Could you have made a different choice? Yes, if you had different inputs, or a different state of mind when you started thinking about the choice.
But if we take the inputs and your initial state of mind as constants, there was only one outcome you could have arrived to.
But you didn’t know what that outcome would be, until you actually arrived there. It was a deterministic computation you had to make.
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Why do you feel you had a freedom of choice? Because a different initial state of mind, or maybe even a small difference in inputs, could have led you to a different conclusion. As you don’t know the result of the calculation until you actually make it, your initial guess is just a set of plausible conclusions, but the actual conclusion will only be known after you make it, so it feels like it was “magically, freely” picked from the set. Instead, it was just picked “unpredictably” in the sense that you were not able to predict it until you made it.
You made a choice.
Could you have made a different choice? Yes, if you had different inputs, or a different state of mind when you started thinking about the choice.
But if we take the inputs and your initial state of mind as constants, there was only one outcome you could have arrived to.
But you didn’t know what that outcome would be, until you actually arrived there. It was a deterministic computation you had to make.
*
Why do you feel you had a freedom of choice? Because a different initial state of mind, or maybe even a small difference in inputs, could have led you to a different conclusion. As you don’t know the result of the calculation until you actually make it, your initial guess is just a set of plausible conclusions, but the actual conclusion will only be known after you make it, so it feels like it was “magically, freely” picked from the set. Instead, it was just picked “unpredictably” in the sense that you were not able to predict it until you made it.