25 Ways to Melt Away the Feeling of Free Will

I feel like I have free will! You probably do too.

But, as you’ve likely experienced countless times in your own life, feelings are often wrong. As you’ll quickly see, there are lots of realities that begin to melt away this feeling of free will (I say “realities” instead of “problems” because they are what they are—no need to refer to them as “problems”).

“The popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions: (1) that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and (2) that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present. As we are about to see, however, both of these assumptions are false.” — Sam Harris

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25 Ways to Melt Away the Feeling of Free Will

1. Thought Experiments

The following thought experiments allow you to experience your lack of free will for yourself. This is always an impactful place to start because it opens the mind and allows space for questioning. Where’s the freedom in these?

Pick a city, any city:

Pick a movie, any movie:

Why this preference?

“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

Why this desire?

“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

Why this decision?

“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

More thought experiments:

2. Lottery of Birth

We all experienced life’s lottery: none of us chose to exist, none of us chose our nature, and none of us chose our nurture. We did not have the freedom to choose or control any of these factors—all of which shaped the brains and minds we are now using in this very moment. Where’s the freedom in this?

Philosopher Raoul Martinez calls it the “lottery of birth”:

“We do not choose to exist. We do not choose the environment we will grow up in. We do not choose to be born Hindu, Christian or Muslim, into a war-zone or peaceful middle-class suburb, into starvation or luxury. We do not choose our parents, nor whether they’ll be happy or miserable, knowledgeable or ignorant, healthy or sickly, attentive or neglectful. The knowledge we possess, the beliefs we hold, the tastes we develop, the traditions we adopt, the opportunities we enjoy, the work we do – the very lives we lead – depend entirely on our biological inheritance and the environment to which we are exposed. This is the lottery of birth … Thinking about the lottery of birth draws our attention to a simple fact: we do not create ourselves. The very idea entails a logical contradiction. To create something, you have to exist, so to create yourself you’d have to have existed before you had been created. Whether we’re talking about flesh and blood people or immaterial souls, there is no way around this simple fact.”

Billionaire Warren Buffett calls it the “ovarian lottery”:

“When I was a kid, I got all kinds of good things. I had the advantage of a home where people talked about interesting things, and I had intelligent parents and I went to decent schools. I don’t think I could have been raised with a better pair of parents. That was enormously important. I didn’t get money from my parents, and I really didn’t want it. But I was born at the right time and place. I won the ‘Ovarian Lottery.'”

More about the lottery of birth:

Our minds are a product of socialization. By the time we’re able to realize our conditioning and programming, we’ve already been conditioned and programmed. There is no way around this, and no such thing as “self-made.” Where’s the freedom in this?

Philosopher Raoul Martinez:

“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

Theoretical physicist David Bohm:

“When you say that you choose this alternative, it’s not clear what it means—who chooses, or what chooses, or how it gets chosen. Even if that were free, it would seem that it’s not a very significant kind of freedom. It does seem that it is not free, however, because if your choice is conditioned then you are not free … As long as we are in this system, there is very little freedom. You can say ‘I do what I want’, but what you want is the result of the system.”

Spiritual teacher Anthony de Mello:

“One must take responsibility wisely … It’s no maturity to blame yourself when you’re not to blame. You’re not doing it deliberately. This comes from your programming. You’re not blaming your programming, you’re understanding it … When you bump into reality, there’s a pain caused within you. That pain is not caused by reality, but something that’s happening inside of you. You’re not producing that deliberately. Who would deliberately want to cause pain to themselves? Now you have to understand what that something is. Why is it with some people this process doesn’t go on (or they’ve released themselves from it), whereas with others it does? This is responsibility—to understand. And, as a result of understanding, to be freed from it.”

More about social conditioning:

4. Free Thinking

How do you think you think? Where do you think all your ideas came from? Many types of thinking are possible: deep thinking, broad thinking, critical thinking, even contrarian thinking. But, it seems that independent or free thinking is limited to your conditioning/programming inputs and your brain anatomy. If you didn’t have this, you’d be a feral child. Where’s the freedom in this?

Social philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger:

“I wouldn’t call myself an independent thinker … I wouldn’t call anyone an independent thinker because I think in words and concepts invented and discovered by other people. I don’t necessarily have a specific school of orthodoxy from which I take an entire worldview, but almost every idea that I believe in I did not discover … The idea of an individual is fundamentally a misnomer—without everybody else, I wouldn’t be who I am, I wouldn’t think the way I think, and I wouldn’t think in the language I do.”

Spiritual philosopher Alan Watts:

“We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”

More about free/independent thinking:

🔒 Stream of Consciousness: Is Free Thinking Even Possible?

5. Brain Development (until Age 25)

Our brains are still developing until our mid-20s. So, can you claim to have free will before age 25 if your brain isn’t even fully developed and online? And, after age 25, can you claim to have free will when it was your experience and environment that shaped the frontal cortex you ended up with? Where’s the freedom in this?

