Free will
Intention definitely seems to have an impact on what I do and what happens in the world. I aim a dart throw at the bullseye, and my dart does get closer to the bullseye (not that my darts aim is particularly good). I intend to stop at a stop light and I press my breaks.
And that intention feels like free will. It makes me think I have some choice about what happens in the world, but I wonder if it's just my experience I'm choosing. Bear with me.
So, let's assume (strong foundations!) that there are many many universes. universi. universes. And right now you're experience one universe. Imagine your soul as the thing that experiences what you're doing right now. It can all be just a fleshy machine doing sparky chemistry, or it can be an ethereal ghost-like thing or it can be a soul in the sense of any religion.
So the meat sack (brain included) is doing a thing - throwing, breathing deeply, cutting veggies. The soul experiences what is being done. And my general experience is that I am the one doing the thing, not my body, but me, which includes my body. I am in control and I create intention and my actions follow that intention if drugs or addictions or obsessive compulsions don't win out.
And anyway the idea is that the soul, the experiencing part, is not one and the same with the meat sack, but is actually something that can shift between the realities, within narrow limits, and it can basically just shift through intentions.
So it's not the soul having the intention. It's the meat sack, the brain, perhaps even the mind having the intention. What the soul is doing is moving toward the universe where the Reed-meatsack had the intention to write this blog post.
I wrote this blog post because I transitioned into that one universe within the multi-verse. There is another Reed in another universe who did not write this blog post, but I (my soul) didn't experience that Reed. It feels like I chose to write a blog post. But perhaps I just shifted my view into another reality, much like changing a TV channel.