The Free Will Experiment
Well, let's run a little experiment for you. Think of a city. Any city you want in the world. Just pay attention to what this process is like. The first thing to notice is that this is as free of a decision as you're ever gonna make. There isn't a gun to your head and you're just being asked to pick 1 city. Now do it one more time, and pay attention again to what this experience is like. Pick a new city. Now, there are many cities you've heard of which didn't occur to you such as for example, Cairo. However, the neurophysiology of your brain dictated that Cairo would not be in the cards. Now were you really free to choose that which did not occur to you to choose? Based on the state of your brain a few moments ago and how recently and often you've thought of Cairo, that decision is made based on the circuity of the neurons of your brain. Of course, if you did pick Cairo you should consider yourself a fortune teller. So let's say you thought of New York, Tokyo, and Amsterdam.
Then you said to yourself, I love Tokyo, I'm going with Tokyo, and then in the end said nonono, Amsterdam! Herein lies the idea that motivates the idea of free will. It's just you and your thoughts and you're picking by yourself. You could have taken as long as you wanted, you could have gone through all the cities and picked one. Even if you have a story to tell yourself, such as well I picked Tokyo because I had Japanese food last night, well why didn't you think the opposite as in, well I just had Japanese last night, so let's go with New York.
There's no amount you can fill into the story that makes thoughts not come out of the darkness. Now if you can see that every single decision in your life is exactly like that too, who you choose to marry, what car you decided to buy, whether you want water or a soda, you will see that you do indeed not have any free will and you are as in control of the words that come out of your mouth as you are the words that come out of other people's mouths. You don't choose what thoughts arise in consciousness. You can't think a thought before you think it.
This isn't obvious to most people because they never bothered to sit alone with themselves and close their eyes and pay attention to their thoughts and actively try to suppress them and try to think of nothing for 10 minutes. If you did this once, you would quickly realize you're not capable of doing this, and thus don't have any free will. Now the reason most people don't meditate once ever is because for some reason, we easily get caught in the momentum of life in this distracted age and always have stimuli to immerse ourselves in. We need a daily reminder in order to feel the ego as not really there. Realizing that you as the thinker of thoughts don't exist, not that reality isn't real or that you aren't real, just the part where you think you're the one doing everything, allows you to relax and loosely take each moment as it comes to you.
It also shows you there's nothing else to do, nowhere else to be other than where you are now and that the moment you live in right now is the only "real" thing that exists. The past isn't "real" because when that happened that was now too, the future isn't "real" because when that arrives that'll be now too.
So when you see that deep down people aren't responsible for who they are, and that you had no choice in choosing the family you were born into, the life circumstances you find yourself in, you can begin to feel a deep sympathy for people. If you were born a psychopath, it wouldn't be up to you. So it allows us to be more compassionate towards other people and hopefully a bit nicer.
Also, don't let this idea scare you, if you're thinking to yourself, well am I just a puppet? Or am I really doing everything that really exists? The answer is that both are true and you can choose to either accept responsibility, and deal with the things under your control, and say to yourself everything I do matters or you can live responsibility free and say to yourself nothing matters. In my experience, life is a lot more meaningful if you choose the responsibility path, though it may be tougher. The fact of the matter is, what you do really does matter because your actions ripple outwards and create ever growing effects in people across the globe. Also, you're at the center of a network, you'll know at least 1,000 people over the course of your life and they'll know 1,000 people each, and that puts you 1 person away from a million people. And so the things you do are like dropping a stone in a pond. You wouldn't believe how far your actions reach, and this means the things you do and don't do are far more important than you think.
If you have any questions, shoot them below and I'd be happy to answer them.
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Credits go to Sam Harris, Neoruscientist and Alan Watts, Philosopher
