50+ Free Will Questions to Examine the Nature of Your Reality

While writing another post about all the problems with free will, I realized I was compiling a bunch of free will questions.

This post is your one-stop shop for a multitude of deep questions to ask yourself if you’re ready to investigate the nature of your reality.

Let’s dive headfirst into this free will rabbit hole…

“In order to wake up, the one thing you need the most is not energy, or strength, or youthfulness, or even great intelligence. The one thing you need most of all is the readiness to learn something new. The chances that you will wake up are in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away. How much are you ready to take?” — Anthony de Mello

50+ Free Will Questions to Examine the Nature of Your Reality

Experience Questions:

1. “How can we be ‘free’ as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can’t. To say that ‘my brain’ decided to think or act in a particular way, whether consciously or not, and that this is the basis for my freedom, is to ignore the very source of our belief in free will: the feeling of conscious agency. People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about.” — Sam Harris

2. “Someone can understand how free will and the conventional notion of self don’t make any sense in terms of ongoing neurophysiological changes in the brain. But even most people who understand and accept those arguments, don’t really have the courage of their convictions because they still feel like selves that enjoy free will. Most people don’t have the introspective tools to discover that their experience is actually convergent with what makes the most sense scientifically and philosophically. So they’re stuck trying to grapple with a pseudo-problem: how can we make sense of our experience of an unchanging self that has free will when we know conceptually that these things don’t make any sense? That’s where many people are stuck.” — Sam Harris

3. “If you pay attention to how your thoughts arise and how decisions actually get made, you’ll see that there’s no evidence for free will. Not only no evidence, it’s impossible to make sense of the claim that free will might exist … What in your experience could it refer to? Everything is simply springing out of the darkness.” — Sam Harris

4. “Consider what it would take to actually have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions, and you would need to have complete control over those factors. But there is a paradox here that vitiates the very notion of freedom—for what would influence the influences? More influences?” — Sam Harris

5. “I, as the conscious witness of my experience, no more initiate events in my prefrontal cortex than I cause my heart to beat. There will always be some delay between the first neurophysiological events that kindle my next conscious thought and the thought itself. And even if there weren’t—even if all mental states were truly coincident with their underlying brain states—I cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental state be? I do not know—it just happens. Where is the freedom in that?” — Sam Harris

6. “If we pay attention, we will realize that every moment around us there is a world that we do not create … and there are trillions of cells in your body that are doing what they’re supposed to do, all of nature, everything. And, you wake up and you realize, ‘I’m not doing any of this. I didn’t make my body, I didn’t make my mind think, I don’t make my heart beat, I don’t make my breath breathe—yet I have this notion that I have to make things happen. Yet, all throughout the universe things are happening everywhere, and I’m not doing them. So, why exactly am I the one that’s in charge of what’s unfolding in front of me?’ And, what you realize at some point, is that you’re not … That the moment in front of you that’s unfolding is no different than all the zillions of other moments that aren’t in front of you that are unfolding in accordance to the laws of nature, the laws of creation.” — Michael Singer

Thought Questions:

7. “Here’s the question: If you can’t control your next thought, if you can’t decide what it will be before it arises, and if you can’t prevent it from arising, where is your freedom of will?” — Sam Harris

8. “What are you going to think next? You don’t know. Yet your thoughts determine what you want and intend and do next. Your thoughts determine your goals and whether or not you believe you’ve met them … Thoughts determine almost everything that makes you human.” — Sam Harris

9. “You do not know what you will think next. In what sense is that a basis for free will? You do not know what you will think. You do not know what it will take to make it behaviorally active. You do not know what is happening when you are second guessing the thing you just thought and that becomes behaviorally active.” — Sam Harris

Choice Questions:

10. “Were you free to choose that which did not occur to you to choose?” — Sam Harris

11. “Am I free to do that which does not occur to me to do? Of course not.” — Sam Harris

12. “Am I free to change my mind? Of course not. It can only change me.” — Sam Harris

13. “Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn’t choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime—by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this?” — Sam Harris

14. “I generally start each day with a cup of coffee or tea—sometimes two. This morning, it was coffee (two). Why not tea? I am in no position to know. I wanted coffee more than I wanted tea today, and I was free to have what I wanted. Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The choice was made for me by events in my brain that I, as the conscious witness of my thoughts and actions, could not inspect or influence. Could I have ‘changed my mind’ and switched to tea before the coffee drinker in me could get his bearings? Yes, but this impulse would also have been the product of unconscious causes. Why didn’t it arise this morning? Why might it arise in the future? I cannot know.” — Sam Harris

