u/impersonal_process

Descartes "I think, therefore I am" commits a mistake by assuming that if there is thinking, there must also be a thinker - something distinct from the thought itself that does the thinking. A more economical description is simply: there is thinking. A thought arises. In the same way, the statement "No one prevents me from thinking, therefore I have free will" is more accurately expressed as: thinking occurs unhindered.

Descartes claim and the compatibilist conclusion share the same fallacy. In both cases, the absence of one thing is treated as evidence for the presence of something entirely different. For Descartes, the absence of doubt is taken as proof that a thinking subject exists. For compatibilism, the absence of external constraint is taken as proof that free will exists. But the fact that we do not find an obstacle does not mean that we have found an author. Absence does not, by itself, create presence. It merely reveals a process unfolding according to its own lawful regularities. There is thinking. There is choosing. There is living. And within these impersonal verbs, no place remains for an independent agent.

To say that a person is free because they do what they want is only half the truth. The other half is far less comfortable: a person does not choose what they will want, what they will find convincing, what will frighten them, what will attract them, what will repel them, or how much force any particular motive or belief will have at any given moment.

Freedom, in this sense, often turns out to be little more than rhetorical decoration laid over causality. When a system operates according to its programming, we call it "functioning." When a human being operates according to their programming, some call it "free." The difference lies in an emotional need for dignity. Human beings do not want to see themselves as results. They want to see themselves as first causes. They do not want to be effects but beginnings. Yet the desire to be a first cause does not make it so.

That need, to be a beginning rather than an impersonal consequence is not a product of free will but another product of the very same causal chain. An organism convinced that it is the first cause of its actions takes responsibility, makes plans, feels regret, and corrects its course with greater persistence than an organism that experiences itself merely as a conduit for past causes. Evolution did not select for truth; it selected for effectiveness, and belief in authorship proved more adaptive than accuracy. The desire to see oneself as a beginning is therefore not an argument against determinism; it is one of determinism's most sophisticated products, a mechanism designed to conceal its own origins precisely because that concealment enhanced the survival of the organism carrying it.

The belief, "I am the first cause," does not mean that I am the first cause. It means only that the thought, "I am the first cause," has occurred. The belief itself may have come from outside: from parents, teachers, religion, culture, or language. It did not create itself. It is the result of causes that made it seem convincing.

If someone grows up in a society that constantly repeats, "You alone choose your destiny," they are far more likely to adopt that belief than someone raised among philosophers who, from childhood, explain that human beings are not exempt from an unbroken chain of cause and effect. In both cases, the belief is not freely chosen. It has entered the mind, found fertile ground, and become part of the way the organism interprets its own actions.

The paradox is that even the thought, "I freely chose to believe that I am the first cause," is itself just another thought that arose because of prior causes. It cannot serve as evidence for its own truth, because it is itself part of the very phenomenon it attempts to explain. To use the feeling of free authorship as proof of free authorship is circular reasoning. It is like a clock trying to prove its own accuracy merely by pointing to its own hands.

From the standpoint of determinism, it makes no difference whether a person believes they are a first cause or believes they are an effect. Both beliefs are events in the brain produced by prior events. The only difference lies in the content of the thought, not in the way it comes into existence. The irony is that even the strongest defender of free will did not freely choose the arguments with which they defend it. Nor did the determinist freely choose the arguments with which they reject it. Both are products of history, biology, and environment that, at a particular moment, arrived at different conclusions.

Imagine a sailor who has spent his whole life believing he controls the wind. Every morning he raises his hands to the sky and recites a spell, and then, when the wind blows in the desired direction, he concludes: “I did that.” The days when the wind blows against him are inconvenient details. They do not count. Perhaps the spell was uttered with insufficiently dramatic intonation. Perhaps the sky was not in the mood. Perhaps the Universe was having technical difficulties. What matters is that when coincidence works in favor of superstition, it is called evidence. When it does not work, it is called an exception.

This is exactly how the naive belief in free will functions: we feel a desire, perform an action, and then consciousness solemnly declares, “I chose,” without ever asking where the desire came from, why this particular motive outweighed the others, who chose the character, the childhood, the brain chemistry at that given moment.

One day, the sailor is shown the meteorological maps. The wind has never listened to his spell - not even once. A crisis follows: “I have lost control over the elements!” But he has not lost a control he never possessed. He has lost only a flattering story about himself. The same is true of the discovery that free will is an illusion: the first reaction is tragic: “If I do not govern my causes, then I am a marionette, then nothing has any meaning”, as if the sailor were to decide that since he does not control the wind, there is no point in trimming the sails.

Here lies the difference between childish superstition and mature navigation. Yes, you did not choose your initial conditions, but you can be changed by new conditions. The naive person wants freedom as magic: “I command the wind.” The mature person wants freedom as a skill: “I am learning to sail according to the wind.” The first flatters the ego; the second moves the ship.

Real freedom is not stepping outside the chain; it is the chain being able to pass through other links. It is encountering an idea, an environment, or a habit that changes your direction. It is the moment when longing finally comes to weigh more than inertia. This is not an illusion; this is the practical freedom we meant all along, before we imagined ourselves to be little gods.

