Free will? Who the hell is Will? Probably did something sick and twisted. I think we should keep him suspended in a protein cage, forced to watch Sam Harris shorts over and over until his brain leaks out his urinary tract.

You’ve seen the TikToks or Instagram Reels; “Remembering I have free will,” and it’s a forty-year-old bald man asking a Starbucks employee if they’d like to see his hemorrhoid. There are charming videos, like a man spinning around in an insignificant amount of water, emulating a washing machine, or a girl grabbing a bird right off the ground. Although these are titillating pieces of content that have intriguing origins in a sort of social media exhibitionist psychosis (a conversation for another day), I have been stirred by this existentialist subject, and I’d like to take a nihilistic stab at whether these individuals are truly exercising their pure volition—because what is an internet trend if not something to hate. 

The Question of Will

I am aware that I’m not the first to broach this subject, but if it consoles you (why is this kid musing on the ancient question of autonomy?) I haven’t read any Sam Harris, Susan Wolf, Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer, or Smilansky. Frankly, I am rather uneducated in philosophy at large, and so I think we can just call those thinkers my peers, and any overlap in ideas can be chalked up to mutual genius. 

I will not be wading through the stinking marsh of environmental determinism and nature vs nurture. I won’t be arguing for compatibilism. No, instead: make way for a bitching new brand of ill-informed genetic illusionism that I call, I Hope He Doesn’t Talk to Me at The Partyism.

The experience of free will is an illusion that drives self-worth. That’s why the internet has latched on to the phrase so vehemently. We are obsessed with self-worth, and the prospect that we can reach out and grasp more of it at any moment is tantalizing. This trend is in accordance with how our brains invent gymnastics to preserve and perpetuate the self. A similar process can be examined in our subjective and fallible modes of encoding/interpreting memory. I, with my whole heart, believe that I experience reality, and would be willing to stake my life on most of my perception. I equally understand that this is untrue. There are countless flaws in my ‘campus of hippos,’ and one of my favourites has always been the Peak-End rule. Tangent time.

The Peak-End rule indicates that humans experience a memory not as the entirety of an experience, but rather as an average of the climax and conclusion of said event. Here’s the gist: some doctors have to put a camera in your keister, sans anesthetic. Camera goes in at a pain threshold of 6; it rounds a bend for a pain threshold of 8 (the climax). Finally, the doctors remove the camera at a pain threshold of 5 (the conclusion). Your brain remembers this experience as an average of the values 8 and 5, and quantifies the event at a pain threshold of 6.5. In the same procedure, the camera goes in, oof 6; rounds the bend, ouch 8 (climax); time to take the camera out, eep 5. But just before they pull the GoPro out of your PortHole, one doctor goes, “Eureka,” and spends an extra ten minutes lightly stabbing at the sides of your rectum so that the final concluding pain threshold is a 3. Even though in the second experience you are enduring a longer procedure with objectively more total pain, the brain processes this experience as an average of 8 and 3, marking the experience at a pain threshold of 5.5. When asked what procedure you would repeat, you will choose the second option even though it’s objectively worse. 

For this same reason, you might go to a brutal party, waste 4 hours being uncomfortable and bored, flirt with one person, get their number, leave shortly after, and remember the party as a wildly fun night. If you’d like to do your own reading, there is a banging study from ’93 titled When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End. Additionally, my colonoscopy analogy wasn’t entirely made up and is based on a study from 1996, conducted by the same scientists.

You Are Mostly Instructions

My intention isn’t to suggest that our sense of reality is fragile and thus our free will and reasoning is baseless (although the argument could be made); I merely want to point out that our cerebral processes don’t point towards truth, but are designed to make our reality more palatable. This is observed in memory suppression in trauma victims, and it’s evident in how people invent rationales after being hypnotized. Free will is an illusion that our minds have evolved so that we can process the deterministic track laid by our DNA.

Can we all agree that we evolved through a slurry of lifeforms, commanded by strands of a protein code—we’re talking old G-A-T-T-A-C-A. Cue one twink and one spliced hunk sprinting into the ocean, breathlessly tearing their way into the dark, glassy Pacific propelled by the boyish dream of being shot off into space. Indulgent for a niche reference, but my DNA told me to do it. Just as my DNA dictates literally everything I do and will ever do. Now, if you are pragmatic or have a low will to live, that argument might be convincing enough, but if you like yourself and enjoy your emotional palate, a little part of you rejects my claim. Sure, I’m defined by my genetics, but there is a little special gooey part of my head swirling with manna where I rationalize things beyond my own biology. Right?

