Layered Causal Realism I.S : Determinism, Continuity, and the Structure of Agency

Libertarian accounts of free will typically try to preserve a genuinely open space of choice for the agent by introducing some non-deterministic causal structure. Robert Kane's theory of self-forming actions (SFAs) is one of the most representative versions of this approach. It introduces genuine quantum-level indeterminacy into crucial nodes of deliberation in order to prevent action from being fully determined by prior states. This paper argues that the proposal contains a fundamental gap concerning the continuity of the subject. Agency is not a single decision event. It is a structure accumulated across time. The central features of agency, including commitment, moral responsibility, and self-formation, all presuppose a subject that persists through time and can inherit its own deliberation trajectory. The paper first argues that determinism is not a threat to agency. On the contrary, it provides the structural conditions of causal inheritance required for diachronic agency. It then presents the difficulties facing Kane's proposal from three directions: the decisive moment cannot be identified at the time, narrative continuity depends on causal continuity, and the attribution of moral responsibility requires causal traceability. The paper then introduces the concept of Free Feel and argues that the subject's summative phenomenal endorsement of its own accumulated deliberative history depends on the same cross-round causal continuity and therefore collapses under the indeterministic rupture the SFA proposal requires. The indeterministic rupture introduced by the SFA proposal cuts precisely the infrastructure through which agency persists across time.