I know I have posted about it before, but I find it fascinating.
Knowing that I have no free will has lots of implications. A big one being that 'How can I hate another person who is an automaton (like me)? I mean what is the point of hating someone who primarily and ultimately can’t help what they are and what they do?
It really changes a mindset.
Anyway, here is the article:
The Illusion of Free Will. And why it matters | by Helen Ma | Medium
" Free will is one of the most cherished beliefs we have about ourselves. We believe we are free to choose our actions at any given moment. Free will seems self evident because it agrees with our first hand experience. All of us experience decision making as an exercise of free will on a regular basis, from what to eat for dinner to who we chose to live with and everything in-between.
Not only is it a central part of our beliefs, free will also provides the basis for the concept of personal responsibility, which underpins our notion of justice and consequences. Without free will, it’s difficult to see how anyone can be held responsible for their actions. If no one is responsible for their actions, it’s hard to see how society can function without devolving to “might makes right”.
We tell ourselves useful stories all the time, they don’t have to be real, they just have to be useful. For example, the American Dream served as the driving force for the booming economy of the 1990s in the United States, even though it was only realized for a small fraction of the population. Another useful story is that a meritocracy is the ideal way to distribute power and wealth, which is demonstrably false, yet it help us maintain social cohesion despite rampant inequality.
Do we possess free will?
So is free will a useful story, or do they actually exist and we possess it? The experience of free will is not proof that it exists, just like the experience of seeing an optical illusion does not prove anything. As a purely mental process, it takes more than subjective introspection to prove its existence, since it cannot be observed directly. However, we can and do find evidence that would contradict its existence, at least as we know it.
to the extent that the law of cause and effect is subject to indeterminism — quantum or otherwise — we can take no credit for what happens. There is no combination of these truths that seems compatible with the popular notion of free will
— Sam Harris
Let’s take a closer look at how the illusion of free will breaks down.
In 2008, neuroscientists at the Max Planck Institute were able to detect brain activity between seven and ten seconds prior to the subjects making a decision. In another study, published in 2019, researchers in Australia was able to predict choices eleven seconds prior to participants making decisions. What these studies show, is that while our brain is making the decision, most of the decision making process is completely opaque to us.
All we can experience is the final product of whatever subconscious processes serves up. Everything we perceive comes to us via a network of nerves and neurons, but we don’t even have a guess as to how the sight of the color blue turns into the experience of seeing the color blue. We simply have no idea, not even a plausible theory that can explain how external stimulus translates into subjective experience.
So it is with the experience of thinking. We don’t think our thoughts as much as our thoughts think us, because we don’t get to choose the next random thought that drifts into our awareness, and we can’t get rid of unwanted thoughts at will, at least not without some serious training.
To sum up, a felt sense or subjective experience of free will does not mean we actually have free will, if most of our decision making process occurs outside of our awareness.
Can free will exist in a material universe?
If we do not possess free will, does it exist anywhere in the universe? It’s an apparent contradiction that free will can exist in a universe that is, down to every atom, supposed to obey the immutable laws of physics at all times, with no exceptions (those are called miracles). Is free will itself a miracle?
A quick word about determinism, which some people conflate with lack of free will. Just because we don’t have free will doesn’t mean the world is deterministic, because we are not the sole cause of events in the universe. However, there can be no free will in a deterministic universe by definition.
But wait, since quantum mechanics demonstrates that the world is not straightforwardly deterministic, couldn’t free will operate at the quantum level? Could randomness at the sub-atomic particle level somehow account for free will?
Turns out, there is a theory trying to prove just that, called the Free Will Theorem by Princeton mathematician John Conway and his longtime colleague Simon Kochen. I won’t pretend to understand their argument, I was never really good at math. But I do understand their conclusion, which is that we have free will because sub atomic particles possess it.
I don’t know about you, but that seems like something only mathematicians can believe in. If our free will is derived from the countless subatomic particles that make up our physical bodies, how is that free will? We have free will because our brains do, our brains do because our neurons do, and our neurons do because our molecules do, it’s just free will all the way down? I wonder what would happen if all the iron molecules in my blood all of a sudden decide to try something new?
Bottom line — our notion of free will is incompatible with the materialist worldview, not even quantum mechanics can save free will. The only place free will as we know it can exist is as intangible forces outside of the material world that somehow is able to interact with it. We’ll get to those later in a separate article, but for now we’ll just note that free will is fundamentally incompatible with reductive materialism. Only one of them can be true.
So what?
Ok, so free will as we commonly know it cannot co-exist with the materialist worldview. What difference does it make? Turns out, quite a lot.
Our largely retributive criminal justice system is built on the assumption that we are free to choose our actions, at all times under all circumstances. So if someone commits a crime, it’s because they chose to and therefore should suffer the consequences, however pointless and severe they may be.
As you might have guessed, it’s a lot more complicated than that. If a brain tumor could turn an ordinary person into a mass murderer, can we really take credit for not having that brain tumor in the wrong place? Can we blame people, for whatever reason, have the brain they have when we can’t take credit for having the brain we have?
The implications goes beyond the criminal justice system. Our notion of meritocracy is predicated on the idea that everyone is free to achieve anything as long as they want it enough. We are all free to choose to be the 1%, except 99% of us choose not to for various reasons, mostly our own character flaws.
How convenient.
Keeping things the way they are suits those who are at the top because it obscures an inconvenient truth — it takes more than making better choices to be successful.
Free will is a powerful argument for keeping things the way they are, because after all, we all chose it collectively on some level. Also, as discussed earlier, the act of making a choice is itself largely an illusion, so we can hardly take credit for the choices we make.
Free will is one of those self evident truths that doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny, like the earth being the center of the universe. If you believe that we live in a purely material universe, that is. If not, then that’s a whole other discussion that I’m working on.
Stay tuned!"
What do you think, or should I say how does the universe make you respond about this subject? 
You will or you won’t as decided by the universe long before your consciousness realises it.
