Free Will After Determinism: Why Agency Survives the Limits of Predictability

This paper defines free will as a structural property of conscious systems: the capacity to make real-time decisions under bounded knowledge, without external control or internal omniscience. Unlike metaphysical, compatibilist, or randomness-based models, this framework is grounded in physically verifiable constraints. This paper demonstrates that seven universal limits: computation, information storage, causal speed, recursive modeling, measurement disturbance, and internal epistemic blindness, render perfect prediction and control impossible, even in a deterministic universe. As a result, all conscious agents necessarily exhibit irreducible agency. Free will is not an illusion, exception, or escape from causality; it is an inevitable consequence of how conscious systems resolve choices in physical reality. Keywords: Free Will, Determinism, Prediction Limits, Agency, Biological Agency, Computational Limits, Computational Irreducibility, Structural Constraints, Epistemic Blindness, Real-time Decision Making, Cognitive Science, Epistemic Substrate, Compatibilism. This version is identical to the manuscripted submitted to PhilPapers: Link