The Illusion of Free Will

I want to talk about a sensitive subject, which almost all will take as a personal insult, I want to get rid of your Free Will, or more so, show that it is in fact an illusion.

I want to write about this because the illusoriness of free will is as certain a fact as the truth of evolution. And, unlike evolution, understanding this truth about the human mind has the potential to change our sense of moral wellbeing, and a grandiose moral Copernican revolution of our society.

The question of free will touches nearly everything people care about: politics, the legal system, religion, feelings of personal accomplishment, emotions like happiness, sadness, love, guilt, remorse. So much of human life seems to depend on our viewing one another as conscious agents capable of free choice. So if the scientific community were ever to declare free will an illusion, I think it would precipitate a cultural war far more acrimonious than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution.

I want to propose two ideas in this writing. One that free will is an illusion, and it's worse than an illusion. It's a totally incoherent idea, which is to say, it's impossible to describe a universe in which it could be true. Not only is it untrue, but it's also hard to make sense of what is even being claimed to be true.

And I also hope to convince you that understanding this truth about the human mind matters and that it can change the way we view morality and questions of justice.

1. Misconceptions

The popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions. The first is that each of us was free to behave differently than we did in the past. You became a fireman, and yet you could have become a policeman. You chose chocolate, but you could have chosen vanilla. It certainly seems that this is the world we're living in.

The second assumption is that we are the conscious source of our thoughts and actions, so your experience of wanting to do something is, in fact, the proximate cause of your doing that something. You feel that you want to move and then you move. You are doing it. YOU - the conscious witness of your life.

Unfortunately, we know that both of these assumptions are just untrue.

The first problem is that we live in a world of cause and effect, and there's no way of thinking about cause and effect that allows us to say that the buck stops here. Okay? The buck never stops. Either our wills are determined by prior causes, a long chain of prior causes, and we're not responsible for them; or they're the product of chance, and we're not responsible for them; or there's some combination of chance and determinism. But no combination seems to give you the free will the people cherish.

2. Predetermination

Consider a generic serial killer. His choice to commit his last murder was determined by neuropsychological events in his brain. Which were in turn determined by prior causes: bad genes, the developmental effects of an unhappy childhood, the night of lost sleep because the car alarm was going off down the street. These events preceded conscious decisions to act. But what does it mean to say that this murderer committed the crime of his own free will? If this statement means anything it must mean that he could have behaved differently. He could have resisted the impulse to commit the murder, or he could have declined to feel the impulse altogether. And not based on some random influences over which he had no conscious control, but because he was the conscious author of his thoughts and actions.

The problem is no one has been able to describe a way in which mental and physical events could arise, that would make sense of this claim of freedom.

Now, when we assume that violent criminals have such freedom, of course, we reflexively blame them for their actions. But when we look at this wider net of causality, the basis for placing blame seems to evaporate. The moment we catch sight of the stream of causes, that reach back into childhood and beyond, the sense of his culpability begins to disappear. And to say that would have done otherwise, or could have done otherwise, had he chosen to, is simply to say he would have lived in a different universe, had he been in a different universe.

As sickening as I might find such a person's behavior, I have to admit that, if I were to trade places with him, atom for atom, I would be him. There's no extra part of me that could resist the impulse to victimize innocent people. And even if you believe that every one of us harbors an immortal soul, this problem of responsibility remains. And I cannot take credit for the fact that I don't have the soul of the psychopath. So, if I'd truly been in this person's shoes, if I had genes and life experience, an identical brain or an identical soul, in an identical state I would have behaved as he did, and for the same reasons.

Nobody picks their parents, or the society into which they were born, nobody picks the life influences that shape the development of their nervous system.

You are no more responsible for the microstructure of your brain at this moment than you are for your height.

The role of luck in our lives appears decisive. One has to be very unlucky to have the mind and brain of the psychopath. But the significance of luck is very difficult to admit because it seems to destabilize our sense of morality. And yet, in specific circumstances, it's very easy to admit.

