The Illusion of Free Will
What if free will is just a clever illusion, not because it doesn’t exist, but because we experience “choice” only because our limited processing power prevents us from seeing all possibilities at once? This is a concept I explore in my upcoming book, The Cosmic Mind. In this exploration, I delve into the idea that, if we accept the Cosmic Mind’s infinite computational power, we might realise something unsettling: with its boundless capacity, the Cosmic Mind already knows every possible outcome.
From its perspective, all outcomes have already happened. And so, free will—this thing we feel as an undeniable part of our lives—becomes part of a much larger, more complex reality, one that I explore throughout the book.
Schopenhauer had already laid the foundation for this argument centuries ago: we do not will what we will. Our desires, thoughts, and actions are dictated by an interplay of character, experience, and external forces, all bound within a framework of necessity. In simpler terms, what we call “choice” is just the unfolding of events within predetermined parameters. Free will, in the absolute sense, is a non-starter.
But then, skeptics raise their familiar challenge: if everything is determined, why do we feel like we’re making choices? And if the alternative is pure randomness, then choice loses all meaning. If our decisions are nothing more than quantum coin flips, we’re left with nothing but chaotic noise. So, we return to the age-old question: if the universe is determined but not random, how can we still experience choice?
The answer, I believe, lies in how we process reality itself.
Picture this: You’re immersed in an open-world video game, where countless possibilities lie before you. To the player, every decision—where to go, what to do, which path to take—feels like a free choice. But from the perspective of the game’s underlying code, every action was already accounted for, long before you touched the controller.
Now, scale that up to the universe. As conscious beings, we have limited computational power—we can only process a fraction of all possible decisions at any given moment. This limitation creates the illusion of choice. We see only a narrow path through the near-infinite web of potential futures. But to the Cosmic Mind, all possibilities are known, processed, and intertwined. From its vantage point, we didn’t just take one path—we took all of them.
If we entertain the notion of an omniscient Cosmic Mind, one with infinite processing capacity, it follows that every permutation of choice exists as a precomputed solution. This leads us to a few conclusions:
Our choices aren’t truly free—they are constrained by prior conditions and our own computational limitations.
From the Cosmic Mind’s perspective, all paths have already been taken—there is no “decision” in the sense we think of it, because every button has already been pressed.
What we perceive as ‘choosing’ is just experiencing the most computationally efficient path that aligns with our awareness.
The Cosmic Mind doesn’t need to wait and see which choice we’ll make—it already holds all possible configurations. Our moment of decision is not a surprise; it’s simply the way our particular trajectory lights up on the vast cosmic map.
So what does this mean for us? If free will doesn’t truly exist in the way we think, should we simply resign ourselves to nihilism? Absolutely not.
Think of it this way: when you step into a theme park, there are multiple rides to choose from. From the park designer’s perspective, all those rides were planned, built, and set into place long before you arrived. Yet, when you walk through the entrance, you still experience the thrill of picking one. The fact that the roller coaster existed before you decided to ride it doesn’t diminish the rush of the drop.
That’s the essence of our experience of free will. Not an absolute choice, but an interactive amusement—a ride that makes life feel dynamic, even though the structure of the park was already there.
The unsettling yet oddly comforting conclusion is this: we don’t actually make choices; we just experience them unfolding. Our sense of agency is not a sign of autonomy, but a reflection of our limited ability to perceive the full deterministic structure of reality. And yet, this doesn’t make life meaningless. If anything, it makes it even more fascinating. We are participants in an infinite computational process, navigating a universe where possible path already exists, and we simply step into the one that resonates most with us.
Maybe free will isn’t real. But the illusion of it? That’s priceless.
In the next article, I explore the intriguing connection between causation and the illusion of free will. What if causation, as we understand it, is not as fixed as we believe? I’ll delve into how our perception of cause and effect might be a construct of our limited perspective, challenging the classical view that every event has a predetermined cause.