To say you choose not to choose is contradictory.
Is it theoretically viable to consider ourselves in a world that is both deterministic and chaotic?
See, Chaos Theory actually doesn't defend the concept of free will in the slightest. Even though chaotic systems are unpredictable, their behaviour is considered deterministic in that despite their movements being far too complex to be calculable, they still are determinable.
Perhaps free will is illusory. To believe in free will means to imply that my thought processes act outside of my environment, i.e. not a reaction to stimuli. But the truth is, I can only react. If the universe is deterministic, it means that everything we have done or will do stems from long lines of causation that extend beyond a single individual, from before we can even be born.
In order for free will to exist, we’d have to get rid of both determinism and indeterminism, which by then we would have nothing left. The rules of chance say that an event could happen or it could not happen. There is no in between. There is a Latin term that describes people who exist outside the rules of all we know: 'causa sui', it means 'creators of their own cause'. None of them exist.
What's a scientific discussion without some God thrown in, eh?
Theists believe that God awards them free will. Yet they also believe that God knows the future. They demonstrate free will cannot exist simply by believing it does. If God fails to know the future, He'd lose his godlike nature. Free will's existence would contradict the very idea of an all knowing 'God'.
Does this mean that life is meaningless? Not at all. It means that although I don’t have any choice in the matter, I am able to experience life, beauty, variety, a slice of unpredictability and love - which makes life worth living.
But maybe we can live in a deterministic world and still have something that resembles free will...
Perhaps the notion of free will is truly subjective and depends on from where in spacetime you look at the bigger picture. If we accept that the universe operates in either a deterministic or indeterministic way, we essentially understand that this means the future (in principle) is fixed. But this future is only knowable from the outside, if the past can be evaluated simultaneously with the present. From where we are - imbedded within spacetime - we cannot know the future. The future always appears unpredictable from our stance, and this is what creates the illusion of an open future. Of free will.
We are slaves to the butterfly effect.
