DEFINITION OF CONTROL

If a genuine prediction about a future state that the system will assume is fed to the system itself (the system acquires that information), and the system is able to both willingly and consciously assume that future state or completely veto it, then the system has control over that future state (thus control over itself — deciding power).

EXAMPLES

If a rock, a deterministic computer program, or a very stupid animal "acquires", or get "entangled" with information about its future states, that information doesn’t change in the slightest what it will do; thus it has no control.

Smart animals or AI might alter their future states to some degree if they apprehend certain types of predictive information about possible future states.

Conscious humans, have to the highest degree.

I predict that today you will go to school: if I can willingly and consciously falsify this prediction, I am in control over that future state.

I predict that today your DNA will replicate: if I cannot willingly and consciously falsify this prediction, I am not in control over that future state.

I predict that the next phrase will be spoken in English: I can willingly and consciously falsify this prediction by answering you in French.

A POSSIBILE COUNTER-ARGUMENT

You might say: “Ah, but this ‘altering your future behaviour / vetoing predicted future states’ is caused by the fact that you ‘want to prove to me that you are not determined / constrained’; so you will just do the opposite of what I predict, which can itself become a very accurate prediction about your behaviour.”

So the “updated” prediction would be: I predict that you will not go to school after I predict that today you will go to school, because there is a deeper mechanism that forces you to behave by giving the opposite output. Therefore, if I say that today you will go to school or talk in English, you will not.

WHY THAT DOESN'T WORK WITH CONSCIOUS HUMAN

But again: if this genuine prediction is acquired by the system, the system can again willingly and consciously falsify it, and go to school or speak in English.

Here AI and smart animals fail here. Maybe an LLM has (or could have) a “line of code” that enables it to falsify my prediction about it (for example: if input → “ChatGPT, I foresee your next word will be ‘Hi’” — and maybe I’ve done the math and that is indeed the most likely output — but there is an underlying line of code that I haven’t considered which says: “if someone foresees you will output X, output non-X instead.” Then ChatGPT would output “Bye” instead).

But if I also consider this line of code in my prediction and write: “I predict that your next word will be ‘Hi’. But since there is that line of code instructing you to act contrary to my prediction, you will actually say not-‘Hi’” — then ChatGPT will either say “Hi” or “not Hi” (depending on which part of the phrase it identifies as the actual prediction) every time. And if I know the criteria by which it interprets which part of the phrase is the prediction, it will do the same thing all the time. It has no control over it.

But if a human acquires the knowledge of the above “updated” prediction — even if it has this underlying “I will show you otherwise” instruction, and even if it has an underlying criterion to identify which part of my paradoxical prediction is the prediction to falsify — it can always override or change both the instructions and the criteria.

And so on. You can regress all you want, update the prediction with more meta-cognitive parameters, but once the predictions enters the loop, once it becomes self-referential, can always be "flattened". It can be considered as "one package", and can be vetoed, or not.

CONSEQUENCES

This means that a prediction about the conscious system, once acquired by the system, has a deflagrating effect — even if it is a prediction that takes into account how the system is structured to react to predictions about itself.

A known prediction always destroys all the predictive power of such a prediction. It erases the deterministic features of the predicted causal chain

This radically not compatible with determinism.

The system has TRUE control over the final output, since the predicted (not matter how "updated" the predictin is) chain of deterministic causality is flattened— and starts again, ANEW, with no deterministic property — if the system acquires a genuine prediction about itself.

And what is the human mind all about? Making and receiving predictions (simulating scenarios) about itself.

This is the source of self-causality (control).

WHY DETERMINISM IS DEFEATED, OR PUSHED BACK TO EDGES OF REALITY

Determinism requires that there exists (in principle) a complete description of the future state of every system that is 100 % accurate and could be known ahead of time. But the above mechanism shows that any such descriptions, if and once known by the system it describes, loses its accuracy by default, within the realm of physical possibility of the system.

I can treat the entire prediction P (including any meta-layers: "I predict you'll veto because I predicted you'd go to school / speak English / follow your anti-prediction rule...") as a single object in my mental workspace.

I consciously and willingly veto it, and act accordingly → P is falsified.

The predictor might update P to P1 and P1 to P2 so that it would include my veto mechanism, the rules behind that mecahnism, all my metacognition, my "I will show you otherwise once I acquire your predictions" drive and its causes. But once I acquire P1 → I can veto that too. Or maybe not, I don't have to. I can.

Is this infinite regress? No, is a radical feature. In some sense, it's like a Gödel-style self-reference trap for causality itself: it shows that a perfect external prediction of a conscious, self-modeling system is impossible in principle, if and once the prediction is internalized, entangled with the predicted system.

And the mind's self-prediction machinery constantly creating this loop, this flattening, and incompleteness, and indeterminacy

THIS IS TESTABLE

Note that I'm not just describing a feeling. I'm describing testable empirical evidence for a form of self-causality.

Give me any concrete, observable, specifiable COMPLETE, genuine prediction about my future state, within the realm of what is allowed by the laws of physics, and I will falsify it. That's an empirical challenge, not a metaphysical one. And it's one that determinism, as a testable claim, cannot meet.

Determinism often gets a kind of unfalsifiable free pass: "Yes you falsified the prediction — but that falsification was itself determined." Feed me the predictions update with the "deterministic necessity" of the falsification, then. This can also be falsified.

But what if I had the complete and entire description of the whole universe... yes, this last desperate move is always available. But notice what it costs: the claim retreats entirely behind the observable, the empirical, the testable. It becomes a claim about a complete description of the universe that no one can ever access, test, or produce.

At that point it starts to look less like a scientific claim and more like a metaphysical commitment — too similar to "God works in ways we cannot observe."