How is Freedom of Choice Possible?

The question of whether we can freely choose between several possibilities without imagining this freedom or confusing it with chance leads us to the truth about our responsibility. Because if we had to answer for something that comes 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 answer, we will consider the simple choice between two continuations of our day, for example, whether to go to the cinema or to the theater. Actually, we like both equally, though sometimes we feel more like one than the other. Today, however, we really don't care; we might as well flip a coin. But we don't - that would be too cheap. We are thinking. We put ourselves into the cinema, then into the theater, then back into the present, and so on. In this way we circumscribe the entirety 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 influences the subsequent perception of the theater and vice versa – and, again, our present and vice versa. The indeterminacy between the determined alternatives thereby condenses to the determinacy of the decisive situation up to its exact center, which on the other hand is completely neutral, thus behaves indeterminately. But with that, the whole situation is again indeterminate and so on.

We are not finished yet: cinema and theater inside and outside, as well as the routes to them with all details are likewise circumscribed by the movement of our attention. Instead of letting our thoughts circle around a cinema, we might as well wander to the subway and the dance club and forget about the theater. Instead, we intentionally focus on those weighings between goals, seating, access routes. That is, the determinacy/indeterminacy structure also applies to every detail of the trade-off process. And thus small decisions are due everywhere. We cannot escape this decision-making structure anywhere – it is an i-structure (infinitesimality structure).

This process structure unites determinacy and indeterminacy also totally at every place. For in that both refer to each other and merge into each other towards the center of the entirety thus circumscribed, they are precisely there no longer even partially separated.

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 the subunits not merely can, but must come a free decision. This is the only possibility, the only meaningful description. It does not matter that for outsiders the choice could also have been predominantly random or conditional. Coincidences and conditions such as weather and timetables naturally entered into the decision and limited its scope in the peripheral area of the process. But the periphery is just one side of the whole - one of the non-decisive ones.


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