On a conventional bicycle, you can stop pedalling while the bicycle continues to move. The rear wheel keeps turning beneath you, but the cranks remain still, temporarily separating the movement of the rider from the movement of the bicycle. A fixed gear bike removes this possibility. The rear sprocket is fixed directly to the hub, which means that when the rear wheel turns, the sprocket turns with it; the sprocket moves the chain, the chain turns the chainring, and the chainring rotates the cranks beneath the rider’s feet. There is no point at which one component considers whether to participate. Each movement follows mechanically from the movement elsewhere in the system.
This makes the fixed gear bike a surprisingly useful object through which to consider one of philosophy’s oldest questions. If the movement of the pedals follows necessarily from the movement of the rear wheel, what distinguishes this mechanical determination from the rider’s apparently voluntary actions? Imagine descending a trail on a fixed gear and approaching a junction. The left path disappears into woodland while the right climbs towards an exposed hillside. You turn left. The pedals could not have done otherwise given the movement of the wheel, but could you? What initially appears to be a straightforward distinction between the determined bicycle and the freely choosing rider quickly becomes more difficult once we ask where the rider’s decision actually came from.
The philosophical problem of determinism concerns, in broad terms, whether the state of the world at one moment, together with the laws governing it, fixes what follows. If causal determinism is true, the present does not arrive independently of the past. Every state emerges from previous states, which themselves emerged from earlier conditions. The fixed gear drivetrain offers a crude but unusually tangible model of this relationship because causation can be felt through the legs. Wheel, sprocket, chain, chainring and crank form a visible sequence in which the movement of one component is inseparable from that of the others. The rider, however, appears to introduce something different into the system: intention.
When I turn left at the junction, I experience myself as choosing. I do not ordinarily experience the decision as though it were simply another mechanical event taking place inside me. Yet if someone asks why I turned left, I will probably provide reasons. Perhaps I know the trail and remember enjoying it. Perhaps the other path looks unpleasantly steep. Perhaps the left-hand trail seems quieter, more interesting or simply more attractive at that moment. The decision therefore appears to have causes. Memory, perception, preference, previous experience and bodily state all contribute to what I do. Once we begin asking why a particular decision occurred, the supposedly clean boundary between mechanical causation and human choice begins to blur.
This creates one of the central difficulties in discussions of free will. We often imagine freedom as requiring some kind of independence from what came before, as though the genuinely free self must be capable of temporarily disengaging from the causal machinery of the universe. The fixed gear metaphor allows us to picture this almost literally. On a normal bicycle, the freewheel allows the wheel to rotate without forcing the cranks to rotate. By analogy, we might imagine consciousness possessing a kind of metaphysical freewheel: biology continues, history continues, culture continues, the nervous system continues processing information, but somewhere within the person there is a moment when the self disengages from all of these influences and simply chooses. Once the choice has been made, causation re-engages and the decision is transmitted back into the physical world through the body.
The difficulty is explaining what this detached decision would actually be. If my character influences what I choose, then my character has become part of the causal explanation. If my values influence the decision, those values also have histories. If I decide according to reasons, the reasons have affected the outcome. If my desires determine which option seems attractive, those desires have arisen from a complicated interaction between biology, experience, culture and circumstance. Pushing backwards through the explanation eventually brings us to conditions that I certainly did not choose: my body, my childhood, my language, my historical period and the social world into which I happened to arrive. By the time any of us becomes capable of asking whether we possess free will, the bicycle is already moving.
This does not by itself prove determinism, and the fixed gear bike cannot establish whether the physical universe is deterministic. It does, however, expose the difficulty involved in imagining freedom as complete causal independence. If a decision were truly independent of my desires, reasons, memories and character, it is not obvious why I should regard it as more fully mine. Imagine that I reach the junction and turn left for absolutely no reason. Nothing about what I wanted, believed or perceived contributed to the decision. The turn simply occurred. Far from appearing more free, the action now seems arbitrary.
This is one of the major problems faced by attempts to rescue freedom through indeterminacy alone. Libertarian theories of free will, in the philosophical rather than political sense, generally maintain that genuine freedom is incompatible with complete causal determinism. Yet simply introducing indeterminacy does not automatically produce agency. If the handlebars of my bicycle were connected to a genuinely random mechanism that chose left or right whenever I reached a junction, the bicycle would become less predictable, but I would not become more free. I would have lost control of the steering. Randomness may interrupt determination, but interruption alone is not authorship.
