Scientifically, we don't really know yet. At scales larger than subatomic particles, things generally work deterministically, that is, acting in an intricate and unbroken chain of causality stretching back to the Big Bang. Everything you have ever done or ever will do was determined at the instant of creation.
Quantum mechanics revealed some qualities of the universe that appear to behave probabilistically. There was a huge debate between Einstein and the determinists on one side and Niels Bohr and the quantum mechanics/randomness kooks on the other (this is where Einstein's "God Does Not Play Dice" quote came from. Most scientists these days lean toward randomness being real but there are still things like hidden variables theories (the guys who won the Nobel prize in Physics in 2022 won it for dunking on these hidden variables people).
There are still holdouts in the determinism camp, like superdeterminism, which basically argues there is an underlying deterministic godhand behind every supposedly 'random' result. This is probably unfalsifiable and is closer to a religion than a scientific theory.
So if probability is a real quality of the universe, it is very much possible that you actually have free will, that you are actually making your own decisions-- but it feels unlikely and I'll explain a few oblique ways it could be possible:
1.
Orchestrated Objective Reduction: Argues that the microtubules in the neurons of your central nervous system bridge our consciousness with the quantum realm, and allow us to collapse wave functions as a singular entity to create our objective reality and essentially act as a quantum computer. Seems like mystical woo-woo shit right? Well consider that 100 years later we still have no fucking idea how general anesthesia works, we can't find a mechanism anywhere in the cells of our brain. But a few interesting studies in the last few years have found a connection to microtubules. Most consider this theory to be bullshit.
2.
Allegory of the Cave, or
Idealism: We entirely create or singularly experience our own reality, like a stream of data into a receiver. At the instant of observation, when the wave function collapses, and a pixel of the universe transforms from a wave function (data), to a particle (reality), it provides its 'causal history' contained within the wave (in the form of its energy, direction, amplitude etc). Was any of it actually real?
Einstein, questioning the apparent absurdity of quantum mechanical explanations for reality, famously was like "So you're saying the moon isn't there when I'm not observing it?". And the quantum mechanics/randomness people were like "You can't prove that it is". And they were right. Our observations, or at least the objective collapse of a wave function, have the power to
ret-con their own history through time. This can also be explained as: they are neither a particle or a wave, they are nothing at all until we create/observe them. Indistinguishable from the fabric of the universe and reality.
In this paradigm, reality is nothing more than a stream of data, and we make real choices with our free will, and the stream constructs a plausible deterministic history. This would have some power in explaining things like
synchronicities and the collective unconscious, basically themes in the fabric of the dream. (Interestingly, this idea came from a collaboration between Carl Jung, an analytic psychologist, and Wolfgang Pauli, one of the originators of quantum mechanics, both mystics).
Basically:
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