If you imagine this murderer was discovered to have a brain tumor in the appropriate spot in his brain that would explain his violent impulses, well, then that is exculpatory, then he's just a victim; we view him as a victim of biology. And our moral intuitions shift automatically.

But I would argue that a brain tumor is just a special case of physical events giving rise to thoughts and actions. And if we fully understood the neurophysiology of any murderer's brain, that would be as exculpatory as finding a tumor in it. If we could see how the wrong genes were being relentlessly transcribed, if we could see how this person's genome and entanglement with other people and ideas and events throughout life had sculpted the microstructure of his brain, so that it was guaranteed to produce violent states of mind and violent behavior, the basis for placing blame, in the sense that we usually do, would disappear.

Of course, this is the problem that scientists and philosophers are well aware of, and many people think they have arguments that allow us to keep free will in the play, even in light of these facts.

3. You didn't pick that thought

I want to suggest to you that the problem of free will is deeper than this. It's deeper than the problem of cause and effect.

Most people think that the problem is that we have the subjective experience of free will, but it can't be mapped onto physical reality. I'm about to argue that free will doesn't even correspond to any subjective fact about us. And if you pay attention to your experience closely, you can notice this.

If you pay attention, you can see that you no more decide the next thing you think than the next thing I write. Thoughts simply appear in conscience. Very much like my words. What are you going to think next? What am I going to write next? I could suddenly start writing about the pleasures of sailing. Where did that come from? From your point of view, it came out of nowhere.

But the same thing is happening in the privacy of your mind. You've all made an effort to be here, and to stay this extra hour, presumably to hear what I have to say about free will. But there's also a voice in your head that's just saying things. Haven't you noticed? And many of these things have nothing to do with what I'm writing about. You're probably struggling to follow my train of thought, but there's competition. You suddenly start thinking things like: ”I should probably stop drinking soda.” or "I should probably do the laundry." or "Can giraffes smell their own fart up that high?"

Thoughts just emerge in consciousness. We are not authoring them. That would require us to think them before we think them.

If you can't control your next thought and you don't know what's it gonna be until it arises, where is your freedom of will? Now, at this moment, many of you are thinking: ”What the hell is he talking about?” Here's what I'm talking about: you didn't pick that thought, either.

4. Dissonance

Of course, in a sense, we do think our thoughts before we think them. Or, at least, our brain does. And much of this thinking is something we never hear about. We're conscious of only a tiny fraction of the information that our brains process in each moment.

We continually notice changes in our experience, in thoughts and moods and sensations and behavior, but we are utterly unaware of the neuropsychological events that produce those changes.

Consider the sensation of touching your finger to your nose. Feel free to try this. The contact appears simultaneous? But we know at the level of the brain that it can't be. We know that the input from the finger reaches a sensory cortex after the input from the nose. And this is true, no matter how short your arms, or long nose.

Our brains correct for this time discrepancy by clearly buffering the inputs in memory, and then delivering the apparent simultaneity to consciousness. So, our experience of the present moment is, in a very real sense, a memory of the present moment. And even the simplest conscious sensations are built upon the unconscious mechanism and unconscious processing, of which we are fundamentally unaware.

Needless to say, this unconscious machinery also governs what we think and feel and do and intend, as well, and not just perception. And that is where notions of free will and moral responsibility begin to get squeezed.

Many people have now demonstrated in a lab that a person's choices, behavioral choices, voluntary choices, can be detected some moments, sometimes seconds before they are consciously aware of having made the choice. In each of these experiments, people were given a very simple task to push a left button as opposed to a right button or to move their left hand, versus to the right hand, and they just have to watch a clock and decide when they were first consciously aware of committing to the left or the right.