A skilled rider demonstrates the opposite problem. Their behaviour may be highly predictable precisely because they are skilled. They alter their body position before a loose corner, anticipate the location of the pedals, carry momentum into a climb and reduce pressure when the rear tyre begins to lose traction. These responses are structured by previous experience and repeatable relationships between perception and action. The rider who behaves randomly, by contrast, is not displaying some purer form of freedom. If they suddenly wrench the handlebars left, then right, then throw their weight forwards for no reason, we are more likely to think that they have lost control. Predictability and agency are therefore not simple opposites. In many contexts, reliable relationships between perception, intention and action are precisely what make control possible.
This moves us towards the compatibilist tradition. Compatibilists argue, broadly, that determinism and meaningful human freedom do not necessarily contradict one another. David Hume’s discussion of liberty and necessity provides one of the classic versions of this argument. Hume rejects the idea that freedom requires actions to be completely detached from causes and instead emphasises the distinction between actions that follow from a person’s motives and actions produced through external constraint. The important contrast is therefore not necessarily between caused and uncaused behaviour, but between different kinds of causation (Hume, 1748).
A bicycle makes this distinction easy to understand. Suppose I approach the junction and turn left because I want to ride through the woods. Now imagine somebody reaches over and physically forces my handlebars left while I am attempting to go right. In both cases, the bicycle follows the same path. In both cases, the movement has causes. Yet our judgement about my agency changes substantially because the causal structure differs. In the first situation, the movement expresses my intention; in the second, the movement occurs against it. Causation itself has not disappeared from either event, but one appears free in a way the other does not.
This is important because explanations of human behaviour often move between different levels without acknowledging that they are doing so. If I say that a rider accelerated and somebody replies that what really happened was muscular contraction applying torque through the cranks, the second account has not disproved the first. It has described the mechanism through which the first occurred. In the same way, explaining a decision through neural activity does not automatically demonstrate that no decision occurred. “The rider chose the left trail” and “neural activity caused muscular movements that turned the handlebars” may describe the same event at different levels. Finding a drivetrain does not prove that the bicycle is not moving.
The hard determinist can still object that the rider’s desires, intentions and reasons were themselves caused by factors outside the rider’s ultimate control. This is the deeper challenge. If my desire to turn left emerged inevitably from previous conditions, the fact that the action expressed my desire may not satisfy someone who believes freedom requires ultimate authorship. Yet even here the fixed gear bike offers an important complication because the language of causal chains can mislead us into thinking that causation only restricts action. On a bicycle, the chain is also the mechanism through which action becomes effective.
Imagine literally breaking the chain. The cranks immediately gain a form of mechanical independence. They can rotate forwards, backwards or remain stationary regardless of what the rear wheel is doing. In that narrow sense, the cranks have become freer. Yet this freedom is strangely impotent. Push as hard as you like and nothing reaches the rear wheel. The rider’s muscular effort produces movement in the legs and cranks, but the sequence stops there. The same connection that previously appeared to constrain the pedals was also the means through which the rider could propel the bicycle.
This gives us a useful reversal of the familiar metaphor of being “chained” by causation. A causal chain is usually imagined as something binding the present to the past, but agency itself appears to require causal transmission. For my intention to matter, it must influence my body. My body must act upon the bicycle. The handlebars must affect the fork, the drivetrain must affect the rear wheel, and the tyres must interact with the ground. If my intentions had no causal relationship with my muscles, I would not become freer; I would become incapable of acting. Agency therefore seems to depend upon a relationship that can transmit consequences from intention into the world.
This does not prove compatibilism. An incompatibilist can reasonably argue that an action may be causally effective while still failing to satisfy the deeper conditions required for genuine free will. Nevertheless, the bicycle places pressure on a simpler assumption: that freedom must increase as causal connection decreases. Sometimes breaking the chain does not liberate the rider. It removes the rider’s ability to affect what happens next.
The distinction between determinism and fatalism becomes important here. These ideas are often treated as though they were interchangeable, but they are not. Imagine that I am halfway up a steep fixed gear climb and announce that, if determinism is true, whether I reach the top must already be fixed. I therefore decide there is no point continuing to pedal. Unsurprisingly, the bicycle slows and eventually stops. My refusal to pedal has not demonstrated the futility of action. It has become one of the causes explaining why I failed to reach the top.
