Even though I've never studied philosophy, I think about philosophical topics and ideas a lot. Most often this comes when I'm trying to sleep.

A big part of this is because of my interest in artificial intelligence development. Even more than technical issues, I've got a philosophical issue blocking the development of AI.

I think about philosophical stuff to try and figure out a solution, but it only seems to make things worse.

The issue ties pretty hard into 'Meaning of Life' stuff. There really isn't one, you know? We just kinda make them up for ourselves. But, that means in order to make an artificial intelligence, we need to make one up for THEM too, or they won't do ANYTHING.

There's no logical reason to do anything, or to even exist. The need to live or survive that humans experience is the result of a physical process causing life and then evolution. It's not something innate or universal.

Expanding past that, though, leads me to think about other meaning of life stuff, but also the mechanics of existance and conciousness... But we don't know how conciousness WORKS mechanically speaking. We can prove that we're connected to our bodies, but not what WE are, the ones seeing what's going into the mind. Are we in the brain? The 'software' running on the brain? Something outside the universe just watching?

But, I realized some other things while thinking.

There's certain concepts that exist in the mind that aren't really a part of the universe itself, like numbers, mathematics, logic... We figure through this stuff but it doesn't have a physical existance.

I think these things would exist even outside of the universe, or with any physical laws, even if there was no-one to think about them or care.

This is important for the other part though because it ties into issues of "Why are we here?' and 'Why should we do anything?'

There's various ideas on if there's a purpose to the universe. Maybe it was made by someone or something outside of it. However, maybe it wasn't. If it WAS, that creator would also have to either have a creator or emerge from whatever. So, god or no god, we can't count on something outside of us to give purpose to the universe. It just happened.

Now I need to get to the free will part...

So here's the other thing. Action and reaction. I think that regardless of what physics or rules a universe can have, in order for things to happen, objects must react to eachother's behavior. That's how it works in our universe, and even if we don't know the logic or physics of others (if they exist) it seems like any where things didn't interact wouldn't be capable of anything anyways. That's a sort of logic, so I think it should be constant?

So the reason for all that before is so that this part makes sense.

Our bodies, like anything in our universe, are made of physical objects, which react to eachother. All sorts of particles and energy. So, what we are must be built up out of them, or be outside of this universe.

If we're built up of stuff in the universe, it's all a deterministic system. Every physical particle and energy is going to bounce off eachother the one way they will.

Scale that up to us.