Several experiments over the years have shown that people can go back and forth as much as they want, they become consciously aware of when they've committed, they make their choice, and yet, the experimenters, by scanning the brain's one modality or another, know some half a second, a second, depending on what the decision is, even several seconds, before they do, what they're gonna do.

So, as a result of this work, it is scientifically uncontroversial to say that, some moments before you are aware of what you are going to do, in making a simple voluntary action, at a time at which you appear to be subjectively free to do whatever you want, your brain has already determined what it is you will do. And then you become gradually aware of this decision, while you still think you're in the process of making it.

Needless to say, this is very difficult to reconcile with a conventional notion of free will, because this timing discrepancy demonstrates it would be possible for someone to know what you are going to do before you do and while you still think you're free to make up your mind.

5. Feel free to choose

The truth is, even if there were no time lag, even if conscious attention were truly simultaneous with its neurophysiological underpinnings, there would still be no room for free will. Because you still wouldn't know why it is you do what you do. And again, this is the fact you can notice about yourself directly.

Think of a city, anywhere in the world. Of course, I could have primed you, I could have artfully placed cues in my article, that would make you more likely to think of London, for instance. So, just to be on the safe side, don't pick London. But pick a city, any city, and just pay attention to what this conscious process is like.

The first thing to notice about this is: this is as free a decision as you are ever going to make in your life. You have all the cities in the world to choose from and I'm just asking you to pick one. Several cities have probably occurred to you, and just focus on one.

Now, I'm sorry to say that you all picked the wrong city. Don't ask me how I know this, but I do. I just want you to do this again, just so you can see what the process is like. Pick another city; can't be the first. And notice what that experience is like.

Did you see any evidence for free will? We better be able to find it here, I mean, if it's not here, it's not anywhere. So let's look for it.

First, let's set aside all those cities whose names you don't know, and, therefore, could not have picked. Because you couldn't have picked one of those if your life depended on it. There's no freedom in that. And then, there are many other cities whose names are quite well-known to you, but which simply didn't occur to you to pick. For instance, perhaps, Marrakesh didn't occur to you. You know Marrakesh is a city, but, for whatever reason, your Marrakesh circuits were not engaged.

As a matter of neurophysiology, Marrakesh was not in the cards. So, I want you to think about this: were you free to choose that which did not occur to you to choose? Based on the state of your brain a few moments ago, Marrakesh was not coming. Where is the freedom in that?

You probably thought of several cities, and then, let's say you thought of Paris and London and New York. And then you thought: I love Paris; let me go with Paris. And the last-minute you thought: no, no, no; London, I'll go with London. Now, this is the sort of decision that motivates the idea of free will. You've got two, or more, choices and you're picking between them and it's just you and your thoughts. There's no coercion from the external world. You are doing it.

But when you look closely, I think you'll find that you're in no position to know why you picked what you picked. In this case, why did you choose London over Paris? I mean, you might have some additional story to tell about it; you might think: well, I had fish&chips last night, and so I remembered it and I picked London.

Of course, we know, from psychology, that these kinds of stories are rather often false. Whenever people are manipulated in a lab, they always have some tale to tell about why they did what they did, and it never bears any relationship to the actual variables that caused them to behave that way. So, you can cause people to like one person more than another, or to cooperate more in economic games, by simply giving them a hot beverage to hold, as opposed to a cold one. And they never tell you that the reason they were biased as they were was because of the temperature of the cup in their hands. This psychology is replete with evidence that we are very poor judges of why it is we, retrospectively, why it is we do what we do.

But, even if you are right in this instance, even if your choice of London over Paris is based on your memory of having fish&chips last night, okay, you still can't explain why you remembered having fish&chips last night. Or, why the memory had the effect that it did. Why didn't it have the opposite effect? Why didn't you think: ”Well, I just had fish&chips last night, so let's go with something new; let's go with croissants”?

The thing to notice about this is that you as conscious witnesses of your inner life are not making these decisions.

You can only witness your decisions.

