The Incoherence of Compatibilist Free Will and the Epistemology of Temporal Determinism
This paper presents a formal theorem proving the structural incoherence of Counterfactual Freedom (CFF)—the ability to have done otherwise—within any causally and temporally consistent epistemic framework. Building upon established work in prediction and self-reference paradoxes (e.g., Newcomb's Problem), we introduce the Fixed-Point Paradox (FPP): an embedded agent cannot possess both epistemic access (\Box_k E) to a future action and the modal power of CFF (\Diamond_m \neg E) to alter it without generating a deductive logical contradiction. Importantly, the argument grounds the FPP in fundamental limits of computability theory and informational closure, demonstrating CFF to be a formally uncomputable property for any self-referential system. This structural constraint leads to the Axiomatic Opacity Constraint, eliminating all theories that require CFF. By proving that CFF is either unverifiable or contradictory, the paper uses a Closure Theorem to reduce the free will debate to a single, coherent descriptive model: the compatibilist framework of measurable, computable reason-responsiveness (\rho-metric). This clarifies that the remaining philosophical disagreement is solely a semantic dispute over the labeling of this coherent model as 'freedom'. The result vindicates Aristotle's ancient intuition with the formal rigor of modern modal logic and theoretical physics.
Institutions
- Golden West College (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Published
- 2025-10-31
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17534027
- Primary Topic
- Philosophy and Theoretical Science
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00