Fatalism suggests that an outcome will occur regardless of what we do. Determinism, by contrast, says that what we do is itself part of the causal process through which outcomes occur. If I pedal, that matters. If I stop, that matters. If I choose a different line, adjust my weight or carry more momentum into the climb, those actions contribute to what follows. A determinist might insist that whether I perform those actions is itself determined, but this does not render the actions causally irrelevant. The future does not happen despite our behaviour. Our behaviour belongs to the collection of causes from which the future emerges.
This is one reason the familiar image of determinism as a row of falling dominoes is inadequate when applied to human beings. Dominoes are passive. They do not perceive previous events, remember mistakes, imagine future possibilities or modify their behaviour according to feedback. Human beings do all of these things. We are affected by causes, but we are also systems capable of responding to information about those causes. The causal process can fold back upon itself.
Cycling makes this feedback structure particularly obvious. A rider enters a muddy corner and feels the front wheel begin to slide. That movement changes what the rider perceives through the handlebars, tyres, vestibular system and body. The rider alters pressure or changes position, which affects the bicycle, which produces new sensory information, which prompts another adjustment. The process cannot easily be divided into one side called “perception” and another called “action”. Each continually modifies the other. This is broadly compatible with action-based and ecological theories of perception, in which perception is understood not merely as the passive reception of sensory data but as intimately connected to bodily engagement with an environment (Gibson, 1979; Noë, 2004).
The same point appears within off-road riding through the idea of affordances. A root across a trail does not offer identical possibilities to every rider. A novice may experience it simply as an obstacle, while a more experienced rider may perceive several lines through or over it. A BMX rider may perceive the same object as something that affords a hop or another form of movement. The root has not physically changed, but the practical possibilities available within the rider-environment relationship have changed. Skill does not simply allow somebody to choose more effectively between pre-existing options; it can alter which possibilities become visible in the first place.
This complicates another common assumption about freedom: that having more possible choices automatically means possessing more agency. A geared bicycle appears, in one obvious sense, freer than a fixed gear because it offers a wider range of mechanical options. The rider can select different ratios and can coast. A fixed gear removes these possibilities. Yet many riders find the simplified bicycle subjectively liberating precisely because it removes an entire layer of decision-making. There is no question about whether to shift because shifting is impossible. The rider adapts cadence, body position, force and line rather than altering the mechanical relationship every time the terrain changes.
The paradox is that mechanical restriction can sometimes produce greater experiential openness. This should not be exaggerated into the claim that restriction is inherently liberating, but it does show that the number of available options and the quality of agency are not identical. A bicycle with a thousand selectable gears would offer more theoretical choices than a single-speed bicycle, but if the rider had to consciously evaluate every possible ratio every few seconds, those options could become cognitive burden rather than meaningful freedom. Agency requires usable possibilities, not simply an enormous menu.
The relationship between constraint and creativity appears elsewhere. A sonnet restricts what a poet can do, yet those restrictions can become part of the creative process. Chess limits how pieces may move, but those limitations make strategic play possible. BMX and skateboarding develop extraordinary variation within strict relationships between body, equipment, architecture and gravity. Removing every limitation would not produce an infinitely expressive sport. It would remove the structure against which skill becomes intelligible. Freedom therefore need not mean the absence of a grammar. In many activities, a grammar is what makes meaningful improvisation possible.
The fixed gear rider encounters this directly. One gear is not experienced solely as deprivation. It becomes a condition around which technique develops. The rider learns when to stand, when to spin, when to carry momentum and when to accept that the chosen ratio was a spectacular error. The mechanical limitation provides the problem to which embodied skill responds. This does not mean imposed restriction should be romanticised. Choosing a fixed gear for pleasure is radically different from having meaningful options removed by coercion, poverty, exclusion or inaccessible environments. Some constraints generate play while others suppress agency. The philosophical point is more modest: the existence of constraint does not, by itself, demonstrate the absence of freedom.
This distinction is particularly important when existential philosophy enters the discussion. Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of facticity offers a useful language for thinking about the conditions within which freedom is exercised. Facticity includes the aspects of our situation that are already given: our past, our body, our historical position and the circumstances we encounter. Sartrean freedom does not imply that we can simply abolish those facts by choosing differently. A fixed gear provides an almost comic illustration of facticity. The ratio is the ratio. The hill is the hill. The surface is wet. Your legs are tired. No amount of existential authenticity transforms a 48-tooth chainring into a 32 halfway through a climb.
Yet those facts do not contain a complete command about how the rider must respond. The rider might continue, stand on the pedals, change line, stop, walk, turn around or decide to return another day. The conditions restrict what is possible, but they do not automatically provide the meaning of the situation. A steep climb might be experienced as an unwanted obstacle by somebody travelling home after work, while another rider may have selected the route precisely because the climb is difficult. The material hill remains the same, but its significance is shaped by the project in which it appears.
