Free Will, Volition, and Self-Agency as Emergent Control Processes: A Compatibilist Account

This paper presents a compatibilist account of free will grounded in emergent organization, predictive processing, and higher-level causal structure. Free will is not treated as absolute uncaused freedom or a violation of physical law. Instead, it is understood as the capacity of an organism to form intentions, evaluate options, select actions, and initiate behavior through internally integrated and self-referential processes. The framework rejects both libertarian appeals to metaphysically uncaused agency and eliminativist claims that agency is purely illusory. Higher-level organizational processes are argued to be causally meaningful despite being fully physically instantiated. The paper also addresses objections from source incompatibilism and explains why quantum indeterminacy alone does not generate authorship or control.