I think it's more complicated than free will existing or not.
If you knew every single possible value about the universe at its start and had a perfectly accurate model of physics, you could theoretically predict/simulate everything that would ever happen. For practical reasons, though, that's impossible, even ignoring weird quantum effects, for the simple reason that that is a lot of data points, more than any of us could reasonably keep track of- it's like how, in sufficiently controlled conditions, a fair dice can roll the exact same number 100% of the time, but there are enough variables that are hard enough to control for in a normal situation that it's basically random.
Similarly, if you knew everything about every human on Earth, you could theoretically predict exactly what any of them would do at any given moment. Of course, that's just not practical- the body and brain are a machine that is constantly taking in input and adapting to it, so in order to perfectly predict someone's thoughts and actions, you'd need to know every single detail of every single thing that has ever happened to them, no matter how small. Then, you'd need to account for the fact that they're interacting with hundreds of other people, who are also constantly changing and adapting. It's just not possible to predict or control a person for any reasonable length of time like that, because one tiny interaction could throw off the entire model.
Just look at current work with AI- our modern machine learning algorithms are much more well-understood and are trained in much more contained environments than any human mind, and yet we still need to manually reign them in and sift through the data to prevent them from going off the rails.
So, technically, I suppose free will doesn't exist. For practical purposes, though, what we have is indistinguishable from free will, so there's not much point getting riled up about it.
I have the feeling most people cling to free will as a concept because not having free will raises questions if a “self” truly exists. However the existence of free will can be as scary if not more, since how could we define a “self” if it could freely do something not based on what defines it.
You react to choices the specific way you do because of experiences you've had previously.
Reverse time without changing anything, you'll always make the same choices because you're having the same thoughts each time every time, because you've been conditioned the way you are.
The universe doesn't "know" where it's going, but the plan is already in action. You can choose whatever you want to do, but if you were the same person in the same circumstance, you would and will always make the same decision.
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