You no more picked the city you settled on, in subjective terms, than you would have if I picked it for you. There was this first moment when I said - pick a city; and there's this hiatus where nothing has occurred to you, and then the names of cities start to get promoted into consciousness, for reasons you can't inspect. And you can't choose the cities you think of before you think of it.

So, if you pay attention to how thoughts and intentions arise, and how decisions get made moment-to-moment, I think that you can see that there's no evidence for free will. That experience of our life is compatible with the truth of determinism.

6. Soul

Now, it's also important to recognize that the case I'm building against free will does not depend upon philosophical materialism, the idea that reality is at the bottom physical. There are very good reasons to believe that the mind is at the bottom physically.

Certainly, most mental events are the product of physical events. The brain is a physical system, entirely beholden to the laws of nature. But even if we have souls, even if the human mind were made out of soul-stuff, that we don't understand, nothing about my argument would change. The unconscious operations of a soul grant you no more freedom than the unconscious neurophysiology of your brain does.

If you don't know what your soul is going to do next, you're not in control of your soul. And this is obviously true where people behave in ways that they wish they wouldn't. So you think of all the committed Muslims, whose souls just happen to be gay.

That's obviously not an argument for free will. But it's also true when you do exactly what you wish you had done, in retrospect. The soul that allows you to stay on your diet is just as mysterious as the soul that tempts you to binge eat a whole can of Pringles.

So I think it's safe to say that no one has ever argued for free will because it holds great promise as an abstract idea. The endurance of free will as a philosophical problem in need of a solution is born of the fact that most of us feel that we freely author our thoughts intentions and actions. However difficult it may be to make sense of this in logical or scientific terms. The idea of free will emerges from a felt experience.

7. Compatibilism

At the moment, the only philosophically respectful way to defend free will, in light of what we know to be true scientifically, is to endorse the view that's usually termed ”compatibilism” in philosophical circles and to argue in essence that free will is compatible with the truth of compatibilism.

Compatibilists generally claim that the person is free as long as he's free from any outer, or inner compulsion that would prevent him from acting on his actual desires and intentions. So, if a man wants to commit a murder, and he does so because of this desire, well, then that's all the free will you need.

But, from both a moral and a scientific point of view, this just misses the point.

Where is the freedom in doing what one wants, when one's wants are the product of prior causes which one cannot inspect, and, therefore, could not choose, and one had absolutely no hand in creating?

From my point of view, compatibilism is essentially the dictum: a puppet is free, as long as it loves its strings.

Indeed, compatibilists push back here, and they say that even if our thoughts are the product of unconscious causes, they are still our thoughts and actions; anything that your brain does and decides is something that you have done or decided.

On this account, the fact that we can't always be aware of the causes of our conscious thoughts and actions does not negate free will, because the unconscious neurophysiology of your brain is just as much you, as your conscious thought are. But this seems to me to be just a bait and switch.

This trades a psychological fact, the subjective experience, of being the conscious agent, for a conceptual understanding of ourselves as persons. The psychological truth is that people feel identical to, and in control of, a certain channel of information in their minds - and they are mistaken about this.

The compatibilist comes in and says: ”Actually, you're much more than that. You are the totality of the conscious processing in your brain, as well.” This is like you're saying you're made of stardust, which of course you are, but you don't feel like stardust. And the knowledge that you're stardust is not driving your moral intuitions or determining our system of criminal justice.

You can't honestly take credit for your unconscious mental life. In fact, you're making countless decisions, with organs other than your brain, at this moment. Are you making red blood cells, at this moment? Hopefully, your body is. But if it decided to stop, you wouldn't be responsible for that change. You would be a victim of that change.

There are more bacteria in your body than in human cells. Ninety percent of the cells in your body are microbes like E. coli. Ninety-nine percent of the functional genes in your body belong to them. You don't feel identical to these creatures. And many of them perform necessary functions. They are you in some larger sense because your well-being depends on them.

