Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.
Decisions in the brain occur before you are conscious of them.In special study, subjects were asked to press one of two buttons while watching a clock composed of a random sequence of letters on a screen. The experimenters used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show that two brain regions contained information about which button subjects would press a full seven to ten seconds before the decision was consciously made.
It’s hard to let go of the idea that free will exists, but neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky says that society starts to look very different once you do.
Robert Sapolsky is one of the most revered scientists alive today. He made his name from his work studying wild baboons in Kenya, unpicking how their complex social lives lead to stress.
His most recent focus, however, has been on something rather different – a book that comprehensively argues that free will doesn’t exist in any shape or form.
As he writes: “We are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control – our biology, our environments, their interactions”.
