At The Whims Of The World: Do We Really Have Free Will?

We interact with reality using our senses, which are controlled by our brains. Our brains process the sense information and our minds create a concept out of it. Love is good. Hate is bad. Fire is hot and ice is cold.

Over time the exchanges between the senses and the mind, wire the brain with an emphasis towards specific channels of sensory/mind relationships, which creates our habits and finds form in our actions that influence the world in which we live. This mind/sensory connection then becomes genetic and can sway future offspring towards similar mind/sensory states….

To what degree are we like sophisticated machines then; deterministic animals acting in accord with a pre-programmed “system”? And to what degree are we free? Free will is determined by our minds, which is relentlessly at the control of our senses and emotions, so how can it be completely free? Emotions are deterministic. They are programmed responses created by the brain; the same brain that has been set on automatic after centuries of species-specific conditioning. You can say you love someone, but what is love? Is it the emotion you feel? Well that’s just a chemical reaction in your body causing you to feel that way. It’s nature’s innate system activating and taking control.

Whenever you think about love, your hypothalamus gland automatically releases peptides into your bloodstream that cause you to feel positive or negative feelings depending on your idea of love; a concept built and shaped by social determinants in your life and electrical signals that have been tying neurons together since your inception. So do you really have free will when it comes to love or any other decision for that matter?

All decisions are made based on emotion and experience. As much as we’d like to believe we are rational, logical creatures, for the most part, we feel things out. Because at the end of the day, when we don’t have the necessary information to act upon, we have to guess, and guessing is at the whim of our gut feelings, which are pretty much pre-determined. This is the essence of personality. Different people have different life experiences that have given them specific sensory information, so the way they respond to a given situation could be totally different from one another, but easily predicted based on their individual characters. However, most people make the mistake of thinking they have made themselves who they are.

In most cases, people have been defined and molded into who they are by external sources and are already so solidified in their mind/sensory habits, they can’t even conceive stepping out of their condition to examine or reconfigure it. To break the system is to break themselves and not too many are willing to go that far

So at what point do we truly have free will? How do we know it’s even possible and not just anther concept wrapped up in the feelings of hope? Well I have a few ideas. I’ll be adding them into the comments section of this post.

Gives you something interesting to think about in the meanwhile.

-Sage