Originally published in Much Ado About Mensa, 2005.

I’ve thought about it a bit and have decided that free will just doesn’t exist. You’re probably thinking, now hold on there – if he made a decision about free will then he just exercised it. Nope, it just seems that way. Let me explain.

To me free will seems to be about choice: the capacity for (occasionally) rational human beings to choose a course of action from various alternatives. It seems obvious that people make choices, but are these choices really free? Cognitive theories and neurosciences help explain the mechanics of how the brain works, and basically it comes down to hardware and software – the genetic and biological make-up of the brain (the hardware), and mental states formed by the programming (software) received from your environment. Nature and nurture. So you see, I have no choice but to write this sentence. My current mental state demands it. These mental states are a product of my genetic make-up and my environment. I didn’t get to choose my parents or the genetic coding used to make my brain, nor did I have a choice in my earliest environment – it existed before I had any conscious decision-making power. So my brain was beginning to be “wired” long before I could make a conscience choice. The “choices” I make now are the inevitable result of an enormously long string of things that happened previously and formed the current neural-connections in my brain.

The brainiacs out there probably are thinking things like, “What about the Heisenberg uncertainty principal of quantum mechanics?” Fine. Let’s say a stray electron landing in the electrical current of my neuron-transmission could be enough to re-route the impulses just enough to create a different choice. Maybe determinism is out, but I didn’t get to choose the random electron either, so that’s no help in shoring up the idea of free will.

Still others, in what I tend to think of as the “fantasy-based community,” may claim things like a non-corporeal mind, a soul or some other ghost in the machine gives us free will independent of the material universe. First, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of a supernatural ghost of some sort taking control of my brain and decisions, but if there was, than it would be the spirit with the free will – not me. Now if you say “I” am the spirit, not the body and brain, then why can’t I decide to take over a younger, thinner, and wealthier body? Why do I need a body at all?

Finally, lots of people say that an all-knowing, all-powerful God gives us free will. But if God is all-knowing, then he knows what choices we will make ahead of time. If we can’t make any choice other than the one he already knows about, then really we have no choice at all.

So logically free will doesn’t exist. I’m sure you all appreciate that I was able to sort out in a few brief paragraphs what philosophers have been debating for millennia. You’re welcome.