A Commonsense Resolution to the Issue of Determinism versus Rational Agency (aka, free-will)

Abstract

This brief is an essay providing newer perspectives than the traditional (often religiously oriented) and modern scholarship on free-will versus determinism.  The essay’s scope is confined to biological life on Earth and does not address how the chaos and randomness of the universe had come to have organized planets and suns. Among the issues raised is that willfulness is not free, rather a cost. The assertion is made that the agency allowing humanity to make changes deviating from what the past had wrought is the evolved linguistic skills to communicate first with words, then signs, then with sentences and then exchanging information in paragraphs allowing discussions about how to modify the way being lived which, in turn, led to actions and feedback on the value of their actions, hence progress.