So to say that you are responsible for everything that goes on inside your skin because it's all you, is to make a claim that bears absolutely no relationship to the actual experience that has made free will a problem for philosophy.

8. Don't just sit back

The truth is, we feel or presume authorship over our thoughts and actions that is illusory. If I could detect all of your conscious thoughts and intentions, and subsequent behaviors with a brain scanner, some moments before you are aware of them, you would be rightly shocked. Because it would undermine your sense that you are the prime mover of your inner life.

How can we be free as conscious agents, if everything we consciously intend was caused by events in our brain that we did not intend, and over which we had no control? We can't.

So what does this mean?

Well, first, here is what it doesn't mean. The fact that our choices depend upon prior causes does not mean that choice doesn't matter. This is one point of confusion that people have. They confuse determinism with fatalism, and they think: ”Well if it's all determined, why should I do anything? Why just not sit back and see what happens?”

To sit back and see what happens is also a choice that has its consequences. And it's very difficult to do. You just try staying in your bed all day, waiting for something to happen, you'll very quickly feel the urge to get up and do something, and resisting this impulse will take more effort than going with it. It becomes harder to do nothing than to do something, very quickly. So, you can't step out of this stream of choices and efforts.

And, clearly, choice and effort are part of the causal chain of life. So effort, discipline, and willpower are causal states of the brain that beget their own behaviors.

And behaviors lead to outcomes in the world. So the choices we make in life are as important as most people think. But the next choice you make will come out of a wilderness of prior causes, that you can't see, and did not bring into being. So, while it's true to say that a person would have behaved differently in the past had he chosen to, this doesn't give the kind of free will that most people seem to want.

9. Self is a process

From the perspective of your conscious mind, you are no more responsible for the next thing you think, and, therefore, do, than you are for the fact that you were born into this world. You have not built your mind. And in the moments when you seem to build it, when you make an effort to learn a new skill or to improve yourself, the only tools at your disposal are those which you have inherited from moments passed.

Now, I'm not even slightly suggesting that we all just blame our parents for everything that has gone wrong in our lives and do nothing. It is possible to change. In fact, from my point of view, viewing oneself as an open system, open to myriad influences, makes change seem even more possible.

You are, by no means, condemned to be who you were yesterday. In fact, you can't be that person.

The self is a process. This is what makes growth possible. The self is not a stable entity.

But, subjectively speaking, the unfolding of our lives is a fundamentally mysterious process. None of us know how it was we came to be in this moment. And we don't know what's gonna happen next, really, on any level. We don't know what we're going to think and feel next.

Now, this might sound scary to some, but, I think recognizing this can be quite liberating. The present moment is a mystery. No matter how much you know about the world, the present moment is still a mystery. You are simply discovering what your life is, in every moment. I mean, you may think you're doing something, but you, again, don't know what you're going to do next.

Our choices matter, and there are clearly paths toward making wiser ones. There's no telling how much a conversation with a smart person could change you, but we can't choose what we choose in life. And when it seems that we choose what we choose, perhaps when going back and forth between two options, we don't choose to choose what we choose.

There is a regress here that ends in darkness. We have to take a first step, or a last one, for reasons that are subjectively mysterious. And, therefore, to think the thought: ”I could have done otherwise”, is really just to think: ”I could have done otherwise”, after doing whatever I, in fact, did.

And what I'm gonna do next remains a mystery that is fully determined by a prior state of the universe and the laws of nature, including whatever contributions come from chance, quantum mechanical, or otherwise and to declare my freedom in this context is really just another way of saying: ”You know, I'm not sure why I did that, but I don't mind doing it.”

I don't mean to belabor this point, but in my experience, people have a really hard time with this. Just think about the context in which your next decision will occur. A decision of any size: to get married or not, to go to graduate school or not, to wear the red shirt or the blue shirt, anything that you could decide. You didn't pick your parents, you didn't pick your genes, you didn't pick the interactions or the effect they had upon you, of every event and conversation, and exposures to ideas you had in life. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want, even now, but where do your wants come from?

