"Everyone sits in the prison of his own ideas." Albert Einstein
"A man's character is his fate." Heraclitus

I do sometimes wonder if Free Will is actually free. Here we are creatures influenced by our "ideas" or "characters". That's hardly freedom is it? Sometimes I can try all I can to choose the 'right' thing but sometimes, just sometimes, I fail. Not by choice, simply because I'm limited to my nature. Sometimes it feels like I can flick a switch inside me where I can turn on and off things like memory, emotions and thoughts, but not all the time, I don't have the freedom to completely become another person and do other things.

There's something in my mind that I can't quite figure out about free will. Where does it come from? I mainly associate this problem with Chaos and Order. Now Order is completely mechanical, completely predictable and has no room for variation. And yet like Will it has a direction and focus.

What about Chaos? Now some say that this gives us the capacity for choice. There is no mechanics, there is no predictability, and infinite room for variation. But I still remain unconvinced. To me Chaos equates with completely spontaneous randomness. That is something that is not controlled nor predetermined, so this has no room for choice either.

If we had none of what Heraclitus called character, maybe that would be freedom. We'd have no conditions and infinite potential and yet that would mean there is no control, just randomness. Whereas Order or 'character' is conditioned and directioned like the Will of Free Will but is so rigid that it allows no variation, so I can't see where choice comes there either.

Yet humankind has evolved to percieve itself making 'choices'. Everyday I seem to make choices between one door or another, between toffee or mint icecream. I make my choice but then after reflection I'm unsure where it came from. Was it a predetermined desire or a completely random act where no thought determined it?

I think I would say that Free Will is a combination of Chaos and Order, Free=Chaos and Will=Order. I could still be wrong, there may be another alternative where 'choice' transcends the polarity of Chaos and Order, but because of the limited condtions of my mind I just cannot see it clearly.

Of course now I'm thinking pragmatically. None of this really matters, if I knew one way or another then that knowing would make no difference at all. If we don't have choice, well that's that, no choice. But if we do, well, we do and that's that too. Still the knowledge of one way or another isn't really an advantage.

The bottom line is that I percieve myself making choices, so I'll carry on with this awareness, whether illusory or not and carry on with my life as responsibly as I can and maybe, just maybe I could become the wiser.