Scott Aaronson has a great reply to a question that directly answers what you're asking, I will quote it below in full and link to it: >Would you say that

Scott Aaronson has a great reply to a question that directly answers what you're asking, I will quote it below in full and link to it: >Would you say that you, personally, have ever experienced true free will? And if so in what situation(s)? I would say that I exerted the “maximum amount of free will” (at least, the maximum that I’ve experienced) in those rare cases when I did something not because the people around me wanted or expected me to do it, or because it was the natural thing to do for someone in my situation, but simply because I wanted to and damn what people around me thought. Here are some examples: – In 1994, when I pushed my parents and the administrators at Hong Kong International School to let me start skipping grades. – In 1996, when I left home at age 15, to attend a program at Clarkson University that I’d literally learned about from a mass-mailed brochure. – In 2000, when I set up a website called “In Defense of NaderTrading” to try to prevent the election of George W. Bush. (Had I exerted my free will some more, and gotten more attention for the site, maybe we would’ve gotten just 539 more vote-swaps in Florida…) – In 2001, when I dropped everything else I was doing to work on a ridiculously ambitious problem, one that even Andris Ambainis hadn’t solved: namely, lower-bounding the quantum query complexity of distinguishing 1-to-1 from 2-to-1 functions – In 2002, when I decided to waste a month building a huge zoo of complexity classes, and another month reading and reviewing Stephen Wolfram’s book (despite being a totally unknown grad student) – In 2005, when I started a blog called (of all things) “Shtetl-Optimized” – In 2006, when I asked my boss, Ray Laflamme at the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, if I could teach a crazy course called “Quantum Computing Since Democritus” – In 2009, when I spent a whole weekend in a difficult, contentious, incredibly personal email exchange with some postdoc in Princeton who I barely knew, then accepted her invitation to take the train there to continue arguing in person. (Over the next 3 years, that postdoc would become my girlfriend, fiancee, wife, then mother of my first child.) With these examples in mind, I can finally explain something that seems to have perplexed many people: namely, why I reacted to SneerClub and its fellow travelers, not merely as some annoying nobodies shitposting on social media, but as an existential threat, a coronavirus of the mind. And this despite the fact that, at least 3/4 of the time, I’m politically closer to the sneerers than to those they attack. The reason is that, with laser precision, the sneerers target the urge to “exercise one’s free will.” Like, they spend hours perfecting and refining mental kryptonite against the impulses of nerds like me to say what they’re thinking or do what they want, and damn the disapproval or the quizzical looks of those around them. The sneerers’ worldview, even when one happens to agree with them, is poisonous to the little hothouse flower of nerdian freedom that led to almost everything that was good in my life. Source: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4684#comment-1833463 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4684#comment-1833463