I believe free will is a gradient that increases with awareness, experience, power, and control. At what point when you die do you lose your free will?

If you compared a baby to a rock, that baby has more free will. If you compare a baby to an adult, some would probably say the baby has none. Just depends what you compare it to.

I believe free will is an emergent property/illusion. I personally subscribe to hard determinism. I don’t think there’s nothing stopping up from feeling we have free will, but how we feel about the universe and how the universe actually is can be different.

Similar to what the other person said, I believe the free will we feel is past oriented free will. If you took a moment in your life and you made a save point, in hard determinism, the event that occur after that point will always be the same even if you loaded that moment an infinite amount of times.

Let’s say you wanna go to the past to change something. You failed your math test. If you went back to that moment without any recollection of the present, the events would always be same. But if you could go back to the past with new knowledge, then sure you can finally change that. But that wouldn’t happen since you have didn’t experience failing the test which would force you to add/change your methods.

Let’s now say you have another chaise to take the test. What do you do? You learn from your experience and change. If you didn’t change, you be in the same position when you took the test the first time.

There’s benefits to believe you have free will, but your free will is compromised of past experiences. If you want to change your path, experience more or simulate experiences.

Some people subscribe to the idea that subatomic particles add a level of randomness which potentially create a different permutation, but I personally still think there’s no randomness. There appears to be randomness to us, but it’s also possible these particles are still following a predetermined path which we currently cannot fully observe and understand.

Whether if you think it’s minor or not doesn’t diminish the effects it had on you. Trauma for some, might not be trauma for you. Whether if you have it or not, the purpose to understand the effects and behaviors you’ve adopted. There’s benefits to recognizing them, and there’s also disadvantages. For many, the reason why people work on it is because it’s been debilitating. Act accordingly to what you want and what you want to learn. Just remember, if you brush off your experiences, it means you can brush off others too.