Robert Sapolsky, professor of biology, neurology & neurological sciences at Stanford:

“Everything about adolescent behavior is explained by two facts. First off, your dopamine system is going full blast by the time you’re about 11 or 12. Second, your frontal cortex is half-baked when you’re a teenager. Frontal cortex is not fully online amazingly enough until you’re about 25 years old. In other words, this is why juveniles behave in juvenile ways: impulse issues and sensation seeking and novelty seeking and peer effects and conformity … Late adolescence early adulthood is when environment is having its biggest affects on what kind of frontal cortex you’re going to have as an adult … If the frontal cortex is the last part of the brain to come online, by definition it’s the part of the brain least shaped by your genes and most shaped by your experience and environment. And, it’s got to be that way because what’s the difficult, subtle ‘doing the right thing when it’s the harder thing to do’ kind of stuff that takes forever to master? Cultural relativity, context-dependent rules, ‘thou shalt not kill’ but it’s really good to kill them, and ‘you don’t lie’ but this is a good time to lie, and hypocrisy and self-serving—and no genes are going to code for that. Your frontal cortex needs 25 years to master stuff like that.”

Learn more about brain development:

No Free Will: The Biology of Behavior with Robert Sapolsky

6. Homunculus Fallacy

A “homunculus” is a representation of a small human being. Imagine all this biological stuff going on in your brain at any and every moment. Now imagine some separate homunculus in your brain that’s completely free of all the biological stuff and just waiting around for you when you need to make free choices and decisions. It doesn’t make sense. Where’s the freedom in this?

Robert Sapolsky:

“There’s the brain—neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, receptors, brain-specific transcription factors, epigenetic effects, gene transpositions during neurogenesis. Aspects of brain function can be influenced by someone’s prenatal environment, genes, and hormones, whether their parents were authoritative or their culture egalitarian, whether they witnessed violence in childhood, when they had breakfast. It’s the whole shebang … And then, separate from that, in a concrete bunker tucked away in the brain, sits a little man (or woman, or agendered individual), a homunculus at a control panel. The homunculus is made of a mixture of nanochips, old vacuum tubes, crinkly ancient parchment, stalactites of your mother’s admonishing voice, streaks of brimstone, rivets made out of gumption. In other words, not squishy biological brain yuck. And the homunculus sits there controlling behavior … The homunculus makes decisions … A homunculus in your brain, but not of it, operating independently of the material rules of the universe that constitute modern science … This is how most people accommodate the supposed coexistence of free will and biological influences on behavior.”

More about the homunculus fallacy:

The Homunculus Fallacy & Mitigated Free Will (Robert Sapolsky Short Excerpt)

7. Free Neuron

Another way to think about the homunculus fallacy above is to think about a free neuron in your brain. Imagine some neuron (or neurons) in your brain that’s completely free from other neurons and the influences of all the biological stuff—and just waiting around for you when you need to make free choices and decisions. It doesn’t make sense. Where’s the freedom in this?

Let’s say you perform an action, even the most basic one (via Robert Sapolsky):

“Neurobiologists can go and find the neuron in your motor cortex which sent the signal to those muscles to flex. And, you could find the neurons in what are called the pre-motor cortex which sent signals which triggered that motor cortex to send that signal. And, you could then find neurons in the frontal cortex that triggered that. And, find neurons in the prefrontal cortex that triggered that. And, neurons in emotional parts of the brain that triggered those neurons. And, basically, show me the neuron that started that cascade—a neuron that fired that had an action potential for no reason whatsoever, a neuron whose firing was not regulated by the physical laws of the universe that happened for no prior causal antecedent reason. Show me a neuron that started that, and that works that way, and then we could talk about free will.”
“You can’t understand where behavior is coming from without incorporating all of those. And, at that point, not only are all of these relevant factors, but they are ultimately all one factor. If you’re talking about what evolution has to do with your behavior, by definition you’re also talking about genetics. If you’re talking about what your genes have to do with behavior, by definition you’re talking about how your brain was constructed or what proteins are coded for. If you’re talking about your mood disorder now, you’re talking about the sense of efficacy you were getting as a five-year-old. They’re all intertwined. And when you look at all those influences, basically, the challenge is: show me a neuron that just caused that behavior (or show me a network of neurons that just caused that behavior), and show me that nothing about what they just did was influenced by anything from the sensory environment one second ago to the evolution of your species. And, there’s no space in there to fit in a free will concept that winds up being in your brain but not of your brain. There’s simply no wiggle room for it there.”

More about the free neuron:

No Free Will: The Biology of Behavior with Robert Sapolsky

8. Readiness Potential

If you look into the neuroscience of free will, it’s virtually impossible to miss the name Benjamin Libet. In the 1980s, Libet found that unconscious brain activity leading up to a conscious decision to act began before someone felt that they had consciously decided to act. What if the feeling of conscious awareness/intention come after unconscious/subconscious neural activity has already begun? Where’s the freedom in this?

Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist:

“Some now famous experimental work by Benjamin Libet, published in 1985, attempted to investigate the conscious will from a neurophysiological point of view. Libet asked subjects to make spontaneous movements of their fingers at will, and recorded what was going on in the brain by monitoring the accompanying electroencephalographic data, recorded by electrodes on the scalp. He confirmed earlier findings of a German neurologist, Hans Kornhuber, who had shown that there is a blip in the trace, known as a ‘readiness potential’ (Bereitschaftspotential), about a second before the movement takes place. But, much to his amazement, he discovered that the conscious urge to move the finger occurred, not before, but approximately 0.2 seconds after, the readiness potential. In other words the brain seemed to know in advance that its ‘owner’ was going to make a decision to carry out an action. This clearly doesn’t square with the common-sense notion that we make a conscious decision to do something, and has cast doubt in some minds on free will, giving rise to an extensive philosophical literature of debate.”