Sartre’s famous discussion of fatigue in Being and Nothingness is particularly relevant here. Fatigue is real, but its meaning is not exhausted by its physical presence. The exhausted hiker encounters tiredness within a project, and whether that tiredness becomes a reason to stop depends upon the broader situation through which it is interpreted (Sartre, 1943). Cycling provides an almost embarrassingly literal version of this. Burning legs do not contain a hidden instruction saying “continue”, nor do they contain one saying “stop”. They are part of the conditions within which the rider acts.
The skid stop gives us perhaps the clearest fixed gear version of this relationship between facticity and agency. A moving bicycle already possesses momentum. The drivetrain is rotating and the rider cannot simply erase the speed already accumulated. To skid, the rider shifts their weight, resists through the pedals and works against the rotation of the rear wheel until traction breaks. Crucially, the rider does not escape the drivetrain in order to act. The same mechanical connection that prevents the pedals from coasting is used to alter the motion of the bicycle.
The skid therefore offers a useful image of freedom within constraint. Momentum represents what has already happened. It cannot be retrospectively removed. The rider inherits it and responds. The response remains governed by physics: tyre friction, weight distribution, speed, terrain and gear ratio all matter. Nothing supernatural enters the system. Yet the rider introduces a force that changes what happens next. Freedom, on this account, does not consist in escaping conditions but in becoming causally significant within them.
This is close to what makes Spinoza particularly interesting in discussions of freedom. Spinoza rejects ordinary free will, arguing that human beings regard themselves as free because they are conscious of their desires while remaining ignorant of the complete network of causes producing those desires. Yet his philosophy does not collapse into simple resignation. Instead, freedom becomes connected with activity, understanding and adequate knowledge. We become freer, in a Spinozist sense, not by stepping outside nature but by understanding more clearly the causes through which we exist and act (Spinoza, 1677).
The transition from novice to experienced fixed gear rider offers a practical analogy. A beginner may experience the drivetrain as something happening to them. The pedals refuse to stop turning, descents feel intrusive, and every change in speed is transmitted through the legs. An experienced rider exists under exactly the same mechanical laws, but their relationship to those laws has changed. They anticipate pedal position, understand how pressure through the cranks affects speed and recognise the approach of lost traction. Gravity has not become less deterministic. The fixed sprocket has not softened its position. Knowledge has nevertheless expanded the rider’s practical capacities.
This gives us a useful formulation: knowledge does not loosen the chain; it teaches us how to ride it. A similar process occurs whenever human beings become aware of patterns in their own behaviour. If I recognise that exhaustion affects my judgement, that knowledge can influence later decisions. I might postpone certain tasks, change my routine or create structures that reduce the likelihood of acting badly when tired. The original disposition remains part of the causal system, but the system now contains information about itself. That information becomes a new cause.
Human beings therefore possess a peculiar capacity for self-modification. We do not merely respond to causes; we can sometimes identify causes and deliberately alter the conditions under which future behaviour will occur. We form habits, practise skills, change environments, create reminders, make commitments and build social structures. None of this requires escaping causation. Indeed, it works because causation is reliable. Preparing the bicycle the night before increases the likelihood of riding the following morning precisely because environments influence behaviour. Arranging to meet another rider introduces a social expectation that can change the probability of leaving the house. If causes did not reliably matter, none of these strategies would make sense.
This introduces a temporal dimension that isolated thought experiments about choice often miss. Yesterday’s agency can become today’s constraint. If I choose a particular gear ratio on Friday night, that choice becomes a fixed condition of Saturday’s climb. The decision was previously open but is now part of the situation I inherit. Human lives contain countless examples of this transformation. Commitments, habits, relationships, jobs, purchases and previous decisions all alter the conditions under which later decisions take place. Not all present constraints were chosen, obviously, but some of our current facticity consists of earlier actions that have hardened into circumstances.
The relationship also works in the opposite direction. Today’s constraints can become the material through which future capacities are developed. Repeatedly riding a difficult trail changes the rider who will encounter it next time. Perception becomes more precise, technique improves and movements that initially required conscious deliberation become increasingly automatic. This raises another interesting problem for simplistic definitions of freedom. If an action becomes habitual and requires less conscious decision-making, has the rider become less free? In practical terms, the opposite is often true. Skill reduces the need for constant deliberation while expanding the range of actions available.
