Freewill doesn’t exist, we never had a choice..

Most of us believe that we live in a world of free choices. Where nothing we do is predetermined and we are the masters of our own destiny. Where the accumulation of our choices creates the reality in which we live. If we explore these beliefs there is a surprising reality to discover, one that reveals we never really had any choices at all.

When we think of free will, we usually think of all the choices we make in a day. For instance, you may choose to go to the shop and buy a cake, you may choose to date your neighbor, or you might choose to travel the world. All these choices may seem like events that we hold complete authority over. But where does your choice begin?

An interesting thing happens when you try to track the root of any choice you make. To track the root of each individual choice, you must go on a trip through your life, through the lives of your ancestors, through the history of evolution and time, through the formation of the galaxy, and to the very beginning of the universe itself.

The easiest way to look at this is by using an example, so let’s think about the factors that led you to read this blog. There are literally millions of factors but let’s look at some of the main ones and then create a timeline back to the first decisive factor that led to your decision to read this blog.

You probably saw a link for this blog on a Social Media platform like Facebook or LinkedIn. Why did you click on the link? It may seem like you made a simple choice but explore this choice a little more and it’s probably more complex than you think. Can you pinpoint the exact moment you made the choice?

Our bodies are made up of billions of individual parts that work collectively to create the entity that is ourselves, each of these parts can influence a decision. The cells of our body create energy, they can determine whether we feel energetic, tired, happy or sad. Bacteria in our gut release pheromones that control our behavior, they can make us crave certain things that satisfy their needs.

Our bodies are chemical factories, and these chemicals influence and drive everything we do. For instance, the chemical dopamine drives us to seek companionship and social interaction. This chemical is the reason why we all feel the need to check our Facebook so often. When we check Facebook, our brain releases dopamine which makes us feel happy. Curiosity and exploration are examples of other activities that cause the brain to release dopamine.

So although you feel that you decided to open up a Social Media site, it was probably your body's desire for dopamine that drove that choice. And although you thought you decided to open up this blog link, it was probably your bodies desire for dopamine that drove that choice too. In fact, it’s actually scientifically possible to use your body’s signals to accurately predict what choices you will make before you have consciously decided what choice you will make.

This leads to the question, why did you see a link to this blog? Potential reasons may be that you have a Social Media account, that you are in some way connected to me as a friend, acquaintance, or a friend of a friend. You might live within the same geographical region as me. Or maybe you share a common interest like Affiliate Marketing.

A bigger question to ask is, what led you to find the link to this blog right now? Did you just come across it while you were surfing the internet? Would you have clicked on a link to this blog if the doorbell rang seconds before you saw it? Or if a more interesting headline caught your eye? What if a major incident happened, like a fire engine racing to a nearby house, would this have distracted you from reading this blog? Or what if the battery died on your laptop, would you ever read this blog again? Any one of a million factors could have occurred that would have prevented you from reading this sentence right now.

If you are reading this, then you clearly speak English. Why do you speak English? The answer most likely is because you grew up in an English speaking country. Most of us grew up in one area because our parents decided to live in that area, it’s through no choice of our own. But the area we grew up in has a massive effect on the person we are. It affects the language we speak, the way we think, and the cultural habits we have.

If you couldn’t speak English, you could not read this text. If you were not part of a culture that utilizes social media, then you probably wouldn’t have found a link to this text. If you weren’t from a culture that promotes introspective thinking then you may not have an interest in this type of text.

Any decision you make is just a collection of learned reactions to social stimuli based on prior behavioral conditioning and genetics. The area you grew up in and the people who are your parents have a massive effect on every decision you make. Your genetics can make you intelligent, stupid, risk-averse, brave, strong, feeble, ambitious, lazy, the type of person who is interested in reading a blog or the type of person who hates reading blogs. So the next obvious question to ask is who are your parents? Where are they from? And why did they meet?