From Wikipedia:

“Matsuhashi and Hallet concluded that the feeling of the conscious intention to move does not cause movement genesis; both the feeling of intention and the movement itself are the result of unconscious processing … The generation of awareness occurred afterwards or in parallel to action, but most importantly, that it was probably not the cause of the movement.”
“Researcher Itzhak Fried says that available studies do at least suggest that consciousness comes in a later stage of decision making than previously expected – challenging any versions of ‘free will’ where intention occurs at the beginning of the human decision process … ‘The current work is in broad agreement with a general trend in neuroscience of volition: although we may experience that our conscious decisions and thoughts cause our actions, these experiences are in fact based on readouts of brain activity in a network of brain areas that control voluntary action … It is clearly wrong to think of (feeling of willing something) as a prior intention, located at the very earliest moment of decision in an extended action chain’ (Patrick Haggard discussing an in-depth experiment by Itzhak Fried).”

More about the neuroscience of free will:

Neuroscience of free will (Wikipedia)
Illusion of control (Wikipedia)
Self-agency (Wikipedia)

9. The Unconscious

Apparently, 95-99% of our brain activity is unconscious! Where’s the freedom in this?

Neuroscientist David Eagleman:

“The first thing we learn from studying our own (brain) circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control. The vast jungles of neurons operate their own programs. The conscious you – the ‘I’ that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning – is the smallest bit of what’s transpiring in your brain … Your consciousness is like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot.”

Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist:

“It certainly would not surprise those who have read the now classic work of Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, in which he systematically disabuses the reader of the idea that consciousness is needed for any of the defining features of human mental life. He points out that very little brain activity is in fact conscious (current estimates are certainly less than 5 per cent, and probably less than 1 per cent), and that we take decisions, solve problems, make judgments, discriminate, reason, and so on, without any need for conscious involvement … As Hans Vaihinger wrote: ‘the organic function of thought is carried on for the most part unconsciously. Should the product finally enter consciousness also, or should consciousness momentarily accompany the processes of logical thought, this light only penetrates to the shallows, and the actual fundamental processes are carried on in the darkness of the unconscious. The specifically purposeful operations are chiefly, and in any case at the beginning, wholly instinctive and unconscious, even if they later press forward into the luminous circle of consciousness’ … The conscious left hemisphere believes that it is an originator, whereas in fact it is a receiver of something that comes to it from elsewhere.”

More about the unconscious:

10. The Veto (Free Won’t)

Some researchers think that although almost everything is happening unconsciously, we have the conscious ability to “veto” what the unconscious processing determines. Some call this “free won’t” (as opposed to “free will”). But, other researchers have shown that even the veto is determined unconsciously. Where’s the freedom in this?

Iain McGilchrist:

“The most highly evolved part of the brain, the frontal cortex, achieves what it does largely by negating (or not negating) other brain activity. ‘The cortex’s job is to prevent the inappropriate response rather than to produce the appropriate one’, writes Joseph LeDoux; that is, it pares down from among things that exist, it selects, it does not originate. And one answer to the problem raised for free will by Libet’s experiments is that there is time between the unconscious initiation of an action and its execution for the conscious mind to intervene and ‘veto’ the action. In this sense, it may exert its influence more as ‘free won’t’ than ‘free will’.”

From Wikipedia:

“Research at least suggests that our conscious self does not initiate all behavior. Instead, the conscious self is somehow alerted to a given behavior that the rest of the brain and body are already planning and performing … If the conscious self is the efferent copy of actions and vetoes being performed, then the consciousness is a sort of narrator of what is already occurring in the body, and an incomplete narrator at that.”
“Researchers interpret their results to mean that the decision to ‘veto’ an action is determined subconsciously, just as the initiation of the action may have been subconscious in the first place … Since the subjects are not very accurate in observing when they have (acted impulsively instead of deliberately), the act of vetoing cannot be consciously initiated … Thus it seems that the intention to move might not only arise from the subconscious, but it may only be inhibited if the subconscious says so. This conclusion could suggest that the phenomenon of ‘consciousness’ is more of narration than direct arbitration (i.e. unconscious processing causes all thoughts, and these thoughts are again processed subconsciously).”

More about the veto (free won’t):

Neuroscience of free will (Wikipedia)

11. Post Hoc Inference

The stories we tell ourselves about why something happened are often unreliable. What if the feelings of agency and intention are constructed and attributed after the fact? Where’s the freedom in this?

Sam Harris:

“You might have a story to tell about why things were different this time around, but it would be nothing more than a post hoc description of events that you did not control … When people are manipulated in a lab, they seem to always have a story about why they did what they did—and it often bears no relationship to what actually influenced them. It’s simply a fact that our judgments about the causes of our own behavior are often unreliable. Generally this comes courtesy of the left hemisphere of the brain.”

