The fallacy of free will

We have discussed “free will” several times: An interesting take on “Free Will vs Will Power”, and ” For those who still believe in free will, and “Read about the strange relationship between opposites: Consciousness and free will,” and “More about non-existent free will.” And elsewhere.

It is a subject that fascinates me. I hope you feel the same.

Here is what CHAT GPT says:

“Free will is generally understood as the ability to make choices that are not determined entirely by prior causes, external forces, or divine intervention.”

In other words, if you have free will, you—as an agent—can choose among alternatives in a way that you could have done otherwise.”

It goes on to give four explanations:

• Libertarian Free Will: Belief that you have genuine freedom to choose. Decisions are not entirely caused by prior events or deterministic laws. Often requires that the self or soul initiate choices.

• Determinism: Every event, including human decisions, is the inevitable result of preceding events and natural laws. Under strict determinism, free will is an illusion.

• Compatibilism: Argues that free will is compatible with determinism. You are “free” if you can act according to your desires and intentions—even if those are caused by past events.

• Hard Incompatibilism: Claims that whether determinism is true or not, you still don’t have the kind of free will that justifies moral responsibility.

In the above definitions and descriptions, a mysterious “you” lurks in the background. That always is the problem — the belief that there is an underlying “you” making out-of-body decisions. It’s the fundamental belief in free will.

And that is why free will does not exist; it would require that underlying “you,” a non-physical entity that doesn’t respond to any outside or internal stimuli, but instead is a self-stimulating concept apart from every atom in one’s body, and every field and force.

Though free will requires a self  (a  “you”) that is not affected by any external or internal stimuli. No such “you” has been found to exist. Everything we think or do is a physical response to some stimulus, external or internal, conscious.

Any process that could supposedly ininitiate “free will” would either arise from prior causes (and be deterministic), or arise from randomness (which isn’t will, just chaos), or require a non-physical self (which violates everything we know about reality).

Consciousness is the response to stimuli. It is not an on-off condition, but rather a continuum, with more reaction to more stimuli being more conscious.

Consciousness is not magical or mystical. It is physics. Not only are our choices caused, but our awarenessof choosing is itself just another response, not the seat of some independent self.

I’m going to propose counterarguments (I love arguing against myself.)

I. If we don’t have free will, why is God so angry at us? Or is that just us making assumptions about a human-like God?

Presumably, God is omniscient, omnipotent, and just. Humans have free will and are judged accordingly. God made us as we are. God knew exactly what we’d do. God is punishing us for doing what he made us do.

This creates a contradiction: A just God cannot righteously punish deterministic beings for actions they were guaranteed to perform.

Conclusions:

1. God is not omniscient, omnipotent, and just, or
2. God did not create us, or
3. God does not exist, or
4. God created us with free will.

What those four alternatives add up to is that the existence of “free will” is a theological, not a scientific, assertion, which cannot be proved scientifically

II. And if I don’t have free will, why should I be blamed and punished for doing evil or credited and rewarded for doing good?

If we don’t have free will, how can we blame Hitler and praise Mother Teresa?

It’s a matter of convenience and perspective. It is convenient to say Hitler was bad, but the reality is that his actions, i.e., his responses to his life’s stimuli, were bad. Hitler is just a bag of chemicals

Mother Teresa was a bag of similar chemicals. Society dubbed her responses to stimuli “good.” But her chemicals had no moral measure. They are just chemicals.

It is the actions that we judge, and those judgments are social, not physical. Murder is bad except when society deems it necessary. Military generals, who have killed thousands, often are revered.

Infants are neither bad nor good. Later in life, their responses to stimuli are judged by society, which then punishes or rewards those actions. The bag of chemicals is changed by stimuli.

Every second of every day, we experience trillions of stimuli, both internal and external. For our small three-pound brain, processing, analyzing, and responding to all these stimuli is an incredibly challenging task — impossible, really.

Even the most powerful electronic computer doesn’t instantly have to deal with the number and range of stimuli and needed responses that the human brain must.

Your brain and body must consider billions of ever-changing situations, from decoding photons for sight to decoding sound waves and decoding chemicals for taste.

All through your body, stimuli are decoded, so y0u can deal with pathogens, and remain the right temperature, sleep and wake, pump blood, and on and on to a factor of millions.

You must keep functioning from when you weighed 8 pounds, and now you weigh 150 pounds, and you still function, though every cell in your body has been replaced many times. (Imagine repairing a car with new parts every day, while the car is running at 50 mph.)

You must create reality out of sensory input. Response alone wouldn’t survive. You need to anticipate, and that anticipation is what you call “reality.”

You see things before you actually “see” them.

This anticipation allows you to mentally “flip” illusions, so the urn alternatively can appear to be two faces.

Pure response, billions of times every second, would be impossible, as well as exhausting. It has to be a mix — anticipation and response– or we always would be a step too slow.

So the brain is forced to take shortcuts. Survival works better with anticipation than with blind response.

The illusion of free will — the belief in effect without cause — is the method by which we create anticipation.

We already know that parts of the brain predict before other parts realize it.

In 1983, Benjamin Libet found that brain activity (the “readiness potential”) begins up to 500 milliseconds before participants report deciding to move their finger. Libet concluded that the brain begins preparing for movement before we become aware of choosing to act.

Soon et al. (2008) – fMRI-based prediction of choices Finding: Using fMRI, researchers could predict with ~60% accuracy which button a subject would press up to 10 seconds before the subject became consciously aware of deciding. “The outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity several seconds before it enters awareness.”