Sapiens’ development of emotional behaviour was not divinely ordained, but rather a product of our code being processed through time’s cruel meat grinder. Survival of the fit enough (plus a little randomness [it’s whatever sticks around]). Turns out humans live longer when we are in groups, and we like each other more when we share: oooooo empathy and reciprocity. Being silly and smiling suggests the absence of threat, and sharing in relief increases trust: oooooo happiness. We can provide support for one another at the expression of a juvenile state: oooooo sadness.

Of course these base traits keep on evolving, and we end up with weird bastardized versions of pure emotion, just as generalized anxiety disorder seems to be an over-evolution of a fear response. Emotions aren’t a poetic expression of the soul; they are a byproduct of genetic/biological evolution. With this in mind, at what point did humans make the jump from operating based on genetic instinct to free will? It feels disingenuous to suggest they are the same. Is it conceivable that as our self-awareness evolved, our sense of free will grew stronger on a parallel scale? The illusion of choice makes us more attentive to events (even ones we can’t control) while our over-evolved social skills distract us. Free will also protects us from the harsh reality that we don’t make decisions. A reality that might drive us to apathy and suicide. 

Does a person born with intense treatment-resistant depression have less free will than someone who is born neurotypical? Do chimpanzees have less free will than humans? Surely, free will isn’t akin to some willpower based in an aptitude for whimsy that one needs to access via an anime-coded belief in self. No, that depressed individual has a genetic code that is expressing over-evolved emotional responses, provoked by an overly designed reality. 

Preference Politiks

Most people don’t even believe that Free Will is truly free. Instead, most people subscribe to a neopolitan flavour of free will which is a reality shaped by unchosen environmental factors, genetic determinism, and a little pocket of ‘I’m special, I chose to buy dino nuggets at the grocery store, when there was a chance I wasn’t going to buy dino nuggets at the grocery store.’ I am here to tell you that you bought dino nuggets because of your genetics. If we had a complex supercomputer that could read your genetic code and all the environmental factors—the grocery store, your upbringing, your reality—it would determine that you will buy the dino nuggets. If this scenario is run as a simulation, every time that situation plays out, you will buy those dino nuggets. Your free choice is fixed because your body is based on code and the universe is math.

Maybe you think I’m putting too much emphasis on the role of DNA? To this, I’ve always enjoyed pointing at personality changes in patients post-heart transplant. After organ transplants (most commonly heart transplants), a warned symptom of the procedure is personality change. While some personality changes are a reflection of new health or lifestyle, these alterations can also be as severe as experiencing verifiably true memories of the donor host, and a complete 180° in likes and dislikes. These preference changes can be cursory; they can also be defining, like sexual behaviour, career path, and who you main in Smash Bros. There is a great paper that came out of the University of Colorado School of Medicine, titled Personality changes following heart transplantation: The role of cellular memory, in which I hope they validate my claims, because I didn’t read it. It costs $35 USD; are you kidding me? Here’s a quote just so you know it’s real:

Accounts of recipients’ acquiring personality traits of their donor following heart transplantation challenge the notion that the heart is “just a pump,” and highlight a major gap in our understanding of such experiences. In order for personality changes to occur, some form of memory transfer must transpire between the donor and recipient. 

You are an operating system, and by introducing new assembly language, you change. There is no identity or freedom in this exchange. Self is as fragile as the protein structures it is based on. We are protein, not purpose, and no matter how loud you scream at that gas station attendant, you still don’t matter. Free will prevents social breakdown and protects us from consciousness.

The only justification, in my mind, that free will would reasonably exist is to serve something supernal, like a soul. But I just have a hard time believing in a soul when my very essence can be changed via organ transplants, splicer, or neural stimulation. This is exacerbated by the fact that my identity evolved from a sloppy little fish creature. No time is more significant than another. I am of equal significance to that fish creature, and that fish creature does not have free will; thus, I am reluctant to believe that at some indeterminate moment my ancestors developed a soul. Sure, the spiritual baddies are crying, “You’ve got it wrong, man. We are all part of the same energy. Our planet is the soul,” to which I reply, why is free will of any importance then? It arguably makes less sense. It’s like giving every ant in an ant colony a favourite movie. What about religion? Hmmmm, don’t a lot of faiths argue for a deterministic system too? God’s Plan baby.   

