People who stray from the norms often claim to be using their free will. This is strange. Why is the philosophical idea that we have free will taken for granted by most of society? I find it incomprehensible and incompatible with reality.
Where Do Our Choices Come From?
Zoom in on a single decision: you reach for tea. Neurons fire; muscles move. Where did that firing pattern originate? Here’s a causal stack:
- Genetics & developmental wiring: Baseline neurotransmitter systems; temperament biases; neural architecture.
- Early environment: Prenatal conditions, nutrition, attachment, language exposure.
- Learning history: Reinforcement, punishment, imitation; the statistical structure of experiences that tuned synaptic weights.
- Current internal state: Hormones, circadian phase, glucose, stress load, fatigue.
- Current perceptual input: Smell of tea, sight of mug, social cues.
- Learned decision policies: Habit loops, value estimates, predictive models.
- Noise / chaotic dynamics: Thermal noise, stochastic synaptic release, network‑level chaos.
There’s no “you” in this stack, there’s no soul.
Some argue that quantum indeterminacy rescues freedom. But randomness ≠ authorship. If a you are randomly influenced by the laws of physics I would find it a difficult claim to say that that is you.
A Quick Test
If you had deep, contra‑causal free will, you should be able to reconfigure yourself by raw act of will-no training loop, no exposure therapy, just deciding.
Example 1: Taste aversion
- Identify a food you strongly dislike (say, black olives).
- Decide-really, will it-that you now want to want olives.
- Check: do you in fact desire olives? Did the felt aversion flip?
Example 2: Motivation
- Notice: I don’t want to run a marathon next month.
- Try-pure willpower-to become the kind of person who wants to run that marathon.
- Recheck the motivation. Still not there? Same problem.
These tests fail. Higher‑order desires (“I wish I wanted X”) do not translate to lower‑order desires (“I actually want X”).
Yes, you can sometimes reshape tastes and motives-but via conditioning, repeated exposure, social incentives, dopaminergic updates, etc.