Haynes Lab and Others (2010s) – Unconscious determinants of thought

Later studies replicated and extended Soon et al.’s work, showing that even abstract decisions, like whether to add or subtract numbers, could be predicted seconds in advance from brain scans.

Consciousness is not a live feed but a carefully delayed and smoothed reconstruction. A classic example: the “flash-lag effect.” See video

And if you enjoy videos, try this one: 30 Best Illusions. We all have seen illusions, and these are good ones. They demonstrate one simple fact.

Our brains invent what we believe is reality. Seeing is not in the eye, or even in the optical system. It is in the prediction.

We cannot act on reality because we don’t know what reality is. It is an illusion created by our brains and other parts of the body. See: Phantom limb pain. See also, “Psychosomatic.”

This undermines the idea of free will— that conscious intent causes behavior. Just as our perception of the world is an illusion, “free will is a functional illusion — a survival mechanism.

It arises from the brain’s need to anticipate complex outcomes and simulate future actions—giving the system a predictive edge. The illusion of free will improves our survival through anticipation.

All living creatures invent their version of reality.

Evolution selects for illusion. So we don’t experience free will because it’s real—we experience it because it’s useful. Free will is not a physical reality, but an evolved illusion. It’s a product of the brain’s need to predict, simulate, and integrate stimuli rapidly for survival.

While consciousness is the ultimate response to stimuli, the free will illusion evolved to deal with the massive number of stimuli, translations of those stimuli, and responses that life survival uniquely demands.

The illusion of free will emerges from the anticipatory architecture of the human brain, which evolved not to reflect absolute truth, but to stay one step ahead of chaos.

Consider AI, to date. It is the product of some very smart people, and is very smart in a narrow range.But no one yet has been smart enough to create even a tiny fruit fly, because a fruit fly is faced with far more complex tasks than any AI.

The fruit fly must live, procreate (a massively complex function in itself), find food, eliminate, avoid predators, gauge the wind, follow odors, sleep, wake, deal with bacteria and viruses, receive stimuli, translate stimuli, and respond to stimuli.

Nature created that fruitfly with more trials and failures than we are capable of running — at least so far.

While consciousness is the response to stimuli, free will is an illusion that emerges from the predictive needs of the human brain, which evolved not to reflect absolute truth, but to stay ahead of chaos.

Every minute, the human body receives trillions of stimuli—from the photons striking our retinas, waves of sound, airborne chemicals decoded as scent, fluctuations in temperature, blood chemistry, and pressure.

Internally, our cells generate, destroy, and communicate. We are bags of chemicals shaped by evolution, complex hierarchies of input processing.

Imagine a United Nations interpreter translating speeches from trillions of people, all speaking different languages at the same time. Your brain faces an even greater challenge. It must translate, edit, and respond simultaneously.

If your response to this chaos were merely reflexive, we would die quickly. Reaction alone is too slow. To survive, organisms must anticipate. Anticipation buys time. It enables strategic action before events unfold.

This predictive capacity forms the scaffold for what we subjectively experience as “free will.”

The classical notion of free will—uncaused, sovereign choice—is incompatible with a deterministic universe. Any genuine “freedom” would require a self that acts independently of all internal and external causes, which no system (biological or otherwise) has ever demonstrated.

Yet, we experience something that feels like choice.

This experience isn’t evidence of freedom. It is a cognitive simulation that arises from the way the brain forecasts possible futures based on pattern recognition, memory, and context.

Like a chess computer searching its decision tree, the brain projects outcomes and generates readiness. Consciousness narrates these projections after the neural action has already begun.

Anticipation is not a luxury—it is a necessity. Brains evolved to “see before seeing,” to integrate probabilities and partial data in real time. Consider the experienced baseball batter: he must begin his swings before the pitch has arrived.

He reads the pitcher’s micro-signals, subconsciously aggregates prior experience, and initiates a swing before any conscious explanation exists.

When asked afterward how he knew a curveball was coming, he might say, “I could just tell.” This is not mysticism; it’s high-speed, subconscious prediction. Free will is the feeling generated when such predictions are fed into the brain’s narrative center and explained retroactively.

Consciousness does not serve as the decision-maker; instead, it acts as a narrator. It recounts the story of what the organism is currently doing, what it has done, or what it may do next.

Consciousness creates coherence in the flow of behavior, but it operates on a delay—the decisions it describes have often already been initiated by unconscious brain activity.

This does not make the experience of choice meaningless. It makes it strategic. The illusion of free will enables humans to reflect on past outcomes, simulate future options, and socially justify actions.

These are evolutionarily valuable functions, not signs of uncaused agency.

If the human brain were only a responder, we’d always be one step too slow. Our perceptual systems constantly forecast: we hallucinate continuity in flickering stimuli; we flip ambiguous images (faces or urns) with our minds. These are not errors—they are demonstrations of a system primed to guess forward.

Reality, as we perceive it, is not built from raw sensory data alone. It is constructed from expectation + input. This is why the “reality” we create feels stable—it is our prediction engine smoothing the chaos.

Free will, as a physical phenomenon, does not exist. Instead, a system has evolved to survive through prediction. The experience of choosing is a necessary illusion—a signal that our anticipatory machinery is working.

In that sense, we are not truly free, but we are equipped to feel free, just in time to stay alive.  

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Monetary Sovereignty

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