Fact Check Me: Yes
Philosophers have argued about free will for as long as we’ve been capable of thinking at all.
Are we choosing our lives — or just experiencing them?
For a long time, the question lived safely in philosophy.
Abstract. Harmless. Unprovable.
But the mantle has shifted.
Now it’s physicists, neuroscientists, and astrophysicists asking it — not because they care about poetry, but because when you study reality closely enough, choice itself starts to look suspicious.
Zoom out far enough and everything follows rules.
Stars form where physics allows them to.
Galaxies collide because trajectories demand it.
Nothing decides. Everything obeys.
Zoom in far enough and the same problem appears.
Neurons fire before you’re aware of a thought.
Chemistry moves first.
Consciousness follows.
And yet — free will feels real.
That’s the puzzle.
We say, I choose this or I choose that, and in that moment the choice feels personal. Immediate. Owned.
But no choice appears from nowhere.
They’re shaped by things we didn’t choose:
where we were born,
who raised us,
what hurt us,
what rewarded us,
what we were taught was possible — and what quietly wasn’t.
An uncountable number of forces collide before a single thought reaches awareness.
Events we never saw.
Words spoken before we arrived.
Systems built without us in mind.
An infinite number of butterflies flapping wings we never see,
rippling through everything we touch.
And that’s just butterflies.
So when we say I chose this, what we’re really saying is:
this is where everything led me.
Maybe we are meant to fall down.
And if we pick ourselves up — we were meant to do that too.
If you’re down and a hand is offered, or advice is given, a new path is carved.
If you take it, that’s how it was meant to be.
If you don’t, that too.
The offer matters.
The moment matters.
The experience of choosing is real — because it’s the level we live on.
Maybe this is just the rambling of someone with no right to speak on things this complex.
And yet something in it hits your ears and you think, yeah… that sounds right.
Is that any different than two asteroids colliding in the dark?
Neither chose its trajectory.
Neither knew why it was moving.
Their entire existence doesn’t suddenly matter because of intention.
What matters is that they collide.
Energy transfers.
Direction changes.
New paths emerge.
Ideas work the same way.
It doesn’t matter who said them.
It doesn’t matter if they were qualified, eloquent, or correct.
What matters is that something hit something else.
So when we ask the question —
Do we have free will, or is everything decided?
The answer is simple.
Yes.
Yes, you choose.
Yes, it was shaped.
Yes, you are constrained.
Yes, you are responsible.
Both are true.
Neither cancels the other out.
We don’t live at the level of equations.
We live at the level of meaning.
And meaning doesn’t require total freedom —
only participation.
Sometimes you fall.
Sometimes you stand.
Sometimes you’re the asteroid.
Sometimes you’re the collision.
And everything changes
not because it was planned —
but because it happened.