Free will, as it is understood by beings of the dualistic world, does not apply to the ultimate reality.
The ultimate will is free, perfect and unchanging.
These three qualities are self-supporting and complete. For example, humans may have a desire to finish a task, but external realities may hinder them. But their will is to accomplish the task. If they were not affected by something external to them, their reality would have been in accordance with their will. A human desires something because they find it to be ideal. Likewise, the ultimate will would be in accordance with the ultimate ideal, so it would always be perfect, even when it is free.
Then when the ultimate reality decides something, it doesn’t have to think it over. Because thinking comes from a limited mind’s perspective, where they need to consider more data. In that way, the ultimate will is unchanging.
Is the perfect will one or many?
Well, this is an open question, because while Tao affirms the possibility of multiple paths in every situation, can all these paths go on forever backwards or forwards? That is, people know the analogy of how altering the timeline would result in them not being born. But looking in the other direction, if you would consider another imagined timeline, then that timeline could not be traced back to their birth, and that would make that timeline invalid. From this, one can infer that in the long scale of time, only a few of the imagined timelines can be valid. That brings us to the question of whether multiple timelines can exist in the possibility space.
For example, take the idea that Fourier Series equations can generate artworks. This is not a perfect analogy, but just consider equations that generate patterns at some areas, but they go on for infinity. A batman diagram or circle does not count, because they are cyclic.
All mathematical equations are unchanging, so when we use them as the models, we do not have to consider if they’ll change, unless the equation we are using is a dependant equation (i.e. one that requires external input). But then we can plot the external inputs, but the point is that then the whole result would not be perfect. So if there is such an equation, we can just apply the constant and generate the specific equation.
A sine wave is cyclic and repeating. So if we consider the ultimate will to be like a sine wave, it accounts for perfection and unchangingness, but it is not free.
But if we take a function that generates some fancy phenomena at some interval, it still collapses towards the regions away from them. So if we consider the case of some fancy phenomena appearing in graphs, they still collapse towards infinity.
So in that sense, it is harder to define a function such that it generates unique phenomena at different points without significant repetition, and keeps doing it for longer distances. Since the number of functions that can keep this up for longer distances are lower, I’ll have to assume the number of possible such functions tends to decrease as we approach infinity.
Yet we know the universe exists, and we assume it to be beginningless and endless, and so there is at least one such function. And in the span of infinity, one could imagine there to be many such functions in normal cases, but since the limit also goes on for infinity, it keeps reducing the possibilities, so much so that we can only assume that ultimately, all of the possibilities give up in favour of the one ultimate possibility or timeline.
It is in this way that I say that the ultimate will is one, and not one among many possibilities.
Or maybe God can have multiple possibilities and could switch to one of them at will. Yet, if we think of it in one way, the switching itself would be an act that is part of an ultimate reality. So in that sense, ultimate reality could be greater than will itself. The choice of wills would be deterministic universal that’s an unreal ideal hypothesis, while reality would be God choosing the will through free will.