From Wikipedia:

“Daniel Wegner’s book The Illusion of Conscious Will posits the phenomenal will as the illusory product of post hoc inference. Sense of agency, on this view, is a product of fallible post hoc inference rather than infallible direct access to one’s conscious force of will … Wegner’s account is a leading example of a postdictive or inferential account of the attribution of self-agency. On this type of view, the feeling of self-agency emerges entirely from post hoc inference and does not track or emerge from anything directly related to the actual causation of the action.”
“Wegner conducted a series of experiments in which people experience an illusion of control, feeling that their will shapes events which are actually determined by someone else. He argued controversially that the ease with which this illusion can be created shows that the everyday feeling of conscious will is an illusion or a ‘construction’ and that this illusion of mental causation is ‘the mind’s best trick’. Wegner defined conscious will as a function of priority (the thought must come before the action), consistency (the thought must be consistent with the action), and exclusivity (the thought cannot be accompanied with other causes). He argued that, although people may feel that conscious intentions drive much of their behavior, in reality both behavior and intentions are the product of other, unconscious mental processes. Wegner’s research agreed with previous findings by Benjamin Libet regarding brain readiness potential and concluded that his own findings were ‘compatible with the idea that brain events cause intention and action, whereas conscious intention itself may not cause action.'”
“Wegner argued that the feeling of intention is something attributed ‘after the fact’ … The idea behind retrospective construction is that, while part of the ‘yes, I did it’ feeling of agency seems to occur during action, there also seems to be processing performed after the fact – after the action is performed – to establish the full feeling of agency. People ‘persist in believing that they have access to their own cognitive processes’ when in fact we do a great deal of automatic unconscious processing before conscious perception occurs.”

More about post hoc inference:

Neuroscience of free will (Wikipedia)

12. Doing Otherwise

Thinking you could have done otherwise in a situation is one of the key parts of the feeling of free will. However, if you could go back and time and rearrange the universe in exactly the same way, you’d make exactly the same decision every time. Or, even if you could go back in time and rearrange the universe in exactly the same way—but this time allow for quantum events of randomness and unpredictability to change some stuff—where’s the free will in randomness and unpredictability? Where’s the freedom in this?

Neuroscientist Sam Harris:

“The free will people think they have is, ‘Damn, I shouldn’t have done that. I could have done otherwise. I should have done otherwise‘ … People are infatuated by this idea that they could have done otherwise. It seems to most people that if you rewound the movie of their life to a few seconds ago, they could have thought or acted or wanted or intended—and therefore behaved—differently than they did … To say that I could have done otherwise is merely to think the thought ‘I could have done otherwise’ after doing whatever I in fact did. This is an empty affirmation … You will do whatever it is you do, and it is meaningless to assert that you could have done otherwise … It has to be an illusion because there’s no picture of causation that would make sense of it. There’s this illusion that if you arrange the universe exactly the way it was a moment ago, it could have played out differently. And, the only way it could have played out differently is if there’s randomness added to that, but randomness isn’t what people feel would give them free will. It’s impossible to say what the universe would have to be like for free will to be a thing—it just doesn’t conceptually map onto any notion of causation we have … My experience of myself closed the door to my saying, ‘Well, I should have done otherwise’ in the sense that if I could go back in time I would have actually effectively done otherwise. No. Given the same causes and conditions, I would do that thing a trillion times in a row.”

Robert Sapolsky:

“If you look at the things that come into account as to whether or not someone is going to do the right thing in the next two seconds amid a temptation to do otherwise, the variables in there reflect everything from whether they’re having gas pains that day because of something unpleasant they ate that morning—that makes us more selfish, more impulsive, et cetera—to what epigenetic effects occurred to them when they were a first trimester fetus.”

More about doing otherwise:

13. Manipulating Choice

This one is eerie! Some research suggests that “transcranial magnetic stimulation” (TMS) can be used to manipulate the authorship perception of a choice. In other words, “neurostimulation” can affect someone’s decision while their feeling/experience of free will remains intact! They truly feel that they are authoring their decisions while a researcher is manipulating them. Where’s the freedom in this?

From Wikipedia:

“An early TMS study revealed that activation of one side of the neocortex could be used to bias the selection of one’s opposite side hand in a forced-choice decision task. Ammon and Gandevia found that it was possible to influence which hand people move by stimulating frontal regions that are involved in movement planning using TMS in the left or right hemisphere of the brain … Lau et al. set up an experiment where subjects would look at an analog-style clock, and a red dot would move around the screen. Subjects were told to click the mouse button whenever they felt the intention to do so. One group was given a TMS pulse, and the other was given a sham TMS. Subjects in the intention condition were told to move the cursor to where it was when they felt the inclination to press the button. In the movement condition, subjects moved their cursor to where it was when they physically pressed the button. Results showed that the TMS was able to shift the perceived intention forward by 16 ms, and shifted back the 14 ms for the movement condition. Perceived intention could be manipulated up to 200 ms after the execution of the spontaneous action, indicating that the perception of intention occurred after the executive motor movements. Often it is thought that if free will were to exist, it would require intention to be the causal source of behavior. These results show that intention may not be the causal source of all behavior.”