15. “Why did I order beer instead of wine? Because I prefer beer. Why do I prefer it? I don’t know, but I generally have no need to ask. Knowing that I like beer more than wine is all I need to know to function in a restaurant. Whatever the reason, I prefer one taste to the other. Is there freedom in this? None whatsoever. Would I magically reclaim my freedom if I decided to spite my preference and order wine instead? No, because the roots of this intention would be as obscure as the preference itself.” — Sam Harris

16. “If I try to make vivid this experience of: OK, I’m finally going to experience free will. I’m going to notice my free will. It’s got to be here. Everyone’s talking about it. Where is it? I’m going to pay attention to it. I’m going to look for it. I’m going to create a circumstance where it has to be most robust: I’m not rushed to make this decision. It’s not a reflex. I’m not under pressure. I’m going to take as long as I want. It’s not trivial. Let’s make a big decision like what should my next podcast be on? Who do I invite on the next podcast? What is it like to make that decision? When I pay attention, there is no evidence of free will anywhere in sight. It feels profoundly mysterious to be going back between two people—is it going to be person ‘A’ or person ‘B’? I’ve got all my reasons for ‘A’ and all my reasons why not, and all my reasons for ‘B’. And, there’s some math going on there that I’m not even privy to where certain concerns are trumping others. And, at a certain point I just decide. The feeling of what it’s like to make that decision is totally without a real sense of agency because something simply emerges. It’s literally as tenuous as what’s the next sound I’m going to hear, or what’s the next thought that’s going to appear? Something just appears. And, if something appears to cancel that something, like if I say I’m going to invite her and then I’m about to send the email and I think, ‘Oh, no, I can’t do that there was a thing in that article I read and I got to talk to this guy.’ That pivot at the last second always just comes out of the darkness, it’s always mysterious.” — Sam Harris

Desire Questions:

17. “There is no way I can influence my desires—for what tools of influence would I use? Other desires? To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is simply to say that I would have lived in a different universe had I been in a different universe.” — Sam Harris

18. “Where is the freedom in wanting what one wants without any internal conflict whatsoever? Where is the freedom in being perfectly satisfied with your thoughts, intentions, and subsequent actions when they are the product of prior events that you had absolutely no hand in creating?” — Sam Harris

19. “People have many competing desires—and some desires appear pathological (that is, undesirable) even to those in their grip. Most people are ruled by many mutually incompatible goals and aspirations: You want to finish your work, but you are also inclined to stop working so that you can play with your kids. You aspire to quit smoking, but you also crave another cigarette. You are struggling to save money, but you are also tempted to buy a new computer. Where is the freedom when one of these opposing desires inexplicably triumphs over its rival?” — Sam Harris

Biology Questions:

20. “Every bit of behavior has multiple levels of causality … What was going on that caused this behavior? This is a multitude of questions.” — Robert Sapolsky

21. “What was going on in your brain one second before? … This brings us into the realm of a brain region called the amygdala. The amygdala, which is central to violence, central to fear, initiates volleys of cascades … What was the level of activity in your amygdala one second before?” — Robert Sapolsky

22. “What was going on in the environment seconds to minutes before that impacted the amygdala? The sights, the sounds … Furthermore, if you’re in pain, if you’re hungry, if you’re exhausted, your frontal cortex is not going to work as well, part of the brain whose job it is to get to the amygdala in time.” — Robert Sapolsky

23. “Weeks to months before, where’s the relevance there? This is the realm of neural plasticity, the fact that your brain can change in response to experience, and if your previous months have been filled with stress and trauma, your amygdala will have enlarged. The neurons will have become more excitable, your frontal cortex would have atrophied, all relevant to what happens in that one second.” — Robert Sapolsky

24. “Genes don’t regulate themselves. What regulates genes? Environment does. Environment can be very local … Genes don’t really know what they’re doing. Genes are being regulated by environment, and the critical thing is, different environments regulate the same genes in different ways.” — Robert Sapolsky

25. “Now, remarkably enough, we’ve got to push even further back now, back centuries. What were your ancestors up to? And if, for example, they were nomadic pastoralists, people living in deserts or grasslands with their herds of camels, cows, goats, odds are they would have invented what’s called a culture of honor filled with warrior classes, retributive violence, clan vendettas, and amazingly, centuries later, that would still be influencing the values with which you were raised.” — Robert Sapolsky

