Both free will and determinism are conceptually flawed.

For one thing, the premise of will is to affect and without cause, there is no effect.

For another, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the present moving past to future.

Yet the evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is "conserved," because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

The energy therefore goes past to future, because the patterns being generated coalesce and dissolve, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past.

Suggesting consciousness functions as an energy and thus causal. Though it is the digestive system processing the energy and feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns/information generated, with the circulation system as feedback in the middle.

Now this doesn't exactly refute determinism, even if the force driving it is manifesting sentience, as one would argue all the input is already in this presence, just waiting for the process to generate the events.

Though this implies there is some overall framework, some computational process, math, omniscient omniscience, in which all this activity functions.

Yet models, maps, frames, etc. are inherently finite.

They break down over infinities. The map reverts back to noise if too much information is included. Whiteout.

What defines, limits. What limits, defines.

An objective point of view is an oxymoron. The universal is the elemental, so it is just this energy/sentience bubbling up. The future simply has not been fully computed. The act of determination only occurs as the present.

Now one might then suggest that if there is this sentience, could it steer events? A teleological approach.

Yet that also runs up against the infinity problem and multiple teleological poles. Competing desires, impulses, gods.

Which describes our situation. The anarchies of desire, driving us on, versus the tyrannies of judgement, doing whatever steering is possible.

The mind is more mediator, arbiter, referee of the emotions and awareness bubbling up, than its source. Yet that makes it the focal point, the locus of this collection of emotions called the self.

Given the flaw of complexity is the competing elements, it breaks back down, when it becomes unbalanced, so the one predictable process is this cycling between complexity and simplicity.

Chicken, egg.

Also, galaxies are the energy radiating out, as form and structure coalesce in, so it would seem the entropic dynamic of form is centripetal. Even though the evident entropic dynamic of the ambient energy, aka, light, is to radiate out. So we are where the feedback loops between these tendencies is most complex. Motor, steering.

And going in circles.