If I follow your argumentation that any decision I make willingly is ultimately only triggered by some causal mysterious other reason, then I would have to assume that man is nothing but a machine and all causalities could be traced at some point.

I call this denial of what science itself could actually claim to represent as great knowledge: That the identification of causes, as soon as they were found, again resulted in new and even more intensive searches for further causes, and that in this way we can go on indefinitely without ever finding a real causal origin.

Unless you believe that the origin of all life will be found by man.

But that is not a science, but a belief.

Furthermore, you don't seem to attach any special importance to your personal experience, because such everyday decisions, like taking the second exit on the highway instead of the third, or calming down instead of getting excited, are simply insignificant events. In fact, human everyday life consists almost exclusively of such simple events and only in movies, for example, do you have to make decisions about life and death. So does this mean that it doesn't really matter if I follow your reasoning about what people do?

It seems almost as if you believe in the power of the predetermined destiny and nothing a human being does has any influence whatsoever on this already determined mechanics, a kind of stupid universal law that marks our path.

Is then human compassion basically worthless feeling and only pure imagination?

Of course you are right, every encounter that is limited to a temporal context contains innumerable other possibilities and these are infinite the larger one draws the temporal context frame. But in second-by-second interactions, as they happen between people, the only meaningful and feasible volitional decision is basically of importance, since according to Buddhism this is probably the most effective way to show one' s will. Everything that moves outside this framework is already past again and only still future. That is why Buddhist doctrine teaches the present moment as the only real one. In so far as I declare this present to be an illusion, I deprive myself, so to speak, of my only possibility to exert influence and leave others to control the situation.

It seems that we do not agree on this question. I believe, however, that an agreement is unnecessary, for if we were to meet in physical life, the conduct of such conversations would not be the basis of our understanding, but rather we would be integrated into a context.