Wrestling with Wonder: One Big Question, Every Angle, No Easy Answers

In the 1980s, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet found that he could detect brain activity related to a decision nearly a full second before the person was consciously aware of making it. Mm-hm. Before they even felt like they'd chosen. Exactly. It just… happened. And this feels like the perfect place to pick up from our conversation last week, you know? We talked about wrestling with big questions and staying in that space of honest wonder. Well, this one might be the biggest. The feeling that I chose to say this sentence versus the possibility that my brain just served it up for me to witness. Right. Are we the drivers, or are we just passengers with a really convincing illusion of a steering wheel in our hands?

It's the free will versus determinism question. It's ancient. And it still feels completely unresolved. The determinist argument is so… clean. So logical. Everything that happens is the result of what came before it. A chain of cause and effect stretching all the way back to the Big Bang. Yeah, it's the physics argument. Your brain is a physical object. It’s made of atoms. Those atoms obey the laws of physics. So your thoughts, your feelings, your "choices"—they're just the end result of an incredibly complex, but ultimately unbroken, causal chain. But that just feels SO wrong. I mean, my entire subjective experience, every moment of my life, is one of making choices.

I am deciding, right now, not to just stop talking. That feels like a real power I have. Oh, I know. It’s the single most powerful counter-argument: our own intuition. But the hard determinist would say that feeling is just… an epiphenomenon. It's like the steam rising from the train engine. It’s a byproduct of the real work happening underneath, but it has no power to affect the engine itself. Your brain already made the choice based on your genetics, your past experiences, what you ate for breakfast… Wow. Okay, so if we take that seriously, what does it do to morality? To justice? If someone's actions are just the inevitable outcome of a causal chain, how can we hold them responsible?

How can you blame them? Or praise them, for that matter. You can't. Not in a deep, philosophical sense. That's the part that's really hard to swallow. The entire foundation of our society—from the legal system to just, you know, being mad at someone for cutting you off in traffic—is built on the assumption that they could have done otherwise. And determinism says, no, they couldn't have. So what are the other options? We can’t just all become hard determinists and throw our hands up, can we? No, probably not. So, you get different camps. You get the philosophical libertarians—not the political kind—who say that, somehow, human consciousness is special.

That we can genuinely originate new causal chains. That we CAN and DO make choices that are not determined by the past. But they don't really have a mechanism for how that works, do they? It's sort of a… a ghost in the machine. It is. It’s an appeal to the mystery of consciousness itself. Then you have the middle ground, which is where a lot of modern philosophers land. It's called compatibilism. Compatibilism. Okay. They're compatible. What are they trying to make compatible? Determinism and free will. The compatibilist says we can have both, we just need to redefine "free will." They say a choice is "free" if you are acting according to your own desires, without being forced by some external power.

So, even if your desire to get coffee was determined by your brain chemistry, the act of getting it was free because no one held a gun to your head. You did what you wanted to do. Huh. That feels a little like a word game, though. It's like saying a river flows freely, but it can only ever stay in its banks. It doesn't capture that feeling I have of being able to choose the banks themselves. It doesn't. And that's the core of the wrestling match, isn't it? The scientific picture of the world seems to point one way, toward a universe of cause and effect. But our deepest, most personal experience of being human points in the exact opposite direction.

So we’re left in this impossible position. I have to live my life as if I'm free. I have to believe my choices matter. I have to hold myself and other people accountable. But there's this constant, nagging voice from science and logic that says it might all be an elaborate show. And maybe that's the only answer we get. To live inside that contradiction. To act with purpose, while holding a bit of humility about how much is truly up to us. So I'm left with the choice to believe in choice. And I'm not even sure if I made that one freely.