If you are reading this article, then surely you are in a problematic situation. If it is currently morning or midday, then I dare say you have scarcely a moment to prepare yourself. If this is the last thing you do today, then you have but a restless night’s sleep until you must face this dilemma: The problem of confronting a decision once you’ve realized that you don’t have free will.
This is no joke. We really can’t make choices. In fact, we have never made a choice in our lives. Wherever we find ourselves, tomorrow was bound to happen based on where we were two minutes ago, two days ago, and two years ago. All the decisions we think we are making, and every ounce of control we think we have, all are illusions, and I can prove it.
One of the main things we feel we have control over is our physical bodies. For instance, if we need to go somewhere we move our legs to walk, or if we have an itch we move our hand to scratch. But not so fast. It is true that when we think of our bodies as a single blob then this all makes perfect sense, but as we know upon closer examination this is not the case. The human body has about 37 trillion cells, all doing slightly different things in this moment. How is it that we could be controlling all these cells? In fact, if we pay attention, we realize that we are completely out of touch with what our cells are doing. We don’t control any of them.
If you can agree to this, then you must agree that you don’t control the body, because everything that the body does must be dictated by what the cells do. After all, a body is nothing more than many cells packed together.
I am sorry if that came as a shock. Many people will start thinking that nothing really matters after they hear this. However, only about 25 percent of them fall off the nihilist deep end, while most of them go on to live normal and happy lives. It doesn’t have to change the way we feel about anything, although maybe we can all be a little more forgiving of each other knowing that nobody controls anything that they do.
Come to think of it, if my body is just a bunch of cells that I have nothing to do with, then what am I?
Anon • Feb 18, 2017 at 6:34 pm
You many not feel a connection to each individual cell in your body, but isn’t it your brain that sends electrical impulses to your cells so that they collectively make up something as complicated as movement? There are probably better examples to explain the lack of free will we actually possess, like how our brain “chooses” to make the decisions it does based on our experiences we have faced over the years, but if you have a rebuttal to my first statement I would love to understand