Your parents’ families probably lived near each other. They probably had little choice in where they lived, that choice was likely made by their parents. Consider how many factors needed to be in place for your parents to have met. They had to live close to each other, they had to meet, they had to click, they had to spend an adequate amount of time together, they had to get through arguments, fend off other potential love interests. And sorry to disgust you but out of all the millions of sperm your father passed into your mother, you were the one that made it and grew into a child. If any one of these factors or a billion others changed even slightly then you or I would not exist.

The next question is how did your grandparents meet. This is a similar story to how your parents met. We can chart this story all the way through generations of your family. You’ll eventually find that your family migrated to wherever you are in the world. If you follow your ancestor’s pattern of migration you’ll eventually find that they migrated from the same area as everyone else’s ancestors, which is where man evolved, Africa.

We have to think then, how did man evolve? Man evolved from the ape, but what did the ape evolve from. The ape evolved from four-legged mammals which evolved from reptiles. Reptiles evolved from fish and fish evolved from simplistic vertebrate sea-dwelling life forms. These simplistic sea-dwelling life forms evolved from bacteria and the bacteria evolved from the simplest single-cell organisms possible. All of these evolutions were just random mutations that managed to adapt successfully to the planet.

Comets have hit the earth, there have been ice ages, volcano eruptions, and any number of global disasters that could have completely destroyed life. But the trail of life that survived all of these disasters has led to you and me, the human species, and this moment now.

All the raw materials that make up our bodies and all other living things on our planet come from the earth. After we die, the materials that make up our body will break down and sink back into the earth. Someday, some of the materials of your body will make up the body of another living creature. Your body is currently made up of materials that were once a part of many other creatures’ bodies. So where do these materials and the earth come from?

The earth is a rock with a mass large enough to generate a strong gravity in the fabric of space. Amazingly, the earth would originally have been part of a large star that eventually died. When a star dies, it turns into a supernova and explodes its matter deep into space. The earth is a gigantic fragment from one of these explosions.

After its birthing star exploded, the earth would have traveled through space until it was captured by the gravity of the sun. The sun’s gravity would eventually have brought the earth into a steady rotation that we call the earth’s orbit. Luckily, the earth’s resting orbit area was the perfect distance from the sun to create the conditions for life to materialize. Any closer and the earth would be scorched, any further and the earth would freeze. Amazing to think, our bodies and everything on our planet, are literally made from the materials of an exploded star.

So

where did that star come from? That star came from gasses that were attracted to each other and eventually built a mass that was large enough to attract more and more gasses, that eventually turned into a gigantic star.

Those gasses formed from raw energy that was created during the big bang. All the energy that was created in the big bang still exists today. It is the energy that exists in you and me, and everything we do today. No more energy can be created and it can’t be destroyed, it can only change form. What came before the big bang? Or what caused it? That is the great mystery that is probably far beyond the simplicity of the human brain.

So there it is. Your decision to read this blog traced back to its origins, which is the dawn of everything, the beginning of time and the universe, the big bang. This is just a quick overview of all the factors that may have led to your decision. If you think of any decision you make, you can track your decision back to the origins of everything. If one factor was changed even slightly then nothing would be the same.

This is what people mean when they talk about the butterfly effect. Everything you do completely changes what the future will be in ways that you and I probably can’t even imagine.

Insignificant things we do every day are creating the “decisions” of the future. Turning on your TV might destroy a distant future civilization. Or deciding to stay in bed today might cause two people to meet in a thousand years time. The most important thing to realize here is what a miracle you are.

Your existence is literally a one in an unimaginable number chance. You can still live your life making choices as normal, just realize you really don’t have an option in the choices you make. The flow of everything is deciding for you. There was really no option in any of the choices that came before you or in any that will come after you.

What that means is that you are exactly where you should be, doing exactly what you should be doing, you are perfectly playing your part in the great play that is everything. There is a hidden conductor in this play that none of us can see, our free will doesn’t exist in this play, we don’t have a true choice.

Anytime I’m taking life too seriously, I always love to watch this video from the late genius Carl Sagan. It really puts life in perspective… Enjoy!

Thanks for reading,

Barry