  But he said to her, ‘You speak as one of the foolish women would speak.  Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?’  In all of this Job did not sin with his lips.

Job 6:11 wrote:

What is my strength, that I should wait?  And what is my end, that I should be patient?

Job 9:2 wrote:

Truly I know that it is so: But how can a man be in the right before God?

Job 23:13-14 wrote:

But He is unchangeable, and who can turn Him back?  What He desires, that He does.  For He will complete what He appoints for me, and many such things are in His mind.

Job 38:36 wrote:

Who has put wisdom in the inward parts or given understanding to the mind?

Job 40:2 wrote:

Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty?  He who argues with God, let him answer it.

Job 42:2, 5-6 wrote:

I know that You can do all things, and that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted.  I had heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You, therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.

Replace 'God' (Lord) with 'Absolute'....name it anything: One, Order, Whole, Love, Universe, any word will suffice if it is 'positive'.
Replace 'Job' with Modern, or any version of the Nihilist: Jew, Christian, Muslim, or any secular variant: Marxist, post-modern, Transhumanist etc.

The foundation of Nihilism:
Absolute un-free-will, or Determinism, implies that life is inevitable, and part of some universal programming, some 'telos'. Though many would deny such a thing.
But isn't that what Abrahamism already believes? Don't the Christians already believe in this?
They compromised, going the other direction, inventing absolute free-will, to explain why 'evil' exists in a world created, according to them, by an absolutely good, benevolent one-god.
It was a ruse, a way of taunting, forcing man to surrender, to submit, as evidence of his 'faith'.
Man was 'free' only as far as he could choose between eternal salvation or eternal damnation - a none-choice dualistic choice. Man was 'free' to choose not to be 'free', making his surrender psychologically complete - body and mind.
They set man up as the fall guy, the cause of evil, to get out of the cognitive corner their own lies and delusions put them in.
They're continuously coming-up with excuses like this - after-the-fact - spin-doctoring their way out of their own bullshyte.
They did the same when they invented that, convenient, new 'sin' that prohibits suicide.
From their own nihilistic dogma it reasonably followed that a 'true-believer would not wait for 'god' to decide to take him to 'heaven' but would speed-up the process by his own hand.
Why suffer this 'deplorable' world - according to them - when you can end it any time you want, and live in bliss 'up in heaven'?
But that went against 'god's will', you see, so it's prohibited. Total submission means your own will is sacrificed to the one-will.
You need to be given 'freedom' so as to then sacrifice it to the totalitarian deity, as evidence of your serious commitment; your faith.
'Primordial sin' only makes sense in a deterministic reality, if you think about it.
How is anyone absolutely and eternally accountable to what happened before his birth, unless he inherited it by being the inevitable product of a broken rule?
The 'rule' was transgressed, but even this was part of a plan; was intentional.
This is where the paradoxes begin if you take this idiocy seriously.

But if free-will was not absolute, nor absolutely absent, then every individual - though determined by his/her past - still had the wilful power to slightly divert from inherited patterns.
Every man can redeem himself with great effort, and to a small degree, because every birth is a new opportunity.
Ironic that 'chaos' is the redeeming quality. It's hinted at in Biblical text, through the metaphor of Satan; the equivalent of Pandora in pagan traditions.
Evolution would be a joke, if everything naturally selected was inevitable. There is no choice, no selection, if all is part of a predetermined program.
It implies that humans and life are part of a universal telos, some plan....an inevitable goal. A back-door way of secretly returning to Abrahamic beliefs.

Absolute order is how they've reinvented their Abrahamic Nihilistic one-god.
'One' is, for them, one of 'his' many names - words/symbols.
They literally believe in 'one', to which they are the 'nil' - ignorant of the one's inevitability.
They are Nihilists, though some still refuse to admit it, while others embrace it with a passion, secretly despising an existence that makes them possible.

What liberates 'order' from its own repeating constraints?
'Chaos,' properly understood as randomness, and not complexity.
It's what is terrifying about 'freedom' - as even a Marxist like Sartre could appreciate. But he went to the other extreme adopting 'absolute free-will' for his own brand of Nihilism. He needed it to justify his delusion that man could continuously reinvent himself, from scratch, from nothing - implying, of course, that all is a social construct, or part of a human conspiracy, eliminating nature and natural selection from the picture.
God was replaced by 'man', as the creator. From one extreme to the other - binary dualistic delusions = 1/0.
In between these cognitive absolutes is where reality works - The Nihilist is unable to think outside his comforting, certain absolutes - a simple mind of simple extremes.
It's a typical either/or dichotomy of the Nihilistic paradigm - either absolute one and/or absolute nil.
Either the will is absolutely free, or it is absolutely un-free; either all is determined, or all is undetermined, invented on the fly, absolutely subjective.

