When I do not have control over how my brain gets shaped in the womb, what genes are passed on to me, and what environment into which I am born and in which I grow up, what are those other “controls” or “freedoms” or “free will” that I can lay claim to when all such controls are shaped and driven by those earlier things over which I had zero control.
Sorry, no free will, which even experiments like those of Benjamin Libet have demonstrated.
Without free will, how can we be the “thinkers” of any thought or the “doers” of any action?
If we are not the thinkers and doers, then how can we be praised or blamed for any of our thoughts or actions?
If you say, it is one’s past life’s karma that determines one’s brain, genes and environment in this life, that only pushes the question back because then I can ask the question what gave me that brain, genes and environment in my previous life which determined the thoughts I had and the actions I did in the previous life.
Thus once you push back on that question, no, we are not caught in an infinite regress but rather end up with that very FIRST LIFE OR FIRST TIME I was born as a human being. Then, without a past life in that first birth, what or who gave me that brain, genes and environment and on what basis where I had no karma to begin with, that has set me off on this ineluctable course where I find myself in the present wondering over why I am the way I am and why I do what I do, why I got the brain I did, etc.
This again shows that there is MASSIVE LOGICAL FALLACY in saying “it is YOUR karma”.
The only logical explanation that satisfies one is if we accept that, ok, there is this universe set in motion whenever, and in it there are these things happening, including human beings born, etc., and at some point in time I latch onto one particular human body-mind as being “me”, and thus begins the karmic identification where I erroneously take on the “doership” of all the thinking and doing that is already happening or has been happening in that particular body-mind, and thus samsara begins with its joys and sorrows.
What is that “I” that so erroneously identifies itself with a body-mind. It is this sense of “I”, which is nothing but a reflection of Consciousness/Awareness/Brahman/God/Self/Truth/Reality in the mind as “I Am” (the chidabhasa or reflected consciousness), the so-called jiva or jivatma or soul.
Realize you as “ego” or the reflected consciousness identifying with body-mind, are NOT THE DOER, and you are at once liberated.
Why and how come?
Ponder over it.
Know Thyself 