26. “What were your ancestors doing? What sort of cultures were they inventing? Because that’s going to influence how you are going to turn into that adult that you are. What sort of cultures did they invent turns out to be very sensitive to what sort of ecosystems they lived in … Ecosystems shape cultures shape brains shape behaviors and some of these differences are manifest within minutes of birth. In other words, brains and bodies and behaviors and cultures and genes all co-evolve.” — Robert Sapolsky

27. “Basically, what we’re seeing here is, if you want to understand a behavior—whether it’s an appalling one, a wondrous one, or confusedly in between—you’ve got take into account what happened a second before to a million years before and everything in between. So, what can we conclude at this point? Officially, it’s complicated.” — Robert Sapolsky

28. “What do we do with the fact that we’re just we’re one extremely complex, nonlinear, chaotic, unpredictable version of an ant in terms of just biological stuff making us up? At the end of the day, the only thing that comes through to me as having any meaning is, amid all of that, pain is painful. So, it’s a good thing to try to reduce the amounts of it in the world, in people around you, and loved ones. That single fact just seems to transcend whatever you might do to turn all of our feelings and longings and everything into their biological substrates. Pain is painful, and even if we’re all just biological organisms, that’s a pretty dominating piece of biology. So, if we need a purpose out of all of this, I guess it’s just simply to try to reduce the amounts of it.” — Robert Sapolsky

Identity Questions:

29. “So, at what point do we become responsible for who we are? The answer is that we don’t. By the time we’re old enough to contemplate our own identity, we already have one. And, by then, the way that we see the world is framed by our prior conditioning. And, that conditioning informs every choice that we make—even the choice to rebel against that conditioning. In short, long before we can shape the world, the world has firmly shaped us.” — Raoul Martinez

30. “There is another benefit to exposing the myth of responsibility: doing so highlights the fundamental importance of questioning. If we are not responsible for the way we are, if we are not the authors of our own identity, then who or what is? Awareness of just how susceptible we are to forces beyond our control gives us a compelling reason to investigate those forces and, if necessary, transcend their influence. This is important. If democracy is to have any meaning, and the dangers of centralised control are to be averted, it is essential to have a questioning citizenry.” — Raoul Martinez

31. “Who’s living in you? It’s pretty horrifying when you come to know that. You think you are free, but there probably isn’t a gesture, a thought, an emotion, an attitude, a belief in you that isn’t coming from someone else. Isn’t that horrible? And you don’t know it. Talk about a mechanical life that was stamped into you.” — Anthony de Mello

32. “There have been some interesting studies in brainwashing. It has been shown that you’re brainwashed when you take on or ‘introject’ an idea that isn’t yours, that is someone else’s. And the funny thing is that you’ll be ready to die for this idea. Isn’t that strange? The first test of whether you’ve been brainwashed and have introjected convictions and beliefs occurs the moment they’re attacked. You feel stunned, you react emotionally. That’s a pretty good sign—not infallible, but a pretty good sign—that we’re dealing with brainwashing. You’re ready to die for an idea that never was yours.” — Anthony de Mello

33. “From every pore or living cell of our bodies and from all our senses we are getting feedback from reality. But we are filtering things out constantly. Who’s doing the filtering? Our conditioning? Our culture? Our programming? The way we were taught to see things and to experience them? Even our language can be a filter. There is so much filtering going on that sometimes you won’t see things that are there.” — Anthony de Mello

34. “‘I am He who is; you are she who is not.’ Have you ever experienced your is-not-ness? In the East we have an image for this. It is the image of the dancer and the dance. God is viewed as the dancer and creation as God’s dance. It isn’t as if God is the big dancer and you are the little dancer. Oh no. You’re not a dancer at all. You are being danced! Did you ever experience that?” — Anthony de Mello

35. “Do I do anything to change myself? I’ve got a big surprise for you, lots of good news! You don’t have to do anything. The more you do, the worse it gets. All you have to do is understand.” — Anthony de Mello

36. “What a liberation to realize that the ‘voice in my head’ is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that. The awareness that is prior to thought, the space in which the thought – or the emotion or sense perception – happens.” — Eckhart Tolle

37. “We could even say that the notion ‘my life’ is the original delusion of separateness, the source of ego. If I and life are two, if I am separate from life, then I am separate form all things, all beings, all people. But how could I be separate from life? What ‘I’ could be there apart from life, apart from Being? It is utterly impossible. So there is no such thing as ‘my life,’ and I don’t have a life. I am life. I and life are one. It cannot be otherwise. So how could I lose my life? How can I lose something that I don’t have in the first place? How can I lose something that I Am? It is impossible.” — Eckhart Tolle

