Author: Dustin Patzer
Status: Long-form philosophical working paper / working monograph
Current version: 0.20 (July 17, 2026)
Canonical web edition: dpatz46-ui.github.io/free-will-authored-foreclosure
Full Markdown: paper.md
This paper proposes one possible location for a logical hinge against the traditional determinism/indeterminism dilemma. It does not offer an exhaustive theory of human freedom, a census of free acts, or a foundation from which all other freedom is derived.
Freedom is operationally defined against determinism: a freedom-bearing event must occur where the future genuinely could have been otherwise. This requires ontic multiplicity, not merely represented alternatives or uncertainty in an embedded observer. Foreclosure requires a further condition: exclusive actualization. One continuation becomes actual in the relevant history and alternatives cease to remain available as continuations of that history. Indeterminism or plurality alone supplies only openness; it does not explain authorship.
The proposed witness-location is a developmentally acquired, diachronically sustained process in which a recursively continuous agent holds an operative feature of itself as an alterable object, represents at least one possible successor variance distinct from a projected default continuation, adopts that variance as an operative target, and repeatedly directs thought, action, attention, environment, and experiential curriculum toward that target under changing feedback.
The constructive core is band-authorship under liveness. Deterministic self-modification supplies routing without live alternatives. Bare chance supplies live alternatives without agent-shaped routing. The proposed witness binds the agent's content-sensitive shaping to the same open successor structure from which one continuation becomes exclusively actual. Recursive uptake then explains how a first nonzero self-directed contribution may enter the constitution from which later contributions arise, producing accrued self-authorship without requiring ultimate self-origination.
Patzer's authored-foreclosure theory is a conditional, event-causal incompatibilist account under which one proposed expression of free will occurs when a diachronically sustained self-object process materially shapes an ontically nondegenerate successor structure and one continuation exclusively actualizes. The theory concedes constitutive and outcome luck, rejects ultimate causa-sui sourcehood, and locates partial authorship in the agent's sustained, content-sensitive contribution to the band of live continuations rather than in control over exact stochastic settlement. Recursive accrual explains how effects of earlier qualifying trajectories can become part of the constitution that initiates and maintains later self-directed trajectories.
- Ontic openness: Incompatibilist freedom requires more than represented alternatives or epistemic uncertainty. More than one continuation must be physically realizable from the same complete relevant prior state.
- Exclusive actualization: Plural support is not enough. One continuation must become actual in the relevant history while alternatives cease to remain available as continuations of that history.
- Self-object routing: A represented possible variance of the continuing agent must materially shape the same successor structure in which the live alternatives exist.
- Relevance binding: Openness and routing cannot merely coexist somewhere in the same organism or trajectory. They must be joined in the same materially relevant transition pathway.
- Authored foreclosure: Where a self-object trajectory shapes a nondegenerate live successor structure and one continuation exclusively actualizes, the event is a candidate authored foreclosure.
- Recursive accrual: The result of one qualifying trajectory can partly constitute the agent who performs the next, allowing partial self-authorship to accrue, sediment, reverse, fragment, or diminish over time.
- Authored foreclosure: A materially self-object-routed foreclosure of genuinely live continuations.
- Accrued self-authorship: Partial authorship carried forward through recursive diachronic self-modification.
- Band-authorship under liveness: Agent-level shaping of the same objectively nondegenerate successor structure from which exclusive actualization occurs.
- Exclusive actualization: One supported continuation becomes actual in the relevant history while alternatives cease to remain available as continuations of that history.
- Recursive accrual: The output of one qualifying self-directed trajectory alters the agent who generates, sustains, or revises later trajectories.
- Curriculum access: The agent's indirect access to later learning through attention, practice, environment, commitments, social scaffolding, and external symbolic aids.
- Relevance binding: The requirement that ontic openness and agent-level routing operate through the same materially relevant transition class.
- Sedimented freedom: Earlier authored foreclosures becoming incorporated into stable later dispositions or character.
The paper engages the determinism/indeterminism dilemma, event-causal libertarianism, compatibilist guidance control, leeway and sourcehood, constitutive and present luck, the disappearing-agent objection, agent causation, Frankfurt-style attribution without alternatives, diachronic planning agency, and naturalistic self-governance. It compares the proposal especially with Robert Kane, Alfred Mele, Derk Pereboom, Jenann Ismael, Mark Balaguer, Christopher Evan Franklin, Galen Strawson, Neil Levy, John Martin Fischer, and adjacent work in action theory and causal inference.
- It does not claim that this is the only possible expression of freedom or selfhood.
- It does not claim that physical indeterminism, exclusive actualization, or a complete witness has already been empirically established.
- It does not infer freedom from randomness alone.
- It does not require primitive agent causation or ultimate self-origination.
- It does not claim that self-authorship increases monotonically.
- It does not establish culpability, punishment, legal responsibility, or basic-desert moral responsibility.
- It does not deny that deterministic systems can deliberate, self-model, respond to reasons, or causally modify themselves.
- Canonical HTML: https://dpatz46-ui.github.io/free-will-authored-foreclosure/
- Repository: https://github.com/dpatz46-ui/free-will-authored-foreclosure
- Full Markdown: https://github.com/dpatz46-ui/free-will-authored-foreclosure/blob/main/paper.md
- Raw Markdown: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dpatz46-ui/free-will-authored-foreclosure/main/paper.md
- Machine-oriented index: https://dpatz46-ui.github.io/free-will-authored-foreclosure/llms.txt
- Complete machine-readable text: https://dpatz46-ui.github.io/free-will-authored-foreclosure/llms-full.txt
Patzer, Dustin. 2026. Free Will Through Authored Foreclosure: A Diachronic Theory of Accrued Self-Authorship. Version 0.20, long-form working paper. https://dpatz46-ui.github.io/free-will-authored-foreclosure/.
Machine-readable citation metadata is available in CITATION.cff and CITATION.bib.
The GitHub repository contains the current living text. Substantive public versions should be preserved as GitHub releases and, once connected, archived through Zenodo for a persistent DOI. The current first web version is v0.20-web.
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