The Incoherence of Compatibilist Free Will and the Epistemology of Temporal Determinism

This paper synthesizes logical, epistemological, physical, and neuroscientific evidence to demonstrate that compatibilist frameworks fail to resolve the contradiction between determinism and volitional agency. Free will—understood as the ability to do otherwise—collapses under epistemic analysis: without knowledge of the future it is unverifiable, and with foreknowledge it becomes paradoxical. Compatibilist theories merely reframe this contradiction, while libertarian appeals to quantum indeterminacy or many-worlds branching do not yield genuine agency. Observing the constraints imposed by well-established physics of time and the epistemic limits of temporally embedded observers, supported by modern neuroscientific findings, the argument is sealed by a Closure Theorem showing that all naturalistic accounts of free will reduce to unverifiability, contradiction, or triviality. Neuroscience further confirms this collapse by revealing conscious agency as post hoc narration rather than causal origin. What remains coherent is consciousness, moral practice, and responsibility within a causally closed and epistemically opaque universe. The framework concludes with testable predictions, aligning the argument with Popperian standards of scientific falsifiability.