More about manipulating choice:

Neuroscience of free will (Wikipedia)

14. Split Brain

A split brain can be like having two brains in one body! Some even theorize that there are two separate consciousnesses within the brain (left hemisphere and right hemisphere) in competition with one another. If you have neurological lesions or some psychiatric conditions, the world itself seems to have truly changed (and there’s no convincing you otherwise). Where’s the freedom in this?

Iain McGilchrist:

“In split-brain patients the left hemisphere will disown the actions that are obviously initiated (‘chosen’, ‘intended’, ‘willed’) by the right hemisphere: it was not ‘my’ will.”
“‘Without batting an eye’ the left hemisphere draws mistaken conclusions from the information available to it and lays down the law about what only the right hemisphere can know: ‘yet, the left did not offer its suggestion in a guessing vein but rather (as) a statement of fact…’ This may be linked to a phenomenon known as confabulation, where the brain, not being able to recall something, rather than admit to a gap in its understanding, makes up something plausible, that appears consistent, to fill it. Thus, for example, in the presence of a right-sided lesion, the brain loses the contextual information that would help it make sense of experience; the left hemisphere, nothing loath, makes up a story, and, lacking insight, appears completely convinced by it. Even in the absence of amnesia, the left hemisphere exhibits a strong tendency to confabulate: it thinks it knows something, recognises something, which it doesn’t, a tendency that may be linked to its lack of ability to discriminate unique cases from the generalised categories into which it places them. The left hemisphere is the equivalent of the sort of person who, when asked for directions, prefers to make something up rather than admit to not knowing.”

Split-brain examples:

“Alien hand syndrome is a category of conditions in which a person experiences their limbs acting seemingly on their own, without conscious control over the actions … The affected person may sometimes reach for objects and manipulate them without wanting to do so, even to the point of having to use the controllable hand to restrain the alien hand. Under normal circumstances however, given that intent and action can be assumed to be deeply mutually entangled, the occurrence of alien hand syndrome can be usefully conceptualized as a phenomenon reflecting a functional ‘disentanglement’ between thought and action.”
“When one split-brain patient dressed himself, he sometimes pulled his pants up with one hand (that side of his brain wanted to get dressed) and down with the other (this side did not). He also reported to have grabbed his wife with his left hand and shaken her violently, at which point his right hand came to her aid and grabbed the aggressive left hand.”
“When split-brain patients are shown an image only in the left half of each eye’s visual field, they cannot vocally name what they have seen. This is because the image seen in the left visual field is sent only to the right side of the brain, and most people’s speech-control center is on the left side of the brain. Communication between the two sides is inhibited, so the patient cannot say out loud the name of that which the right side of the brain is seeing … The same effect occurs for visual pairs and reasoning. For example, a patient with split brain is shown a picture of a chicken foot and a snowy field in separate visual fields and asked to choose from a list of words the best association with the pictures. The patient would choose a chicken to associate with the chicken foot and a shovel to associate with the snow; however, when asked to reason why the patient chose the shovel, the response would relate to the chicken (e.g. ‘the shovel is for cleaning out the chicken coop’).”

More about split brain hemispheres:

15. Brain Stroke

If you have a stroke, you may wipe out the neurons that house your identity and/or deny that half your body even exists at all. Where’s the freedom in this?

Neuroanatomist and left hemisphere stroke survivor Jill Bolte Taylor:

“Pre-stroke, I had known who I was because there had been a group of cells in my left brain that manufactured my identity as Jill Bolte Taylor. These cells that made up my left-brain ego-center knew who I was, where I lived, and tons of other details like what my favorite color was. These ego-center cells had worked day in and day out to keep me abreast of all the tidbits, details, memories, and likes and dislikes that had made up my identity. I, Jill Bolte Taylor, existed because the cells in my left-brain ego-center told me I existed. When those cells of my left-brain ego-center shut down, and I shifted into the oblivion of my right brain, I had no idea who I was and I could not recall anything about my pre-stroke life. It was not as though I was missing a memory that I simply could not put my finger on; it was more like that memory (and I myself) had never existed at all … I know it’s a bit disconcerting to think that who we are is completely manufactured by a small group of cells in our left brain, and that we can lose ourselves at any moment, but that is exactly how fragile our ego identities are.”

“Hemi-neglect” following a right-hemisphere stroke (Iain McGilchrist):

“So extreme can this phenomenon be that the sufferer may fail to acknowledge the existence of anyone standing to his left, the left half of the face of a clock, or the left page of a newspaper or book, and will even neglect to wash, shave or dress the left half of the body, sometimes going so far as to deny that it exists at all. This is despite the fact that there is nothing at all wrong with the primary visual system: the problem is not due to blindness as ordinarily understood.”

More about strokes:

16. Biology of Behavior

Similar to the vast majority of your brain activity happening unconsciously, the vast majority of your biology in general is happening unconsciously. Yet, it’s all influencing you at any and every moment. Where’s the freedom in this?

