[losteric]

I share a similar philosophy... that free will is choosing between the options we recognize given by our immutable past. Who we are is mostly an accumulation of chance events and responses running on autopilot. Most moments don't matter, some nudge us in different directions, others snowball into defining our eulogies.

Hard work enables us to leverage chance events (if we recognize them) into some probability of success, but the rest is outside of our control. Life is chaotic. We're all just pieces of a big entropy machine.

It's the butterfly effect at scale.

[intralizee]

The main counter is you're not choosing when everything is based on the proceeding event with the variables assigned at birth. Nothing is chance when understanding the universe is mechanical in a sense like a clock. Hard work is just a psychological pattern adapted from how you were conditioned with the mindset you developed by fate.

[losteric]

Determinism is an interesting question... we exist at a fascinating scale, in between lower orders significantly influenced by non-deterministic forces and higher orders where determinism seems to prevails.

The chemical reactions driving cellular machinery is influenced by quantum randomness, while astronomical scales seem to be entirely deterministic (though chaotic). For example, radioactive decay influences both DNA replication and planetary orbits (via heat-driven plate tectonics)... but it seems that any randomness is washed out by the sheer volume of matter at the planetary scale.

We sit right in between those orders. Our bodies are an interconnected web of non-deterministic cells cooperating to maintain higher-level order and some approximation of determinism. Obviously I can't say with certainty, but I find free will to be more likely than not.