Associated with free-will.

Jews are the ones 'determined' - chosen - to suffer on behalf of absolute order - God. An escape is impossible.
Christians, affected by Hellenism, cannot accept this elitist submission.
Their redemption is placed 'outside' existence, where it cannot exploit them in the real world. This is the source of their disagreement with 'mother' Judaism.
What is implied here is that nothing can be 'changed', but only submitted to, endured stoically; accepted as a slave accepts his faith; as the cast system's 'untouchables' accept their fate.
Pagans do not believe in this. Their spirituality challenges divine power; prays but does not grovel; tricks it (order) by allying against it with other divine powers - gods.
The individual's 'will' is not entirely impotent. Whatever small power it possesses it can apply to redeem itself; choosing to not accept its inherited past, but to selectively nurture portions of it, gradually changing itself.
Nihilism is based on this. but it takes it to its absurd extreme - it declared the will absolutely free from past - a god.
Either god created all, or order determines all - absolute slavery - or man creates and determines all - absolute freedom.
The truth, lies in-between these noetic absolutes - in degrees, in fractions and fragmentation, in the very absence of noetic absolutes.

The individual's 'freedom' is expressed in how much - to what degree - it accepts past as binding.
The individual born of weakness, can strive to increase its strength.
This is the basis of our Democratic system. No individual is held accountable for the deeds of his parents, nor completely absolved from them.

Hierarchies are not absolute - they are not 'set in stone'.
The strong become weak, and the weak become strong. This is the agon, the struggle, the warfare Heraclitus spoke of. It is the basis of paganism, properly understood.
The individual is not imprisoned by the past. The past is the foundation - the immutable - that is liquefied in the passions (energies) of the present - interactive Flux.
Energy heats and liquefies..makes fluid.
Chaos is the metaphysical crack, out of the absolute totalitarianism of order.
Each individual can progress or regress from what he/she inherits...but not absolutely - incrementally, gradually, in degrees.
The either/or binary logic of Nihilism, is trapped in absolutes, because the brain cannot think without them; it is trapped in its own thinking....like an artist is engulfed by his art; like Narcissus is mesmerized by his own reflection, lost in his own gaze.

On the one hand the 'positive' nihilists who are convinced they've outgrown Abrahamism and propose absolute order, and determinism, implying that existence has a telos, and life is part of its programmed intent; on the other hand the 'pure' and shameless Nihilists who dismiss all on the grounds that it fails to be an absolute, implying that the absolute should be real, denouncing all because it failed to abide by their desires.

One indirectly implies that conciousness is masochistic - an impotent test of endurance; the other that all is a joke, and if one is not laughing one is crying.

Both are trapped in the linguistic representations of their own abstractions.
Forever chained and destined to live a life of ignorant bliss....but they would have it no other way.
The fodder of every war, the passionate followers of every fabricated ideology.  
Sheeple to the slaughter.

He who even thinks he can wake them is suffering from a different kind of delusion.
He who thinks they ought to be awakened is also suffering from the same disease.

What nature teaches us is that myriads are born to live and die as prey for those who are born to prey on them.
Alpha to Omega - gradations.
Where on the scale do you fall?

The mind becomes aware of its choices after-the-fact...because of the lag-time necessary for processing to occur.
The Modern idiot is like those primitive minds, described in Jayne's book Bicameral Mind: they mistook their self-consciousness for an alien consciousness, and believed that their conscience was god or the gods speaking to them, inside their heads.
Something similar is occurring here.
Most organic processes are automated....requiring no awareness.
The body's functions are automated - reactive, in accordance to a programming that has evolved, through trial and error, called natural selection.
Mind evolves after body...see plants. They are physical but brainless...they have no nervous system.

So, when self-consciousness emerges this produces the sense of insecurity, I've connected to the emergence of Nihilism.    
Another by-product of this developing sense of self, is that the mid becomes aware of its own impulses, after-the-fact...as if some alien will was controlled them. Essentially the brain is alienated from the body's automated processes and impulses, as though body was a stranger.  
An example is obesity in Modern times. I've explained why and how elsewhere.
Another example is a bit more spicy and edgy: A male born and raised within Judeo-Christian, Modern memes, is trained to consider sex with an under-age female immoral, or disgusting...yet, his body does not give a shit. He gets an erection when he comes across a developed female, even if she may be under-age.  
His physical processes are not thwarted by his indoctrination training....the body has a judgement of its own, and they are automated, impulsive.

