An essay for the Philosophy of Mind module at Imperial! It grew out of a very personal place: a genuine frustration with my own phone addiction and the philosophical contradiction I found myself living in. On one hand, I held a reductionist view that mental states are just neural states. On the other, I desperately invoked some Cartesian "self" that could rise above its biology and exert willpower.
Working through the mind-body problem forced me to confront that contradiction. The essay traces a path from Substance Dualism and Eliminative Materialism through Compatibilism, landing on Donald Davidson's non-reductive physicalism as the most honest account of what it actually feels like to struggle with a compulsion. The key insight: for an action to be mine, it must be caused by who I am, not despite who I am. A "causeless" act is not freedom, it is a glitch.