Been thinking about this for a while. Everything you do, every choice you make, every belief you hold, it all traces back to your environment. The family you were born into, where you grew up, what you were exposed to.
But it goes deeper than that. Even your ability to accept new ideas and change is itself determined by your old environment. If you grew up somewhere that never allowed questioning or new perspectives, you wouldn't even be open to change in the first place. So even change itself isn't really free.
This makes free will look like an illusion. And it raises an uncomfortable question, can you really call someone like Hitler evil in the traditional sense? His psychology was built by forces he didn't choose. That doesn't make what he did okay, and society obviously needs laws and accountability. But philosophically, he didn't choose his starting point any more than his victims did.
It also makes organised religion hard to defend. Where you're born almost completely predicts what religion you follow. That looks more like culture than divine truth. And every religion claims to be the only correct one but that claim is also just a product of environment.
Maybe there's something behind existence, some kind of higher reality. But it probably isn't owned by any religion that was built by humans trying to explain something they couldn't fully understand.
Does anyone actually have a solid counter to any of this or does free will just fall apart under honest scrutiny