Free will is real—I could not have believed otherwise

This paper seeks to advance the compatibilist theory of free will, particularly building upon contributions by Christian List (and also Daniel Dennett) regarding the agential capacity to act otherwise. Emphasizing the importance of genuine agential abilities, it aims to conceptualize these abilities in empirically grounded terms, avoiding reliance on modal notions and eschewing an insurmountable divide between physical and psychological levels. To achieve this, the paper conceptualizes agential states as functions of decision-making processes that dissolve the agent’s uncertainty about the consequences of its actions. By modeling the generation and evaluation of multiple potential actions, this approach explicates a form of operational freedom embedded within the physics of information processing. Consequently, it resolves the tension between free will and determinism without isolating psychology from physical processes.