Robert Sapolsky on just a few things that are influencing you at any given moment:

“Blood glucose levels; the socioeconomic status of your family of birth; a concussive head injury; sleep quality and quantity; prenatal environment; stress and glucocorticoid levels; whether you’re in pain; if you have Parkinson’s disease and which medication you’ve been prescribed; perinatal hypoxia; your dopamine D4 receptor gene variant; if you have had a stroke in your frontal cortex; if you suffered childhood abuse; how much of a cognitive load you’ve borne in the last few minutes; your MAO-A gene variant; if you’re infected with a particular parasite; if you have the gene for Huntington’s disease; lead levels in your tap water when you were a kid; if you live in an individualist or a collectivist culture; if you’re a heterosexual male and there’s an attractive woman around; if you’ve been smelling the sweat of someone who is frightened. On and on.”

And, why that means no free will:

“I don’t think we have a shred of free will … The reason for this is you do something—you behave, you make a choice, whatever—and to understand why you did that and where that intention came from … Part of it was due to the sensory environment you were in the previous minute. Some of it is from the hormone levels in your bloodstream that morning. Some of it is from whether you had a wonderful or stressful last three months and what sort of neuroplasticity happened. Part of it is what hormone levels you were exposed to as a fetus. Part of it is what culture your ancestors came up with and thus how you were parented when you were a kid.”

Another angle on it:

“One angle I take in trying to convince people there’s no free will is just to look at the sheer number of things influencing our behavior: If you were sitting in a room with smelly garbage, that made you more likely to do that. If you are male or female and your testosterone levels have been elevated for the last day, that’s more likely to have happened. If you’ve been traumatized five months ago and neurons and your amygdala grew new connections, that’s more likely to happen. If as a third trimester fetus you were exposed to elevated levels of stress hormones from your mom’s circulation. If your ancestors were nomadic pastoralists wandering grasslands or deserts and came up with the culture of honor and you were raised in that, you were more likely to have done that as well. Wait a second, ecosystems 500 years ago have an influence? Yeah, turns out people’s cultures are greatly shaped by that, and it greatly shapes their brains.”

More about the biology of behavior:

No Free Will: The Biology of Behavior with Robert Sapolsky

17. Scientific History (of Being Wrong)

History is filled with examples of society being convinced of something that turns out to be wrong. What are we convinced of today that will be wrong in the future? Where’s the freedom in this?

Robert Sapolsky:

“All we’ve been learning for the last 200 years are more and more things that we used to attribute to this nebulous concept of ‘free will’ we instead at some point have to sit up and say, ‘Oh, I had no idea that was biological.’”
“Look at what we know about the biology of behavior at this point, and 99% of it we’ve learned in the last century, 50% of it we’ve learned in the last 10 years, 25% of it we’ve learned in the last year. So, either you’ve got to sit there and say, ‘That’s it, tonight at midnight there’s no more science. We’ve learned all the science we can ever learn’ … You have to be crazy to think that the science is not going to continue to rise at the same exact fast pace. One way of reframing that is we are going to learn the things that we call ‘free will’ now we’re going to discover a century from now or a year from now that, no, it’s actually a biological phenomenon.”
“Look at the history of how we have subtracted the notion of agency out of all sorts of realms of blame … We’ve done it endless number of times—we’ve been able to subtract out a sense of volition in understanding how the world works around us. And, we don’t have murderers running amuck on the street, and society hasn’t collapsed into a puddle. In fact, it’s a more humane society.”

Some examples:

“We know that epileptic seizures are neurological disorders, they’re not because somebody has slept with Satan.”
“We know that certain types of learning disabilities are not children being lazy and unmotivated, it turns out there’s cortical malformations.”
“We know that certain times when somebody is completely inappropriate in their behavior, it’s because they’ve got a neurochemical disorder called schizophrenia (and it’s not that psychodynamically screwed up mothers cause schizophrenia).”

More about scientific history being wrong:

No Free Will: The Biology of Behavior with Robert Sapolsky

18. Psychological Development

Psychological development impacts your worldview, how you take perspective, how you make meaning, and so much more. At different “stages,” you literally interpret life differently. Your relationships with concepts, words, and even language change. Your relationships with yourself and others change. What if you can’t see, interpret, or understand what you legitimately cannot even fathom based on your current level of psychological development? Where’s the freedom in this?

Susanne Cook-Greuter:

“Human development in general can be looked at as a progression of different ways of making sense of reality or in a sequence of stages of meaning making … Overall, human development as I describe it, moves from the newborn’s unconscious union with mother to a conscious union with everyone and everything.”

More about psychological development:

19. Cognitive Biases

There are hundreds (if not thousands) of cognitive biases running in your mind. Where’s the freedom in this?

There are quite simply too many to list here! For a full list of 100+ cognitive biases (across self, interpersonal, belief, perception, emotion, planning, judgment, decision making, memory, learning, and more) check out Mini Mind: 365 daily emails of bite-size brain food.

More about cognitive biases:

20. Mindfulness Meditation

While meditating, you notice that you as the conscious witness of your inner life are not thinking—your thoughts simply appear in consciousness and all you can do is witness them once they appear. Eventually, you realize there is no thinker to be found apart from thoughts—there’s no subject in the middle of experience. Where’s the freedom in this?

