Free will oxymoron
As free as you know you aren't
If causation dictates all, then free will cannot exist. Your neurons are wired a certain way; your synapses follow neural pathways that form your mental architecture, a predictable result of genetics and random life experiences within circumstantial environments. Everything you perceive, analyse and conclude must go through your mental processes. Your whole sense of reality relies not on objective senses but on your unique individual neural network.
To have will means to be bound by your brain’s parameters. To will is to serve your self-framework. You are a mouse free to roam in his maze.
Free will cannot exist… Perhaps this realisation is the only measure of free will we can attain - and maybe that’s good enough.
The freest slave is he who understands he is a slave. Slaves with delusions of freedom are forever bound by servitude and blissful ignorance.
This is not a deterministic message, nor is it one of denial of agency or accountability. Far from it. If anything, the delusion of free will is what denies self-accountability by driving you to claim false credit for things you did not objectively earn or deserve. How self-accountable can you then be?
Why I reject free will
Every time I suggest that free will may not exist, I get a lot of emotionally-driven flack - we don’t like to be reminded that perhaps we aren’t as free as we told ourselves we were. Yet unfree will is not necessarily bad; and this coming from an individual freedom advocate.
Free Will Exists!
People insisting on “free will” are selling you something. Hear me out… Free-will advocates either want to flatter your decision-making skills before they lead you on to buy what they sell (and make you think it was your “free” decision), or they insinuate that their relative success (compared to your failures) is 100% a product of their own hard work, w…
How To Tell If You're Brainwashed
I used to write propaganda for army intelligence. My mission was to draft the psychological profile of the enemy, define narratives that served our interests, and communicate them in a way that was relatable and manipulable, exploiting the enemy’s historical/political insecurities, and more. This propaganda would then be disseminated by our assets withi…
Does free will exist?
First, we must define what free will is. The way I understand it, free will is the ability to process information, and make decisions without any involuntary external influence. However, if there is no initial influence, then, by which criteria will you be able to process information and make fully voluntary decisions? Without existing mental pathways, h…
We have free won't.
In other words, our brains get impulses and decide whether or NOT to act upon them.
That's why in experiments they found that brains decided before they consciously decided.
Iain McGilchrist's book The Matter With Things goes deeper into this, where the right hemisphere decides whether the left is correct in relation to reality or wrong. It's a bullshit detector 😂
https://iainmcgilchrist.substack.com/p/metaphors-can-make-you-blind?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true