What if I know there is no free will?

 If there is no free will, then there’s a problem. Not just a philosophical problem but a practical one.

If my thoughts, desires, decisions and actions are all the inevitable results of previous causes, then I don't actually choose anything. I merely experience the consequences of everything that came before.

I may feel that I am deciding whether to tell the truth, resist an impulse, change my mind, forgive someone or become a better person. But if hard determinism is true, none of these are really choices. The outcome was already determined by causes stretching back before I was born.

Of course, we can still punish people we just can’t blame them. A determinist can say punishment protects society or changes behaviour. But the idea of deserving punishment doesn’t hold. If someone could not have done otherwise, what are they being blamed for?

The same problem applies to praise, responsibility and moral improvement. No one deserves any credit for any of it. What a fun world where blame and credit are meaningless.

And even telling someone, "You should change your behaviour" becomes obsolete. If they have no free will, their response to your advice is determined too. You aren't appealing to their ability to choose differently; you're simply introducing another cause into the chain which may or may not work depending on their particular configuration, and they have no choice in the matter.

There is some scientific evidence that weakening people's belief in free will can itself negatively affect behaviour. That’s interesting, but we don't need science to establish the basic point that our sense of agency matters enormously for anything approaching a normal life.

Hard determinism may be logically defensible, but as a philosophy of human life it is bleak and proposed primarily to avoid acceptance of Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead.

No genuine choice.
No ultimate responsibility.
No real self-direction.

Things simply happen.

The Vaishnava understanding offers a picture where determinism exits but is not absolute.

It doesn't claim that we have unlimited free will. We are heavily conditioned by our bodies, minds, circumstances, karma and the modes of material nature. But conditioned is not the same as completely determined.

We have a small but genuine capacity to choose.

We cannot control all the causes acting upon us, but we can choose our responses to them. We are not independent of Krishna, but neither are we merely passive objects being pushed through a predetermined sequence of events.

After giving Arjuna extensive knowledge about the self, karma, the modes of nature and their consequences, even explaining that, “The spirit soul bewildered by the influence of false ego thinks himself the doer of activities that are in actuality carried out by the three modes of material nature.” (Bg 3.27) Krishna ends by saying: "Deliberate on this fully, and then do what you wish." Bg 18.63

Krishna doesn't promise Arjuna that he can simply step outside causality and do whatever he likes. In fact, Krishna tells him earlier that his nature will compel him to act. But He gives Arjuna a choice that is more fundamental and subtler: He can choose in what consciousness to act.

That is the little sliver of free will we possess. The freedom to orient our consciousness to align with Krishna or away from Him. It’s small, but it’s enough.

We don't choose what happens to us. The modes of material nature determine that. But we can choose which way to turn.

Toward Krishna, or away from Him.

If I’m wrong about all this, don’t blame me, I couldn’t have written anything else.