The following may sound fairly obvious at first. But sometimes it is necessary to get back to basics in order to recognize the insights of the forest too obvious to be discerned from within the trees.

Free will is a necessary condition of meaningful existence. Without it, there is no purpose, morality, accountability, goals, choice, justice, etc. Why? Without the ability to intelligently shape the world around us, then everything inexplicably just is. If our actions make no difference, if choices don’t bring about anything that wouldn’t happen without them, then minds are just observing the inexplicable ontological show being performed around them. Free will and a shapable world are required. Anyone accepting “purpose” without these conditions is just kidding themselves.

Perhaps then, we should assume that free will exists and then look for the necessary qualities of a universe that could support its existence. If we can affect the world around us, then there must be some level of contingent existence. If all levels of existence were equally necessary, then there would be no options to choose between since everything would be determined by necessary existence alone. In other words, freedom is a requirement of a meaningful universe by allowing it to be partially undetermined and unresolved so that choice can have something to determine and resolve.

This is a requirement of a meaningful universe. But what are the necessary features of an agent possessing free will? Well they too must be free–but not so “free” as to be completely random. If they were, agents wouldn’t be intelligently shaping anything. This is would be just chaos in denial. At the same time, if free-willed agents were completely determined, they wouldn’t be free enough to determine anything. This brings us to our first partial definition: free will is neither completely random nor completely predetermined. Although in a preliminary form, we can already rule out various world views for the sake of meaning and practicality.

There are other things necessary for free will: the ability to recognize potentials to be selected from, a contemplation period prior to choice, the ability to subjectively recognize and value one option over another, the ability to choose and define goals, comprehension of the consequences of the outcome of options, contingent phenomena whose existence depends on choice alone. And so on.

As we can see, virtually none of these have an established explanation within modern science. And yet without them, science is left with no purpose. The ostensibly purposeful pursuit of understanding by modern humanity would reach a most ironic conclusion: science is really purposelessness systematically studying purposelessness. This is seemingly a possibility but hardly the only option. For the sake of purpose itself, it’s time to look for an explanation of free will and all the conceptual scaffolding that supports it.