Obsessed with free will/self

Sorry to hear of your experience with an obsessive thought. It can be quite unpleasant. If you are having a lot of trouble then maybe think about seeking help from a therapist. If you'd like some perspective on your phobia from another person, here you go. Know I may not fully grasp what exactly is bothering you but it sounds like the old debate about determinism. That is, that given cause and effect, all events at all scales are constrained along a immutable trajectory. Then the concern that is actually bothering you, that is derived from this determinism argument, is that free will and even one's self are illusion. Assuming I got your concern correct, I'd say first let's consider "free will". The idea of free will is basically that an agent is not under the control of something else. But let's think for a moment on it. When we think of free will, we usually don't think of just literally completely random, noisy, meaningless actions and thoughts and beliefs disconnected and uncorrelated from the rest of the universe. Right? Instead it's kind of a romantic idea that our nebulously defined will comes from no cause or influence but itself. A "turtles all the way down" kind of conception. A middle ground way of looking at things is that free will, instead of being this romantic thing, makes more sense being correlated with the universe that the agent finds itself in. Able to register, organize and interpret sensations as higher level abstract ideas and beliefs that it can use to reason and plan the actions which bring it the most benefit. That these beliefs and actions have causes is not a bad thing. In fact it is the opposite. An agent that did not have causes originating from the universe it inhabited wouldn't make sense, it could not claim as motivation anything from the universe. Nothing it did could be based on evidence or experience, for those would be causal. Thus such an agent could not be rational (behaving according to reasons) with respect to it's universe. So celebrate the fact that the smell of good tasting food makes you automatically salivate - it simply means you are a part of the universe! You are an inhabitant. You are connected and correlated and not an incomprehensible jumble of randomness. Now the second point about existence - determinism does not entail non-existance. Does a car cease to exist given the knowledge that it contains an engine, oil, fabric, ruber, metal, that it is made up of atoms or that it moves by virtue of combustion? No the car still exists. Given a human has eyes and a brain and neurons and responds and interprets stimulation - this in no way means that the person does not exist. That the moon is made of moon dust, that a computer organizes electrical charges, that a persons thoughts are somehow tied to metabolism does not mean that the moon doesn't exist, that computers don't exist, or that your thoughts, beliefs, mental models, or conception of the self, don't exist. Cause and effect did not negate anything, it is just a description of a relationship. To top it all off, arguably, determinism can't be proven either because of the "problem of induction". Cause and effect is only a guess at how things work and can't be purely logically deduced. So now on to the other issue. Maybe the bigger issue. Obsession. Overthinking. There is a problem in overthinking about a subject we don't know a very lot about. The problem is that we end up bootstrapping. We take some limited knowledge or some idea or interpretation of an event and then we extend it over and over and over when we overthink. It's like making guesses off of guess off of guesses. We compound errors and polute our thinking with them. If you want to think really hard about something, you should already know a lot about it. So what's the cure? Realize what is going on first when overthinking. You are not necessarily making progress because you are not collecting new evidence or experience. When something clicks, we want that something to be based on good data. When we think really hard on something we also use a lot of our perception and can trick ourselves into thinking there is something going on around us. If I think about a blizzard hard enough, I might shiver and feel cold. Thinking really hard on a bothersome thought can make us anxious. It doesn't mean something bad is happening. You are just tricking your senses a little. You want to get to a spot where you don't feel emotional contemplating big interesting thoughts. Try and suspend judgements while thinking on them. Anyway, very long post. I hope there is stuff in there that you find useful. Wishing you relief and happiness.