Thoughts on Free Will
Free Will
I’ve been thinking about free will for a while now. It’s one of those topics that sounds simple on the surface but the deeper you go, the more it messes with you. Do we actually make choices, or are we just incredibly sophisticated dominoes falling in a sequence set in motion long before we were born?
What is Free Will?
Free will, at its core, is the idea that you are the author of your own actions. That when you decide to do something, that decision genuinely originates from you and could have gone differently. It’s the feeling you have when you pick what to eat for lunch, choose a career, or decide whether or not to say something you’ll regret.
There are generally three camps people fall into:
Libertarian Free Will (not the political kind) says we have genuine, undetermined free will. Our choices are not fully caused by prior events.
Hard Determinism says everything, including every thought and decision you’ve ever had, was determined by prior causes stretching back to the Big Bang. There is no room for free will.
Compatibilism tries to meet in the middle. It says free will and determinism can coexist, and that “free will” just means acting according to your own desires without external coercion, even if those desires were themselves determined.
Thought Exercise: Maybe We Do Have Free Will
Imagine you’re standing at a crossroads, literally and figuratively. You can go left or go right. Nothing is forcing you. You think about it, weigh your options, and you go right.
Now ask yourself: what caused you to go right? Your reasoning. Your values. Your past experiences. Everything that makes you, you. In that sense, the decision came from you. Not from a coin flip, not from someone else’s hand pushing you. You deliberated, and you acted. That deliberation feels real because it is real.
There is also the question of quantum indeterminacy. At the subatomic level, the universe is not fully deterministic. Particles behave probabilistically. If the physical world is not fully determined, maybe there is room somewhere in the brain for genuine, undetermined choice to emerge from that randomness.
Add to this the undeniable experience of moral responsibility. We hold people accountable for their actions every day. We praise people for courage and condemn people for cruelty. This entire framework of justice and praise only makes sense if people could have done otherwise. The fact that human civilization has built itself around the assumption of free will might mean we are onto something.
Thought Exercise: Maybe We Don’t
Now flip it. Think about the last “decision” you made. Before you were conscious of making it, your brain had already begun preparing for it. A famous set of neuroscience experiments by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s showed that brain activity associated with a movement begins several hundred milliseconds before a person is consciously aware of deciding to move. Your brain acts, and then you feel like you decided. Consciousness might just be along for the ride.
Zoom out further. You didn’t choose your genes. You didn’t choose your parents, your childhood, your culture, or the first experiences that shaped your values and personality. Every preference you have, every instinct, every belief was installed in you by forces entirely outside your control. The “you” that seems to be making decisions is itself a product of causes you had no say in.
And if the universe is deterministic, then the state of every particle at the Big Bang fully determined every event that would follow, including the words you are reading right now, and every thought you will have in response to them. You were always going to read this. I was always going to write it.
Even if we bring quantum randomness into it, randomness is not freedom. A decision made partly by random quantum noise is not your decision any more than a die roll is. Trading determinism for randomness doesn’t get you free will. It just gets you chaos.
So, Does Free Will Exist?
I don’t think it does. Not in the way we intuitively feel it does.
The version of free will most people believe in, where you could have genuinely chosen otherwise given the exact same brain, exact same history, and exact same moment in time, doesn’t hold up. The feeling of choice is real. The experience of deliberation is real. But the idea that some part of you exists outside the chain of cause and effect, pulling the strings from above, seems like an illusion the brain generates to make sense of itself.
That said, I find compatibilism the most useful framework even if it’s technically a rebranding of the problem. When you act according to your own reasoning and desires without someone holding a gun to your head, that is a meaningful kind of freedom worth preserving and talking about. Societies need to function, and moral responsibility isn’t going anywhere.
But knowing that your choices are the product of causes stretching back further than you can trace should inspire humility, not despair. The person who hurt you was shaped by forces they didn’t choose. So were you. That doesn’t mean consequences shouldn’t exist, but it does change how you see people, including yourself.
Final Thoughts
Free will is one of the few questions where the more seriously you take it, the more it dissolves under scrutiny. You are a universe experiencing itself through the lens of a brain that evolved to feel like it’s in control. That feeling of authorship is part of how the brain works, not evidence that it’s true.
We don’t have free will. But we do have something just as interesting: the experience of being conscious, deliberating, feeling-creatures navigating a world we didn’t design. That’s worth thinking about.