10. Morality

Let's return to this issue I raised at the beginning of the article, because the great worry is that any honest discussion of the underlying causes of human behavior, seems to leave no room for moral responsibility. In fact, the Supreme Cort of the US states that free will is incompatible with, or, rather inconsistent, with underlying precepts of the criminal justice system, and that it's a universal and persistent foundation for our system of law.

So this idea of free will is actually doing work in our world, this is not just an academic discussion. The problem is that if we begin to view people as neuronal weather patterns, it becomes very difficult to make sense, of notions of right and wrong, and good and evil.

Happily, I think we can maintain a very strong sense of morality and an effective criminal justice system, without lying to ourselves about the causes of human behavior.

What must we condemn in people, both morally and legally? It's really the conscious intention to harm. Now, why is the conscious intention to victimize another person so blameworthy?

Well, consciousness is the place where most of your mind seems to be active, where the global properties of your mind get invoked. Consciousness is where your beliefs and desires and prejudices and goals get together. Our conscious, premeditated behavior says the most about us and about what we're likely to do in the future.

If you decide to kill your neighbor, after weeks of library research and debate with your friends, well, then killing your neighbor really says a lot about you. But, the point is not that you are the sole independent cause of your actions. After all, you didn't make yourself. The point is, that for whatever reason, you have the mind of a murderer.

You're not ultimately responsible for having this mind. When we look at the details, we see that you're not even partially responsible for it. In the same way that the grizzly bear isn't responsible for the fact, that is a grizzly bear. But a bear really is a bear, and really will eat you. If you see one in the parking lot, it's worth worrying about. But you can worry about it without ever attributing free will to it, and you can take defensive action, without doing so.

Now, certain criminals are clearly more dangerous than bears, and we have to lock them up for a very long time, in many cases forever, until the end of their lives, to keep them from harming us. And the moral justification for this is entirely straightforward: everyone is better off that way.

But, retribution on this view doesn't make much sense. We don't seek retribution against bears. The idea of punishing people because they deserve it doesn't make much sense. But, I would argue that dispensing with the illusion of free will allows us to focus on the things that actually matter:

• mitigating harm
• assessing risk
• deterring crime

All of the variables that govern the well-being of people.

I'm not arguing that everyone is not guilty because of insanity and that we just need to empty the jails. And there is clearly a difference between voluntary and involuntary action, and there's a difference between moral responsibilities that we can demand of an adult and those of a child. But you don't need free will to make sense of these differences. These are differences that relate to the global property of individual minds, and of what's reasonable to expect of those minds in the future.

Once we recognize that even the most terrifying people are in some basic sense unlucky to be who they are, the logic of hating them, as opposed to merely fearing them, goes away.

And once again, this is true even if you believe that everyone harbors an immortal soul. Anyone born with a soul of a psychopath is profoundly unlucky. One consequence of viewing the world this way is that it reduces hatred, which I think, all things being equal, is a very good thing. It also increases empathy and compassion.

11. Compassion

In my view, this is a doorway into feeling compassion for even the worst people who have ever lived. Ironically, if you want to be like Jesus, and love your enemies, or at least, not hate them, one way of doing it is to take a larger picture of scientific causality into account.

I'm not arguing that it would be easy to adopt this perspective if you, or someone you love, have been the victim of a violent crime. It's perfectly natural to hate the person who has victimized you. But I'm talking about how we need to view the world in our more dispassionate moments. And this is the place from which we make public policy and do science.

To see how fully our intuitions would need to shift, just imagine what would happen if we had a cure for human evil. If we fully understood psychopathy, its neural underpinnings, we could cure it.