The sailor does not lose the ship when he stops believing in spells. On the contrary, that is when he understands for the first time how the ship truly moves. Free will for naive believers dies on the day we see the map. But freedom does not die with it. Only the spell dies.

In this world, nothing essentially carries any meaning in itself. No reality “out there” is, by itself, capable of projecting itself in the form of emotional experience. Everything is emptiness with a psycho-chemical flavor. There is nothing good or bad, desired or hated; there is nothing at all, unless it is produced in our inner laboratory for creating emotional mixtures aimed at sustaining our existence.

Even in the free will debate, we do not choose in advance what will convince us, what will repel us, or which position will seem more credible to us. We do not choose our sensitivity to arguments, our temperament, our need for order, our tendency toward doubt, our fear of meaninglessness, or the comfort we find in the idea of authorship. A thesis takes root not because some independent “I” has chosen it out of nothing, but because it has encountered a suitable biography, a suitable nervous system, a suitable emotional soil.

Every thought has a neural substrate. Every neural substrate has a history: genes, development, environment. None of these determinants is chosen by the subject. Consciousness arrives after the decision and narrates it as its own. Libet measured it. Sapolsky extended it to the biology of behavior. Damasio showed that even the “rational” choice is emotional before it becomes logical.

The human being is a collection of impersonal natural processes experienced from within as a personal fate; therefore, free will is not a metaphysical reality, but an experience produced by those processes.

The problem I have with compatibilism is that it defines freedom too narrowly: as the absence of external coercion, threat, or physical restraint. But the absence of one kind of coercion does not mean the absence of causal determination. A person may be free from a gun pointed at him, but that does not mean he is free from his character, his desires, his biography, his emotional reactions, and the causes that produce his decision.

That is why, in my view, what compatibilism calls “free will” would be more accurately called voluntary action. To act voluntarily means to act according to one’s own desires, without external coercion. But this still does not mean that one is the author of the very desires from which the action arises. The absence of external coercion is not authorship over the will.

If we accept that a will is free simply because it is free from some particular restriction, then the concept of “freedom” becomes diluted. Almost any will can be called free in some limited sense, because every will is free from some factors and dependent on others. For example, my will when choosing a dish from a restaurant menu is “free” from the weather on Mars, but that says nothing substantial about free will. The important question is not what I am not dependent on, but what I am dependent on when the decision actually takes place.

The same applies to the example with the gun. Even a person under threat may refuse to obey if the fear of death is not a strong enough motive for him, or if his belief that death is a good thing prevails. No one can force that belief not to function; therefore, in that sense, the will remains free even under the barrel of a gun. This only shows that his action follows a stronger internal motive. And that motive, too, has its own history, its own causes, and its own conditioning.

The fact that different people find different positions convincing, not on the basis of different evidence, but because of their different emotional histories is among the most eloquent indications that choosing a philosophy is not a free choice.

The position found you.

You merely thought you had chosen it.

Cortisol, adrenaline, and serotonin do not read reality like philosophers. They do not check whether an idea is metaphysically true, whether it is logically sound, or whether it corresponds to the structure of the world. They react to interpretation. To the narrative. To the meaning the organism assigns to what is happening. That is why one and the same situation can be experienced as a threat, a challenge, a punishment, an opportunity, a humiliation, or fate. The body does not wait for proof. It believes the translation the brain gives it.

In this sense, belief is pharmacology. It is not merely an opinion sitting somewhere in the head like a sentence. It is a chemical event. The belief that something will help can trigger a real bodily reaction. There is no medicinal substance in a sugar pill, but sometimes it relieves pain because the brain believes it will relieve it and produces endogenous opioids in response. An unreal premise, real biochemistry. This is the scandal of the placebo: the organism does not react only to the world, but also to the meaning with which the world is charged.

Here free will appears in a peculiar light. Not as truth, but as opium. Not necessarily as a crude deception, but as a substance of interpretation that changes a person’s inner chemistry. Especially compatibilist free will - that softened, socially acceptable version according to which we are free when we act according to our desires, without external coercion. It does not necessarily claim that we are independent of causality. It does not say that we are magical sources of ourselves. It simply renames a certain form of causally conditioned action as “free will.”

Compatibilist free will says to a person: “Yes, you are part of nature, but still, that was your choice.” It preserves the language of authorship without committing itself to a miracle. It leaves the person inside causality, but gives him the psychological feeling that he is not merely being carried by it. This is its opiate effect. It soothes. It organizes. It makes life more bearable, because it allows a person to experience himself as a participant, not merely as a place through which processes pass.

That is why free will is opium not only because it intoxicates, but because it anesthetizes. It softens the horror of impersonal causality. For many people, the thought that they are entirely the product of biology, environment, history, trauma, habits, and luck sounds like a stripping away of human dignity. It can be experienced as coldness, as emptiness, as inner disempowerment. Then compatibilist free will arrives as a moderate dose of consolation: “You are not outside causes, but still, you are free when those causes pass through your desires.” This is a philosophical injection of morphine.

