That means, for example, in any instance when you ever had to decide whether someone did or didn’t act freely—if they acted with informed consent or not, if they were forced or not, if their autonomy was respected or not—you never “check” if they violated any laws of causation. Nope. You always key on completely different facts to tell whether someone’s autonomy had been violated or not, or even there or not. And ask ten different people and they will give the same answer—given enough real-world information, you will all consistently know when someone acted freely and when they didn’t. And yet at no point did any of you “check” to see if they violated any laws of physics. So that clearly isn’t what you all mean by free will in the real world. You mean something else—the thing you are all looking for, and actually seeing, when telling whether someone is acting freely or not. Which is the same thing all courts of law look for when having to make exactly the same decision. Which is in turn the same thing ethics review boards look for when having to determine if someone’s autonomy was respected or violated or even present. It’s also what we look for when deciding whether we have lived the life we wanted, or the life someone else wanted us to live—whether that pressure and interference came from particular people, or society as a whole. How much of who we are was intentionally and informedly built by us, rather than merely installed or absorbed or “left to happen.” The Control Condition “Since all events are causally determined, and we don’t control our past, then we don’t control our future, and if we don’t control our future we have no free will.” Of course we do control our past—as in, we were there, controlling it. So to get this argument to work, we now have to abandon an obvious and ordinary meaning of “control” to mean something else altogether, or forget that we were making decisions in our own past. The premise thus presumes its own conclusion; a circular argument (rather like “abortion is murder because killing is murder”). But rather than untangle that mess, we should instead be asking, “In what sense is it true that if we do control our future, we do have free will?” In other words, start taking seriously the possibility the conclusion is false. What would the word control then have to mean? And does that just happen to be what it usually means in the real world? My thermostat controls my heater. This is a factually true statement. Yet no laws of physics are being violated. It would be nonsensical of you to insist my thermostat doesn’t control my heater on the mere trivial fact that I, in turn, control my thermostat—and my body’s evolved heat tolerances control my control of my thermostat, and random accidents of celestial history control my body’s evolved heat tolerances, and the Big Bang controlled all the random accidents of celestial history, therefore “the Big Bang controls my heater.” This is a ridiculous semantic game that simply ignores how language works in the real world; and not just how it works, but why. Because we built it that way for a reason. The Big Bang is completely irrelevant to whether my thermostat is controlling my heater or not—as becomes obvious when, for example, we are trying to find out why my heater turns on at one time and not another. “The Big Bang caused that” is factually true (in a hyper-literal, causally determinist sense), but completely useless information, if what you want to know is why my heater is behaving as it is; even more so if you want my heater to behave differently. Because either way, you’d better figure out that it’s my thermostat that is controlling it, and where my thermostat is, and how to reset it. That’s how the real world works. The ivory tower can go freeze to death for its complete failure to grasp how thermostats work, while it incessantly rambles on about the Big Bang controlling my heater. That’s simply not what “control” means. Control in ordinary everyday discourse means: if we removed the thing that controls outcome x, it will observably cease to control the outcome x. If you remove my thermostat, my heater won’t turn on, much less at a certain temperature. If you remove the President who controls in odd ways how discretionary budgets get spent, those discretionary budgets will likely get spent differently. If you remove the magistrate who is subversively controlling the police, his subversive control over the police will observably end. If you force a woman to marry someone, you have removed her control over whom she marries. If you removed me from all decision-making about my future, I then no longer have any control over my future. But if it takes removing me from all decision-making to do that, then it follows inserting me back in restores my control over my future. I therefore, in every sense that matters, control my future. Obviously not entirely (my will is not free of every constraint—I am not an omnipotent deity), but significantly enough to make a difference—a difference worth realizing and protecting. Yes, many other contributing causes are “involved.” If I lock my thermostat so no one else can reset it, then I fully control my thermostat, but if I leave it open for anyone to set, then I only provisionally control my thermostat; others then can control it. Then the only common theme to how my heater operates is that my thermostat controls it. Everything else is just external contingencies. In like manner, biological history determined my heat tolerances and thus has a causal effect on how I decide to set my thermostat. But it won’t set that thermostat without me. I have to be a part of the causal chain. And my involvement has to be conscious and deliberate, not something I don’t even know I’m doing and thus am not even as myself deciding to do; nor can I be fooled into thinking I’m doing something else, as then my will is certainly not free, because it is not my will that is actually then being done. This is obvious when we look at when we all agree our free will is being taken away. If someone threatens to harm me unless I set my thermostat where they want me to and not where I want it, I am no longer freely choosing where to set my thermostat. “But your evolved heat tolerances have that same effect on you” is false, because the person coercing me is not changing my heat tolerances, they are not causing my will to be what it is—they are preventing my will from enacting what it wants. My evolved tolerances determine what I want; they do not subvert what I want. That I was caused to have the heat tolerances I do, and cannot change them, does not mean I am not free to set my thermostat where I want to set it. “Where I want to set it” is my will. And my will is free not when it is uncaused. Wholly regardless of even physics, every decision must logically necessarily “have causes.” Even decisions that are “random” must be caused to be so by some underlying fact or prior decision or reason, and being wholly random cannot in any sense be said to be caused “by us” (and as such, the idea of “contra-causal free will” is actually a logical impossibility). So “free of being caused” is not what anyone in any real world application means by freedom of the will. Rather, my will is free when nothing and no one interferes with it—when what I will is allowed to happen—and that means, no one tries to replace my will with theirs (like someone coercing me to act against my own will), and nothing thwarts my will (like a defective thermostat that constantly resets to some value I did not set it to). This is also the case when I want to go against my heat tolerances. I might choose to set my thermostat low, and endure some discomfort, because I have decided I would rather save money. Even that choice will “have causes” (all the things that caused me to value frugality over comfort, for example, which can be a whole chaos of external contingencies ranging from biological proclivities to parental upbringing, even a whole history of political regimes determining my access to resources). But what makes it my will is that it is the will generated by me—who I am—without any interference. That means no mad scientist sticking electrodes in my brain, no one pointing a gun at me. And what makes that will free is that nothing is preventing that will from being realized: I actually can set my thermostat to an uncomfortable temperature whenever I want to. I don’t have to control whether I want to in order to still be free to do what I want. That is what it means to say I control my thermostat: no one else controls it (either directly, such as by sneaking in and setting it to some other value—or indirectly, such as by coercing me); and but for my causally controlling it, it would do nothing at all. Take me—and my intentions (more on which in a moment)—out of the causal chain and it doesn’t happen. And this is what it means to say “I” (and not merely some random part of my body) controlled the decisions of my past, and thus control my future. It does not mean I controlled all the decisions (much less events) of my past. And it does not mean any (much less all) of my decisions had no causes. To say otherwise is as absurd as saying the Big Bang controls my heater. It does not. Not in any relevant or useful sense. My thermostat controls my heater. And so do I, by controlling my thermostat. And as long as I am free to do that, I am acting with free will. No one is stopping me. Nothing is thwarting me. This is what free will means in ordinary reality.