Nobody Asked the Amoeba

I must concede, the strongest argument FOR free will lies in humans’ morbid capacity for suicide. Instincts are not free will. If you put ten amoebas in petri dishes with a speck of food, all ten will navigate to the food and eat. It’s fixed by their genetic instructions. Now, if one of those amoebas protested the food and instead wasted away, I would be inclined to listen to a pro-free will argument. The amoeba is defying its own genetic design, a behaviour that contradicts my argument. I do subscribe to an anti-anthropocentric view. I would find it perplexing if we possessed free will, yet no other animal did—that’s not really an argument, more just how I feel. You can’t kill yourself if you have no conception of death.

Truth is, genetics are of a complex yet messy design. Sometimes the code corrupts, IE: cancer. My Occam’s razor counterargument is that suicide is an error in genetics, or at least our genetics are unfit for the world we’ve collectively designed, and we experience our evolution-based emotions at a state of high dissonance with our surroundings, resulting in stress-related tragedy. This leads me to the discussion of one final concept—relatively tangential to the argument of free will, but interesting nonetheless.

Have you ever heard of Behavioural Sink Theory? The behavioural sink was discovered during a series of experiments conducted by John B. Calhoun (the B stands for Bumpass; no joke). Calhoun created a series of rodent universes, where he introduced pairs of rats and mice to controlled utopian habitats. The rodents could roam a series of tunnels, nesting boxes, food hoppers, and water dispensers. They had unlimited access to nesting materials, breeding partners, a variety of food, water, etc. What began sanguine, eventually devolved into a hellscape. Around the 300-day mark, the colony’s birth rate faltered. Around the 600th day, the colony produced no new mice, despite its idyllic conditions. Females became unable to carry children, and violence seized the colony.

Their numbers fell into terminal decline and the population tailed off to extinction. At the experiments’ end, the only animals still alive had survived at an immense psychological cost: asexual and utterly withdrawn, they clustered in a vacant huddled mass. Even when reintroduced to normal rodent communities, these “socially autistic” animals remained isolated until death. In the words of one of Calhoun’s collaborators, rodent “utopia” had descended into “hell.” (Marsden, 1972)

There are clunky comments to be made regarding free will and this experiment. If these animals (or at least some of them) in the face of utopia (although a cramped Eden), were unable to choose satisfaction, does this suggest they were doomed; that no amount of autonomous will would have saved their souls? 

I bring up this study as a comparison to our current overcrowded and abundant Western civilization. Were the animals unable to process a utopian reality, as their genetic code was designed to address a certain amount of necessary struggle factors? Is our advanced age having a similar effect on us—breeding rates are down, suicide and associated mental issues are becoming more prevalent, and distorted hypersexuality is prevalent in the ruling class. Is our genetic predisposition at odds with our habitat? I think there is a strong case to be made that it is. If we maneuver based on free will, does free will not allow us the choice of satisfaction? Sure, we can choose to take mental health days, see a therapist, eat well, or go on a run, but are those just new survival tactics adapted to our current age—do we choose those or are we cornered into those behaviours as the subsequent option is misery? Doesn’t sound free to me. One must imagine a boulderless rodent Sisyphus—fucking, eating, and drinking—happy. But he is not. And neither am I.

Get On With It

I can sense your curdled brow, stewed by my nihilism, and I see you. This argument is not one of productivity, and I concede that the illusion of free will has its benefits. To the truth? No. To our survival? Yes. But imagine this: you are on a rollercoaster. The track is made of intricate and colourful double helixes—corkscrewing round into the most elaborate ride you could ever conceive. Sometimes the track forks, or changes, and you sit in your cart acknowledging these possibilities with hope. While you yearn for the ride to move one way or another, you can not, with certainty, exact control over its direction. So one must sit back and learn to enjoy the rollercoaster. Love it for what it is, and feel pride in the experience. Or you can just believe in God or some junk. 

Oh, so free will is an illusion; I guess I’ll just sit still for the rest of my life. Sure, that’s literally what monks do, and we regard it as a true and impressive existence—go right ahead. It sure beats posting videos of you torturing customer service employees and blaming it on your autonomy. Plus we’re going to build a simulation of our ancestors soon, and simulation theory will be proved correct. The speed of light is a processor, quantum mechanics is an expression of rendered data, and Planck scale suggests that our universe has a pixels per space ratio. 

Anyways, I’m over it. I’m going to watch some mildly pornographic Instagram Reels, smoke a few cigarettes, and eat a succulent Chinese meal packed with more sugar than an orangutan will consume in their entire life—all of my own free will… illusion.