Compatibilist free will is perhaps the most successful cultural drug because it does not look like a drug. It looks reasonable, moderate, civilized. It does not speak of a soul fallen from heaven. It does not deny science. It simply preserves the old feeling of authorship while dressing it in more modest clothes. It says: “You are free when you do what you want.” But it does not ask insistently enough: “And where did that wanting come from? Why did precisely that desire prevail? Who chose the strength of the motive? Who chose the character through which the action passed?”

It is precisely these questions that spoil the anesthesia.

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Look carefully. The thought “I choose” is not evidence that there is an “I” who chooses. It is an event among other events. It has arisen in exactly the same way that rage, tenderness, and fatigue have arisen - from processes whose mechanics are entirely inaccessible to conscious awareness, in accordance with conditions you did not set, at a moment you did not determine. The thought “I choose” means only that the thought “I choose” has been thought. Nothing more. Nothing less.

The thought “I choose” is often taken as evidence for the existence of an autonomous choosing subject. But a thought does not prove the ontology it presupposes. The thought “someone is watching me” does not prove that someone is actually watching me. The thought “I deserve punishment” does not prove that there is a metaphysical ledger somewhere in the universe. In the same way, the thought “I choose” does not prove that some inner ruler lives inside the brain, independently choosing what to desire, what to regard as reasonable, and which intention to turn into action.

There is also another interpretation, known as compatibilism. According to this view, an independent inner ruler is not required in order to speak of free will. It is enough that the action arise from the person’s own beliefs, desires, values, and reasoning rather than from external coercion or a direct physical threat. In this sense, when a person chooses in accordance with their character and motives, they act freely, even if that character and those motives are themselves the result of prior causes. From this perspective, the absence of a metaphysical “little person inside the head” does not destroy freedom; it merely understands freedom differently - as the organism’s capacity to act according to what it is, rather than as a capacity to be independent of causality. This does not refute the preceding analysis. It shows that the dispute is often not so much about the facts as about what exactly we want to call “free will.”

But in its very definition, compatibilism implicitly acknowledges something more radical: the human being is not an independent source of thoughts and actions, but a biological system continuously reacting to stimuli acting upon it and arising within it. A word affects us, and a thought arises. A threat frightens us, and the body mobilizes. A memory is activated, and the mood changes. A desire crosses a certain threshold, and an action follows. We think and act in response to whatever irritates, attracts, repels, frightens, or persuades us, without having chosen in advance either our sensitivity to these stimuli or the way our nervous system will process them. When the compatibilist says that we are free because we act according to our own desires and motives, they are in fact acknowledging that we act as a particular biological machine inevitably reacts to a particular causal configuration. The only thing that changes is the label: the automatism that passes through the organism’s internal architecture is called “freedom.”

Free will is the presumed capacity of a rational agent to form intentions, make decisions, and perform actions for which the agent is considered the author and bearer of responsibility.

According to the deterministic critique, however, the very intentions from which decisions arise are not formed by the agent’s will, but emerge as a consequence of the agent’s biology, experience, environment, and momentary psychophysical state. In other words, the will is a consequence of intentions, rather than intentions being a consequence of the will.

The history of knowledge is the history of instruments, not introspection. Every breakthrough (Copernicus, Darwin, Libet) occurred not when the mind looked more deeply into itself, but when it was equipped with apparatus that extended the configuration beyond its natural limits. The telescope did not persuade astronomers by means of logic; it changed the physical input data until the new inevitability displaced the old one. Without such an extension, the mind remains enclosed within its own sense of adequacy. It experiences no doubt, because doubt itself is a physical process that, under a particular configuration, simply does not arise.

Libet did not persuade anyone through the force of argument. He attached electrodes. Only when the neural impulse became visible before the intention did something in the configuration shift - not the belief itself, but the physical basis on which the belief rests. Many people looked at the same data and rejected them because their configuration did not allow such a shift. Data do not speak for themselves; they speak only when they encounter a neural architecture ready to hear them.

Second meaning of determinism is more difficult than the first: not only are our actions determined, but so is our ability to perceive that determination. Insight is not a privilege of the mind, but a result of the configuration. We do not choose whether to believe in free will for the same reason that we did not choose the synapses through which that belief is sustained.

No one chooses out of nothing what will seem convincing to them. No one chooses out of nothing what they will desire. No one chooses out of nothing what will frighten them. No one chooses out of nothing what kind of character they will have, what threshold of impulsiveness they will carry, what will move them, what will disgust them, what will attract them, or what they will feel ashamed of.

A person chooses, but does not choose the conditions that predetermine the choice.

This is the tragic and comic side of the human situation. We are marionettes arguing that we have no strings because the strings are invisible. We are automata saying “I” because automatism has reached self-awareness. We are natural processes experiencing themselves as personal destiny.

The compatibilist will say that, despite all this, the will is free from many things, and I will agree with him. I am happy when I feel good and when I realize that I am free from many things that would not make me feel good.

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