Sam Harris:

“Sufficient mindfulness reveals that everything happens all by itself … This is where meditation comes in. You can’t feel that free will doesn’t exist unless you can pay close attention to how thoughts and intentions arise … Until you actually know how to meditate, you can’t stop yourself from fully living out its behavioral or emotional consequences. Mindfulness, arguably, gives you another degree of freedom here. It doesn’t give you free will, but it gives you some other game to play with respect to the emotional and behavioral imperatives of thoughts. The reason why mindfulness doesn’t give you free will is because you can’t account for why in one moment mindfulness arises and in other moments it doesn’t. But, a different process is initiated once you can practice in that way.”

More about mindfulness meditation:

21. Spiritual Enlightenment

Spiritual enlightenment is the merging of subject and object (in other words, the experience of duality is revealed to be nonduality). The question of “Do I have free will?” isn’t even a question you would ask because the sense of “I” disappears when subject and object merge. There is no “I” or “me” to have free will anymore. Where’s the freedom in this?

Ramana Maharshi:

“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.”

Anthony de Mello:

“To lose the self is to suddenly realize that you are something other than what you thought you were … You thought you were the dancer; you now experience yourself as the dance.”

Lao Tzu:

“The game plays the game; the poem writes the poem; we can’t tell the dancer from the dance.”

More about spiritual enlightenment:

22. Ancient Wisdom

You don’t get to pick your part in life. Where’s the freedom in this?

Gregory Hays (translator of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations):

“All events are determined by the logos, and follow in an unbreakable chain of cause and effect. Stoicism is thus from the outset a deterministic system that appears to leave no room for human free will or moral responsibility. In reality the Stoics were reluctant to accept such an arrangement, and attempted to get around the difficulty by defining free will as a voluntary accommodation to what is in any case inevitable.”

Epictetus:

“Remember that you’re an actor in a play, which will be as the author chooses, short if he wants it to be short, and long if he wants it to be long. If he wants you to play the part of a beggar, act even that part with all your skill; and likewise if you’re playing a cripple, an official, or a private citizen. For that is your business, to act the role that is assigned to you as well as you can; but it is another’s part to select that role.”

More about ancient wisdom:

23. Determinism & Causal Closure

It seems like most free will arguments and debates start with the universe, physics, and natural laws. But, after everything we’ve already covered, all this stuff just seems like icing on the no-free-will cake. Where’s the freedom in this?

Sam Harris:

“You are part of the universe, and there’s no place for you to stand outside of its causal structure … Your desires, intentions, and decisions arise out of the present state of the universe—which includes your brain and your soul (if such a thing exists) along with all of their influences. Your mental states are part of a causal framework.”
“No matter how we think about causation—whether things are determined or random or some combination of the two—there’s no place for you as the conscious subject to stand that isn’t downstream of causes that you can’t inspect or anticipate. Everything is just appearing in consciousness.”
“The next thing you think and do can only emerge from this totality of prior causes. And it can only emerge in one of two ways: lawfully (that is deterministically) … or randomly.”
“Everything about your experience is totally compatible with determinism—or determinism plus randomness—neither of which gives you this freedom people think they have.”
“Whether these mental events are fully determined or in part random, the experience is the same. Everything is just happening on its own.”
“The problem is that neither determinism nor randomness nor any combination of the two justifies the feeling that most people have that goes by the name of ‘free will.’”
“There is no will in randomness.”

More about determinism and causal closure:

24. Quantum Everything

But, quantum! It doesn’t seem like free will is found in quantum anything. Where’s the freedom in this?

Robert Sapolsky:

“Quantum mechanics is all about the subatomic level: wave-particle duality, quantum entanglement, non-locality over space and time, quantum tunneling. These are all the things that are occurring at a subatomic level. If that’s going to have anything to do with why you are a good, kind person or why you were a selfish horror, those quantum effects are going to have to bubble up 20-30 orders of magnitude to begin to explain a single action potential which takes about 3-4 milliseconds. That is about 10 to the 23rd times longer in duration than a quantum effect … That’s a hell of a lot of bubbling up you need to do to get to just that level of biology. And, what 99% of the people in the field agree on is you cannot get the bubbling up even if a quantal effect in this one synapse has synchronized through superposition and quantum entanglement and has entangled the events of 4000 other synapses. You’re using about a trillion synapses, emptying about a trillion axon terminals full of neurotransmitter, every time you do an action. There’s very little evidence that it bubbles up.”
“The second big problem is in some ways the even more fundamental one, which is even if it did bubble up that high, the gigantic problem is quantum indeterminacy cannot be the explanation for free will. It could be the explanation for us doing stupid, random things that are completely out of character for us. It’s the explanation for us doing things where we would then say, ‘I have no idea why I just said that,’ except you wouldn’t be able to say that because your tongue muscles would be doing stupid, random things and you wouldn’t even be able to speak.”
“We’re trying to understand the things that make up consistency, and quantum indeterminacy—the most subatomic level of randomness—is not where we get the consistency of a moral philosophy coming from, or your character, or your outlook on life … The third problem is nevertheless there’s a whole bunch of thinkers out there, and they are almost certainly philosophers rather than neurobiologists, who try to magically pull enough levels of bubbling up to get it up to the behavior we’re interested in and magically find a means by which you can harness the randomness of indeterminacy into something determinate and philosophically consistent. And, the problem with that is—I’m being polite here—you read this and it just does not make sense what these people are postulating: they’re ways in which your conscious free will can reach down and change your electron orbitals and from that your brain will work differently. The ways in which you get around the bubbling up problem and the randomness problem make no sense at all. I think quantum indeterminacy has nothing to do with why you pick up this knife at this moment, or why you pick up this fork, and it certainly has nothing to do with moral philosophy.”

