How is Freedom of Choice Possible?

The question of whether we can freely choose between several possibilities without just imagining this freedom or confusing it with chance leads us to the truth about our responsibility. For if we had something to answer for, which came from us, but was not decided by us, it would be no more than the responsibility of a cloud for its rain.

To find the solution, we consider the simple choice between two continuations of our day, for example whether we go to the cinema or the theater. Actually, we like both, though sometimes we feel more like one thing than the other. Today we really do not care; we could as well throw a coin. But we do not - that would be too cheap. We are pondering. We are putting ourselves in the cinema, then in the theater, and back in present, and so on. In this way we are circumscribing the wholeness of the decisive situation, the present being its center. Strictly speaking, this center is infinitely small, right in the middle of the whole circumscription with all its details. That is, in us.

In the periphery, in turn, our perception of the cinema is influencing the subsequent perception of the theater and vice versa - and again our present and vice versa. The vagueness between the certain alternatives is condensing to the certainty of the decisive situation up to its exact center, which on the other hand is completely neutral thus behaving indecisively. So, the whole situation is undetermined again, and so on.

We are not done yet: Cinema and theater inside and around as well as the paths there with all the details are also being circumscribed by the movement of our attention. Instead of letting our thoughts circle around a cinema we could also wander to the subway and the dance club and forget about the theater. Rather, we are intentionally focusing on weighing up goals, seats, access routes. That is, the certainty/uncertainty structure also applies to every detail of the tradeoff process. And by that small decisions are necessary everywhere. We can nowhere escape this decision-making structure – it is an i-structure (infinitesimality structure).

This process structure unites determinacy and indeterminacy at every point also totally. For by referring to each other and merging into the center of the wholeness thus circumscribed they are not even partially separated there.

So, where is the respective "point" of decision? It is obviously not in the neutral center between the alternatives, but between the center and the periphery, in that very center between certainty and indeterminacy. Wherever that is exactly. Because "that" can only ever be in-between, otherwise it would be a side. You can only "limit" but never fix it. It is actually distributed throughout the process, only concentrating around central points - all in all in us, but in the direction of our goals and between them.

From this i-structured unity of sub-unities cannot merely, but must come a free decision. This is the only way, the only meaningful description. It does not matter that the choice for outsiders could have also been mostly coincidental or conditional. Coincidences and conditions like weather and timetables of course contributed to the decision and limited their scope in the peripheral area of the process. But the periphery is just one side of the whole - one of the not decisive ones.


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