Freedom may therefore belong partly to capacities developed across time rather than solely to isolated moments of choice. Harry Frankfurt’s influential work on alternative possibilities similarly challenged the idea that moral responsibility must always depend upon an agent being able to choose a different outcome at a particular instant (Frankfurt, 1969). Whatever position we take on Frankfurt’s argument, it encourages us to separate the question of agency from a simplistic image of two metaphysical doors standing permanently open before the chooser.
The phrase “I could have gone right” illustrates the ambiguity. In ordinary conversation, I probably mean that turning right lay within my capacities. The trail existed, my bicycle could follow it, I possessed the required skill and nothing physically prevented the turn. This differs from the much stronger metaphysical claim that, with every feature of the universe held absolutely identical, I could nevertheless have produced a different choice. Determinism directly challenges the latter claim, but ordinary ideas of ability frequently concern the former.
This distinction matters because control does not ordinarily require behaviour to vary under identical conditions. A rider who reliably avoids the same dangerous pothole every morning is not considered less competent because their behaviour is predictable. Reliability may be evidence of control. If identical perceptions, reasons and intentions reliably lead to an appropriate action, this looks more like agency than a system that occasionally behaves differently for no reason at all.
The fixed gear bicycle therefore encourages us to separate several concepts that are often compressed into the single word “freedom”. There is freedom from coercion, freedom to select between alternatives, freedom to act according to one’s reasons, freedom from unnecessary cognitive load, freedom to develop capacities and freedom to influence future conditions. These forms of freedom can overlap, but they can also conflict. A machine with more mechanical options may demand more attention. A chosen rule may remove possibilities while enabling a project. A commitment may restrict tomorrow while expressing today’s autonomy.
Thinking in terms of degrees of agency may therefore sometimes be more useful than treating freedom as a simple switch that is either present or absent. Mechanical systems themselves possess degrees of freedom: ways in which their parts are capable of moving independently. Interestingly, an assembled bicycle has fewer possible independent movements than a pile of its disconnected components. The frame, headset, axles and drivetrain all constrain movement. Yet the assembled bicycle has vastly greater capacity for coherent locomotion. Greater arbitrary movement does not produce greater functional agency.
Something similar may be true of people. Stable values, commitments, habits and skills restrict behaviour in certain ways, but they also allow sustained projects to exist. A person whose desires, intentions and memories changed randomly every few seconds would be highly unpredictable, yet they would have very little capacity to pursue long-term goals. Predictability, consistency and constraint can therefore be conditions of autonomy rather than merely enemies of it.
None of this should be used to romanticise externally imposed limitations. Material and social constraints can substantially diminish freedom. Poverty, coercion, violence, discrimination, inaccessible environments and institutional power are not equivalent to voluntarily riding one gear through the woods. If anything, a situated account of agency should make us more attentive to these conditions because practical freedom depends upon the real possibilities available to people, not merely abstract declarations that everyone is metaphysically free. Freedom within constraint does not mean all constraints are acceptable.
Responsibility similarly exists somewhere between omnipotence and helplessness. A rider does not control the weather, the existence of gravity or every action of other road users. Yet we can still distinguish careful from reckless riding because there are aspects of the situation to which the rider has some capacity to respond. Responsibility therefore does not require having created the entire situation. It requires some meaningful relationship between capacities, understanding, action and consequences.
Perhaps this suggests a more useful way to approach the problem of free will. Instead of asking only whether I am the ultimate uncaused origin of my actions, we might also ask what kinds of control I possess, how those capacities developed, which forces are shaping me, which of those forces I can understand and what changes I can introduce into the system. These questions do not replace metaphysics, but they bring the problem closer to lived agency.
The rider is neither outside the causal system nor simply a passive object moving through it. The environment acts upon the rider, but the rider acts upon the bicycle and environment in return. A muddy trail alters body position; body position changes tyre loading; tyre loading affects traction; traction produces new sensory information; the rider responds again. The relationship is recursive. Agency emerges not as a magical interruption of causation but as a particularly complex organisation of causation involving perception, memory, anticipation and feedback.
This is why steering may be a better metaphor for freedom than propulsion. We often imagine the free self as the ultimate engine that begins movement from nothing, but cyclists rarely create the forces with which they work. Gravity, momentum, friction and terrain already exist. The rider redirects them. Descending involves negotiating forces rather than abolishing them. Human action may often work in a similar fashion. We do not choose the arrival of every emotion, impulse or circumstance, but we can sometimes develop ways of responding to them. The initial force need not have been freely chosen for the response to matter.