38. “If your beliefs aren’t your own, whose are they? Who are you? You must re-examine all of your assumptions, and only a small fraction of them are readily visible. Unchallenged beliefs can define you and determine the course of your life.” — Jed McKenna

39. “That’s what all this spirituality stuff is about; what’s ultimately true? Once you’ve arrived at the conclusion that reality as we think of it isn’t reality at all, then the question becomes, what is? What’s beyond the dualistic illusion? What’s beyond context?” — Jed McKenna

40. “What do we know for sure? That’s the real question … It’s all about figuring out exactly what we know for certain as opposed to everything else.” — Jed McKenna

41. “Whose will is it? So long as there is the sense of doership, there is the sense of enjoyment and of individual will. But if this sense is lost through the practice of vichara, the divine will will act and guide the course of events. Fate is overcome by jnana, Self-knowledge, which is beyond will and fate.” — Ramana Maharshi

42. “Find out to whom free will or destiny matters. Find out where they come from, and abide in their source. If you do this, both of them are transcended. That is the only purpose of discussing these questions. To whom do these questions arise? Find out and be at peace.” — Ramana Maharshi

Implication Questions:

43. “The implications are far-reaching: if we don’t create ourselves, how can we be responsible for the way we are? And if we aren’t responsible for the way we are, how can we be responsible for what we do? The answer is: we cannot.” — Raoul Martinez

44. “Think of a new-born baby endowed with a genetic inheritance it did not ask for and exposed to a world it played no part in creating. At what point does it become a truly responsible being, worthy of credit and blame?” — Raoul Martinez

45. “How can we make sense of our lives, and hold people accountable for their choices, given the unconscious origins of our conscious minds?” — Sam Harris

46. “How do you explain your capacity for effort? How do you explain when you’re lazy? How do you explain when you’re lazy but then you suddenly get inspired and make great effort? You can’t. The ‘you’ that experiences sudden inspiration or doubling of effort or a failure of nerve, the ‘you’ that rises to the occasion or chokes isn’t in the driver’s seat.” — Sam Harris

47. “Even if you have struggled to make the most of what nature gave you, you must still admit that your ability and inclination to struggle is part of your inheritance. How much credit does a person deserve for not being lazy? None at all. Laziness, like diligence, is a neurological condition.” — Sam Harris

48. “What do we do with our good traits? Because if we are purely biological organisms when it comes to our worst behaviors, it’s the same thing with our best ones. My gut feeling is if it’s going to be hard to convince people to think in a purely biological way when you’re looking at murderers, it’s going to be so much harder to think that way when it comes to considering our own sort of best behaviors.” — Robert Sapolsky

49. “What do you do with a whole notion that crime and evil and guilt and punishment and criminal justice and none of those concepts make any sense whatsoever if you’re dealing with a biological model?” — Robert Sapolsky

50. “What’s a world like where not only does criminal justice and retribution make no sense at all, but where rewarding people for being better at something than the next person makes no sense either?” — Robert Sapolsky

51. “How are you supposed to go about everyday life if anything you feel entitled to isn’t true? If any angers and hatreds you feel aren’t justified? If there’s no such thing as appropriate blame or punishment or praise or reward?” — Robert Sapolsky

52. “What right do we have to condemn crime if we do not also condemn the conditions that breed it?” — Raoul Martinez

53. “The men and women on death row have some combination of bad genes, bad parents, bad environments, and bad ideas (and the innocent, of course, have supremely bad luck). Which of these qualities, exactly, were they responsible for? No human being is responsible for his genes or his upbringing, yet we have every reason to believe that these factors determine his character. Our system of justice should reflect an understanding that any of us could have been dealt a very different hand in life. In fact, it seems immoral not to recognize just how much luck is involved in morality itself.” — Sam Harris

54. “Why should the lottery of birth have such an impact on what people own and the opportunities they enjoy? Being born to wealthy parents is a matter of blind luck. The typical argument made is that those with wealth have the right to do with it as they please, including passing it on to their children. Even if we accept this as a legitimate right, it is certainly not the only legitimate right. It ought to be balanced against other rights – most pressingly, the right of all children to enter a world of equal economic opportunity, or, at the very least, one in which they have access to clean water, food, shelter, medicine, education and dignified employment. When the two rights conflict, why should the wants of the few outweigh the needs of the many? To the younger generation, equal economic opportunities can mean the difference between health and illness, education and illiteracy, happiness and depression, even life and death. By contrast, reducing great concentrations of economic power by regulating inheritance need not threaten anyone’s health, literacy, happiness or existence.” — Raoul Martinez

Which questions were your favorites? Please let me know in the comments!

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