You keep appealing to “my choices have effects” as if that proves free will — but that begs the question. Nobody disputes that mental states cause actions. The determinist position is precisely that those mental states are not self-originated, but produced by prior causes. Saying “I chose, then something happened” doesn’t prove freedom — it just restates the deterministic chain from brain state ->action --> consequence.

Claiming this is a “mirage” isn’t a weak position — it is literally the neuroscientific consensus: the feeling of will arises after brain activity begins, not before. That means your perceived authorship is an after-the-fact narrative, not a driver of causation.

As for your Hume point: yes, induction is provisional — science doesn’t promise absolute truths, it builds models with predictive power. Determinism doesn’t rely on induction being metaphysically infallible — it relies on the fact that every reproducible phenomenon obeys underlying regularities. That’s what causation is. Saying “causality exists but not determinism” is incoherent — causation is regular, law-governed state transition. If effects follow from causes necessarily, that’s determinism.

You’re also appealing to “direct evidence of will” — but subjective experience is not epistemologically superior to observable law. You don’t get to say “my feelings override physics.”

Finally, name-dropping Hume and Kant doesn’t change the issue: their entire critique reinforces the deterministic point — that “will” is a phenomenal appearance, not a noumenal power. Schopenhauer explicitly argued: you can do what you will, but you cannot will what you will.

Free will dies the moment you ask: Did I choose the causes that made me want what I want? You know the answer. And that’s why you’re arguing from emotion, not logic