So, mind must justify the body's choices, after they've been made.
This works on a very subtle level, but I gave an extreme example to clarify the point.  
This is why free-will is not absolute, but always partial and dependent no a strong 'will'.
The mind must retrain - reprogram, its body's automatic reactions, so as to wilfully control them - to the degree that it can do so.
But the mind can impose its will after careful deliberation, if and when this is possible...by choosing the path-of-more resistance rather than the path-of-least-resistance...or it can choose to make itself uncomfortable, or suffer pain guided by an external ideal.

If all is determined then how does Evolution work...when all choices are predetermined?
How and what is natural selection?
Why does consciousness even evolve, and why, when it is impotent and can only watch itself acting?
To increase the individual's suffering, as it becomes aware of its own impotence and inability to reduce its suffering?

Nihilists have replaced the Abrahamic one-god, with an abstraction called 'freedom' or order....an absolute - something entirely in the mind.
What they're saying, without realizing it, is that life emerges to suffer and to doubly suffer when it becomes aware of how impotent it is to reduce its own suffering - masochism.
It's the Biblical narrative using other words.  

This is a psychosis I could analyse, but why bother?
Self-deceit can take the form of self-aggrandizement, but also self-deprecation.

If all is determined then why do anything....why complain why resist the other....he is as unable to change his own actions as you, presumably, are?
Why think? Why fight? Why resist?
Why do anything....when it'll happen one way or another?
This is slave morality at its core.
A slave wants to remain a slave, because he fears his own freedom more than he does his master. He does not trust himself; he does not truly love himself, so he must hyper-inflate and exaggerate displays of self-love, to hide the fact that he despises himself.
At least, under the master's domination he can absolve himself of all culpability, and only chastise himself when he cannot endure his own fate.

But the absent absolute is always present, in the mind...as a concept: an either/or, 1/0.
Either the will is absolutely free, or it is absolutely un-free. All that matters is that it is absolutely either/or.
This is the dis-ease I've spoken of.

It's just a variant of the Bicameral Mind...an advancement, if you will.  
Virus' evolve, just as any other organism.

All this is a by-product of emerging self-consciousness - the Know Thyself part.
Simpletons, cowards, imbeciles are confused and terrified by what mystifies them - some do not want to understand....others can't, even though they try.
It's a matter of spiritual and/or mental feebleness.
Some - the majority - are confused by their own mind/body's temporal dissonance, others find comfort in it.

This is why I've always said that the pagan spirit lies 'outside' the nihilistic binary paradigm.
It does not participate in its dis-eased dualities.
It is mind/body synthesis, finding balance - with the mind dominating.

Nihilism in all its variants, is about mind liberating itself from the limitations and its impulses - a detachment from the physical, attaining 'purity of mind': the Divine - the one-god is this mind separated from body/physical, corporeality, the tangible...the past.; it is mind with no past, or bodyy-less, disembodied conciousness....existing beyond the mind/body synthesis.
Either mind is a slave to body - an impotent bystander - or body is the mnid's puppet - a marionette that is interchangeable, malleable to the mind's whims.

Quote :

If all is determined then why do anything....why complain why resist the other....he is as unable to change his own actions as you, presumably, are?
Why think? Why fight? Why resist?
Why do anything....when it'll happen one way or another?

What if the past is not an imposition, a tyrant, a hostile outside force attempting to compel you - but is instead the fundamental root of your becoming, the forces that make you possible, without which you wouldn't exist?
As such, one wills in fulfillment of one's past, one's self. The past is not something to be escaped or denied or challenged, no more so than the self is to be escaped, denied or challenged.
What is your Will without the past that gives it shape and direction? How can you will anything without the past which you are a manifestation of? How can there be a "you" without the past to define it?
What is there that is disconnected from past that could be said to be spontaneous, ex nihilo, free?
Why is there even a dichotomy here? What is there about consciousness that's distinct from a causative process such that it could be undetermined by past? The soul?
You've said that randomness produces "free" will, but even if we are to agree that such spontaneous events occur, anything that could be described as free will would only be a response to these events, after the fact. The will would be responding to events around it, caused or determined by events around it, it would not itself be spontaneous, uncaused, free. So even with that it's not salvageable and you need to go with some kind of compatibilism.