Just imagine, for argument's sake, that this cure is trivially easy to administer, it's safe, it's painless, you can just drop it into the food supply, like vitamin C. So, now evil is just a nutritional deficiency. Now imagine this cure for evil exists. And imagine a moral logic of withholding this cure from a murderer as part of his punishment. That makes no sense. Imagine withholding surgery from a murderer with a brain tumor, when we know that the brain tumor was actually the cause of his violent behavior. As a punishment, withholding surgery. That makes no sense.

So, I would argue that this reveals that our urge for retribution is an artifact of our not seeing the causes, the true causes, of human behavior.

12. Religion

This leads me, in conclusion, to the subject of religion. Because, of course, God's justice is purely a matter of retribution.

Religions, like Christianity and Islam, entirely depend on this notion of free will. It's not an accident. This is the only answer they have given to the problem of evil. As in, you know, why is it a good God would allow Nazis to kill millions of innocent people. God and all his omnipotent goodness, couldn't intervene, because people have free will.

This is the usual line.

This doesn't cover all the other mayhem born of tsunamis and epidemics... but this is the best religious people have to justify, the otherwise psychopathic, morality of God. And free will is also what makes sense of this idea of sin. Religions tell us that sin is what justifies eternal punishment in the next life.

To my mind, this is the mother of all culture war issues. This is where science really pulls the keystone out of religion.

Just recall the general picture. We've all inherited original sin because Adam and Eve misused their free will. And then, for eons, God gave us no guidance, whatsoever, and then he wrote a few uneven books, that were filled with rumors of ancient miracles, and then he holds us responsible for the slightest doubt we have about his existence based on these books. Though he has stacked the deck of cards against us, by giving us a faculty of reason and, strangely, an ability to write better books, than the ones he's supposedly written.

We have deemed the ultimate source of our turning away from him. By our own free will, we are the cause of our doubts. I am self-sufficient cause of my lack of faith.

Now, again, this is not only untrue, it seems impossible to describe a universe in which it could be true. Beliefs are the product of prior causes. Either determined or random. And there's no way of turning those dials that get you standing on the hot spot, where you are the ultimate cause of your beliefs.

Without free will, the worldview of monotheistic religion, this idea of God's eternal justice, stands revealed for what it is: a completely sadistic and insane view of the world.

Ironically, one of the fears religious people have, that you hear about over and over, is that a complete understanding of us, in scientific terms, would dehumanize us. I rather think it humanizes us. What could be more dehumanizing than the view that most of the people, most of the time, by virtue of the fact that they were born in the wrong place, to the wrong parents, given the wrong theology, exposed to the wrong intellectual influences, were, nevertheless, crucially responsible for the fact that they didn't believe in God, or believed in the wrong God, and, therefore, as a result, deserve to be burned in a fire for eternity?

13. Conclusion

In conclusion, I just want to bring this back to our direct experience of consciousness at this moment. It's generally argued that free will presents us with this compelling mystery. On the one hand, we know we've got it, on the other, we can't seem to map it onto the world.

I think this is a sign of our confusion. The problem is not merely that free will doesn't make sense objectively. It doesn't make sense subjectively, either.

Not only are we not as free as we think we are; we don't feel as free as we think we do.

Thoughts and intentions simply arise in the mind. What else could they do? Now, some of you might think this sounds very depressing. This seems to take something away from us.

It does, it takes away an egocentric view of life. But I think this can be tremendously liberating. We are not truly separate. We are linked to each other, our past, and our history.

We are part of a system and, therefore, what we do, matters.

You can't take credit for your talents, but it matters that you use them. You can't be blamed for your weaknesses, but it matters that you correct them. So, pride and shame don't make a lot of sense in the final analysis. But, they weren't much fun, anyway. These are isolating emotions.

What does make sense is a commitment to the well-being and to improving your life and the lives of others. Love and compassion make sense.

14. TL;DR

Free will is an incoherent idea with our material universe, but realizing the illusion of it opens up new possibilities to be a better and happier person.