More about quantum everything:

No Free Will: The Biology of Behavior with Robert Sapolsky

25. The Non-Illusion

What if the illusion of free will is itself an illusion (or non-illusion)? Where’s the freedom in this?

Sam Harris:

“There is no question that our attribution of agency can be gravely in error. I am arguing that it always is.”
“The truth about us is stranger than many suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion.”
“Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent. Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.”
“Not only are we not as free as we think we are—we do not feel as free as we think we do. Our sense of our own freedom results from our not paying close attention to what it is like to be us. The moment we pay attention, it is possible to see that free will is nowhere to be found, and our experience is perfectly compatible with this truth. Thoughts and intentions simply arise in the mind.”

More about the non-illusion of free will:

Takeaways & Moving Forward

In Summary: If all of this is overwhelming, remember that you can just think certain thoughts and come to the same realizations (#1). We all experienced the lottery of birth (#2) and social conditioning (#3) that shaped our brains, minds, and the way we think (#4)—and by the time we realize all this, we’ve already been conditioned. If someone’s brain is still biologically developing until age 25 (#5), when could we say they have free will? Speaking of biology, there are countless factors influencing your behavior all the time (#16)—and there’s no free homunculus (#6) or free neuron (#7) separate from your biology. Upwards of 95% of your brain activity is unconscious (#9), your brain’s readiness potential may unconsciously begin before you consciously feel like you do something (#8), and even your ability to exercise your veto power (“free won’t”) may be unconscious (#10). Yet, we are very confident in ourselves courtesy of our left brain hemispheres, and we have no problem telling ourselves stories through post hoc inference (#11) and thinking we could have done otherwise (#12). A lot of this is easier to research when things go wrong like split brains (#14) and strokes (#15)—and researchers can even manipulate our choices while we retain our feeling of free will (#13). Psychological development (#18) and cognitive biases (#19) show we don’t all see reality the same way (with our past selves or each other). Mindfulness meditation (#20), spiritual enlightenment (#21), and ancient wisdom (#22) show there is no “self” there in the first place who could have free will. Scientific history has been wrong a lot in the past (#17)—will the future prove the same about free will? What about determinism/causal closure (#23) and quantum (#24)? Is the illusion of free will itself an illusion (#25)? Where’s the freedom in all this?

Maybe we don’t live life, but life lives us. Maybe the conscious mind is just the receiver / narrator / storyteller of countless unconscious influences. Maybe this is exactly what we are supposed to realize.

Is it really that hard to believe that we don’t make our minds think when we don’t control virtually anything else about ourselves?

“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
“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

If you’re looking for questions to ask yourself now:

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

If you’re looking for the implications of all this:

The Lottery of Birth: “Creating Freedom” by Raoul Martinez (Book Summary)

No Free Will: The Biology of Behavior with Robert Sapolsky

“Free Will” by Sam Harris (Book Summary)

If you want the best of the best:

🔒 Lottery of Birth Synthesis: How to See Yourself and the World Drastically Differently (+ Infographic)

🔒 How to Unravel Free Will with Sam Harris (+ Infographic)

🔒 Stream of Consciousness: Is this the Holy Shit Moment?

25 Ways to Melt Away the Feeling of Free Will

1. Thought Experiments

2. Lottery of Birth

4. Free Thinking

5. Brain Development (until Age 25)

6. Homunculus Fallacy

7. Free Neuron

8. Readiness Potential

9. The Unconscious

10. The Veto (Free Won’t)

11. Post Hoc Inference

12. Doing Otherwise

13. Manipulating Choice

14. Split Brain

15. Brain Stroke

16. Biology of Behavior

17. Scientific History (of Being Wrong)

18. Psychological Development

19. Cognitive Biases

20. Mindfulness Meditation

21. Spiritual Enlightenment

22. Ancient Wisdom

23. Determinism & Causal Closure

24. Quantum Everything

25. The Non-Illusion

Takeaways & Moving Forward

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25 Ways to Melt Away the Feeling of Free Will

1. Thought Experiments

2. Lottery of Birth

3. Social Conditioning

4. Free Thinking

5. Brain Development (until Age 25)

6. Homunculus Fallacy

7. Free Neuron

8. Readiness Potential

9. The Unconscious

10. The Veto (Free Won’t)

11. Post Hoc Inference

12. Doing Otherwise

13. Manipulating Choice

14. Split Brain

15. Brain Stroke

16. Biology of Behavior

17. Scientific History (of Being Wrong)

18. Psychological Development

19. Cognitive Biases

20. Mindfulness Meditation

21. Spiritual Enlightenment

22. Ancient Wisdom

23. Determinism & Causal Closure

24. Quantum Everything

25. The Non-Illusion

Takeaways & Moving Forward

About Kyle Kowalski

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