Free Will After Determinism: Why Agency Survives the Limits of Predictability

This paper defines free will as a structural property of conscious systems: the capacity to make real-time decisions under bounded knowledge, without external control or complete internal prediction. Unlike metaphysical, compatibilist, or randomness-based models, this framework is grounded in physically verifiable constraints. I show that six universal limits—computation, information storage, causal speed, recursive modeling, measurement disturbance, and internal epistemic blindness—make perfect prediction and control impossible, even in a deterministic universe. As a result, all conscious agents necessarily exhibit irreducible agency. Free will is not an illusion, exception, or escape from causality; it is an inevitable consequence of how conscious systems resolve choices in the real world.