The idea of momentum is especially useful here. Every cycling decision inherits momentum from what happened before. Entering a corner too quickly changes the options available inside it. Choosing the wrong line several metres earlier can determine what becomes possible later. The present contains the past in practical form. Human beings similarly inherit biological, psychological, social and historical momentum. Some of it is easy to redirect, some requires sustained effort and some may be effectively impossible for an individual to alter. Freedom, if the term remains useful, must therefore exist within momentum rather than outside it.
Perhaps this is why the traditional question “Could I have done otherwise?” sometimes feels less immediately relevant than another question: “What can I do from here?” The first asks us to imagine rewriting the past while holding everything else constant. The second begins from the fact that the past has already produced a situation and asks what capacities remain available within it. The bicycle is moving. The pedals are turning. The trail is beneath us. Whatever philosophical explanation accounts for our arrival, some response now occurs.
Thinking itself is part of that response. If determinism is true, deliberation does not become pointless. Deliberation is one of the causes through which behaviour is produced. Evidence can change beliefs; arguments can alter reasoning; imagined futures can affect present action. A rider who sees a steep climb ahead may accelerate before reaching it. The future is not literally reaching backwards through time, but the rider’s present representation of that future changes what happens now. Human beings are unusual causal systems partly because imagined possibilities can influence actual behaviour.
This point also explains why fatalistic resignation does not follow from determinism. If reading an argument changes how I understand myself, that new understanding becomes part of the conditions from which later actions emerge. Words can be causes. Ideas can be causes. Relationships, promises, memories and plans can all affect what happens next. The universe does not become less causal when its causes become psychologically meaningful.
A fixed gear therefore cannot solve the problem of free will, and it would be rather alarming if several thousand years of philosophy were finally resolved by removing a bicycle freewheel. The analogy cannot establish whether determinism is true, whether consciousness possesses irreducible causal powers or whether an agent could genuinely act differently under precisely identical conditions. What it can do is expose some of the assumptions hidden inside ordinary ideas of freedom.
Most importantly, the bicycle challenges the assumption that causal connection must necessarily be the enemy of agency. The fixed drivetrain constrains the rider, but the same drivetrain also allows the rider’s effort to reach the rear wheel. The chain limits and enables simultaneously. Break it and the cranks become independent, but independence alone does not make them effective.
Human beings may occupy a similarly uncomfortable position. We inherit bodies, languages, histories, dispositions and environments that we did not choose, and our actions emerge from within these conditions rather than from some untouched space beyond them. Yet we also perceive, deliberate, learn, adapt, develop skills, form projects and alter the conditions encountered by ourselves and others. We are caused, but we also cause.
A compatibilist may regard this as enough for meaningful freedom. An incompatibilist may argue that something crucial is still missing because the rider cannot ultimately be the author of the conditions from which their choices emerge. Spinoza might reject ordinary free will while describing greater understanding and activity as a form of freedom. Sartre would insist that freedom is always encountered from within a concrete situation rather than from an impossible position outside the world. The fixed gear does not decide between these traditions. It simply places their disagreement beneath our feet.
The rear wheel turns, the sprocket turns with it, the chain moves and the cranks rotate. Then the trail divides and the rider turns left. Perhaps everything involved in that decision has a cause. Perhaps, given precisely the same universe, the rider could never have turned right. That remains the difficult metaphysical question. Yet the decision still changes the trajectory of the bicycle, produces a different experience and contributes to the conditions from which the next decision will emerge.
Perhaps freedom was never about finding a metaphysical freewheel hidden somewhere inside consciousness. Perhaps there is no point at which the self completely disengages from nature and coasts independently of everything that produced it. Every decision may remain connected to a history, every action may inherit momentum, and every response may become another condition affecting what happens next.
The universe may have no freewheel. That does not necessarily make us passengers. We remain participants in the processes through which the next moment emerges. We receive forces, respond to them and transmit new ones. We inherit momentum and sometimes redirect it. We do not break the chain in order to act. We act through it.
The universe might be fixed gear.
We still have to steer.
References
Frankfurt, H. G. (1969). ‘Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility’. The Journal of Philosophy, 66(23), 829–839.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Hume, D. (1748). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, particularly Section VIII, ‘Of Liberty and Necessity’.
Noë, A. (2004). Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sartre, J.-P. (1943). Being and Nothingness.
Spinoza, B. (1677). Ethics, particularly Parts I, II and IV for necessity, human action and freedom.
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