Member-only story
Free Will Implies We Have Control Over Our Lives
We do not
Your thoughts are an afterthought
Imagine, like hamsters, we lived our whole lives, for generations, in a cage with a running wheel and some wood chips…and that’s it.
Our lives and behaviors would be formed almost entirely by our limited environment (a Truman Show-like existence.)
If we co-existed with the hamsters, we’d both periodically get on the running wheel since there’d be nothing else to do with our lives.
We accept hamsters have lesser evolved internal thought and just randomly get on and off the wheel by sheer impulse, yet we believe our actions begin with conscious thought, something like, “Gee, it would be nice to think about getting on that hamster wheel…I’ll think about it…and maybe I’ll do it.”
That’s backward.
Our brain, all by itself, unconsciously, determines it’s time to get on that wheel. Then our conscious brain, that little voice in our head that sounds like us, narrates what we’re doing as if we decided it first.
We did not decide it first.
We’re basically living a few seconds behind ourselves.
We follow our brains, not the other way around.
