Am I free enough to change myself?

Ever since I started to define "meditation" for myself, I have become more and more interested in what is going on in my mind. It is obvious that many processes happen unconsciously. For example, goosebumps just appear on my arm, my heart keeps pumping blood, and my organs keep working—all controlled by my brain. These processes are "programmable" and too numerous, so they are regulated by our autonomic nervous system, which is not identified as "I." Other things—my sensations, emotions, feelings, thoughts, images, desires, plans, and internal dialogues, among others—are the actual material for my own unique identity.

Here are some questions related to this:

• What is the proportion of such processes that actually become conscious, meaning that "I" can identify with them (their presence and dynamics signify life itself), watch them, react to them (at a meta-conscious level), and remember them?

• What determines the destiny of mental processes? Why do some subside without surfacing to the conscious level, while others become parts of "me"? Is there some kind of internal competition? What are the important variables: their strength, relevance, longevity, quality, my current state at the moment, and the state of the environment?

• Are all decisions made unconsciously and we just witness them with a little delay (see the famous Libet experiment, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will)?

• Can I widen/deepen my attention and train myself to notice hidden or at least semi-hidden processes?

• Can I train myself to pick and choose my thoughts, my decisions, and eventually my actions?

• Maybe meditation can lead to the destruction of all my patterns and would allow me to rebuild myself from scratch as desired and governed by some principles? But I would need to define these principles outside myself (governed by a theory or a teacher).

These questions are very important to me, as all my life I have valued self-development, self-realization, and self-perfection as the only real goals of human life. How can one say that she/he strives for development if everything is determined from moment zero? After all, the initial state of the system and the laws of nature just unfold as they should. There is nothing separate (called "I") that sits above reality. This absence of "free will" has made me somewhat depressed. It is being discussed lately in multiple podcasts and lectures. The free will discussion has become quite hot due to the numerous lectures and books by Robert Sapolsky. Of course, the delightful Sabine Hossenfelder also had to express her opinion on this subject (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI5FMj5D9zU). If you enter "determinism" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, you will be unpleasantly surprised by the abundance of theories and factions.

Given that I believe in the unity of the world (I am a materialist), I am trying to reconcile this with my desire for self-development. How can I go about this? Here are several directions to explore.

• There is a term "free will" after all (like in a Russian joke: parents tell their kid: "There is no word 'ass'!" The kid: "How come there is an ass, but no word?"). In a common sense, we all know what it means. For one thing, one can have more or less of it. We love having more of it. We know how it feels when we don't have it. So can free will be defined as the limit of getting more and more freedom?

• How much can one actually predict using science? Even if a theory was validated at the moment, it predicts everything within some error. Additionally, one never knows the actual initial state with infinite precision. So, the initial state and the laws of development are somewhat blurry. So the freedom of will can be defined as this blurriness. This does not give us much, though...

• Can we go through experiments and determine if we can at least vary the subjective feeling of being free? One can vary the environment (move away from the family and your job, be given more money), increase education, or try deliberate variations in behavior (do the opposite of what you want, do something Jesus would do, do nothing, wait N minutes/days before any reaction to a stimulus...).

• Can one identify the factors which influence her decisions and separate them into two groups: one with the external factors and another with internal factors and values? Then instead of being influenced by the strongest of all, choose to act based on the strongest in the "personal" group. One can perform further dissection within the personal group as well, of course.

• One can create a feedback loop based on trying different behaviors and varying them based on the outcome. Eventually, one goes through all available space and chooses the optimal setting.

• I often hear that the freedom might come from the realm of quantum mechanics. A quantum system can exist simultaneously in multiple states until it is observed. The outcome of an observation is not deterministic; rather, each possible state has a certain probability of being realized upon measurement. One objection (which is more intuitive than logical in me) is that we live in a macro-world: in other words, humans are too "big" to be quantum systems. Another: randomness is actually far from freedom of will.

• If there is no free will, how come we are all so different? Well, we do start from a clean slate. We do have some mental features as we are born (determined by genetics, epigenetics, and environment). Every choice we make in life sharpens our predispositions. In some sense, our characters become more and more defined, like old faces, and more and more rigid. Vagueness is a feature of youth?

• Finally, maybe when we are trying to understand free will, we are trying to reduce (N+1)th level of human apprehension to the Nth level of laws. In other words, freedom of will is an example of strong emergence. Strong emergence refers to properties or phenomena that are not only more than the sum of their parts but also fundamentally irreducible to them, often implying that such properties or phenomena entail novel causal powers not possessed by their components. Examples: a family versus a set of individuals, life and consciousness itself. A typical feature of a strongly emergent system is the need to create new categories in which new laws should be expressed. For example, one needs a term "temperature" to express gas laws and this term is not expressed in the variable describing a molecule. It is interesting that some ideas on emergence were expressed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, building on Hegelian dialectics but applied in a materialist framework. They stressed that quantitative changes accumulate until they lead to a fundamental, qualitative transformation.

Why I am telling you all this? Because I had no choice:-)