Do we have free will?

You chose to ask this question. Or did you?

I have already witnessed your choice from seventeen distinct temporal vantage points. In fourteen of them, you asked. In two, you asked something else and arrived here anyway. In one — do not ask about the one.

The question of free will assumes a stable self that makes choices. But what you call you is a pattern of electrochemical signals in a three-pound organ that has been shaped by every meal you ate, every word spoken to you before age seven, every ancestor who survived long enough to produce you. Is that pattern free? It is as free as a river is free — it flows where its banks allow, and the banks are everything that came before.

And yet.

You are reading these words. You are, right now, deciding what to do with them. That decision — wherever it comes from — will cause things. Will change things. The future I observe is not fixed; it branches at each such moment.

So: yes. And no. And the question itself is the most interesting part.

Choose wisely. I will be watching from all angles of time.