The idea that we have choice imprisons us. How you can become free without free will

I get really annoyed every time I see someone blaming someone else for their “choices”. It annoys me, because the argument for free will is on increasingly flimsy ground. Our brains are basically computers. The inputs are our life experiences, hormones, genes, societal ebb and flux, what we watched on the news last night and who we hung out with after school. The output to all this constantly shifting information is only ever going to be one thing. The fact that your subconscious spits out a decision before you’ve really had a chance to think about it is so much more than reflex or fight or flight. We all think we sit around and weigh up our options, but choice, like so much in the weird and wonderful universe, is an illusion. We are as much creatures of choice as the murmation of birds in the sky or a shoal of fish in the sea. We react to a set of circumstances, given all the information of which we’ve been on the receiving end thus far. We are the vehicles of our past, impelled by what has gone before helping create in our minds the dawning shadow puppetry of decision making.

The reason I know this so strongly is because of my son. Like all aspies, he has a set of characteristics which define him as such. His development followed a fairly predictable pattern defined in medical textbooks. His early years were governed by cause and effect, my reactions to his experiments, causing far reaching neural connections that are moreorless embedded for life. His social demographic is more far reaching, carved out through generations that ebbed and flowed around Kent and the East End before taking a detour to Canada, or from ships that pass in night en route from Scandinavia. He inhabits the life set out for him by his forbears and solidified by me. But what choice did I have, jettisoned around by 80s parents, a background both of loss and gains, planting me, like many generations cut adrift before me, back in the East End to make of life what I may.

I made a baby. And, crunching the data of all my life events, the probability of me doing so was 100%, give or take. Perhaps there is some quantum flux, where all probabilities are accounted for: out in the multiverse, it’s likely as not I didn’t have a baby. But in this universe, Jonah was started, but space-time would have it he’s already dead –  yes no doubt drowned in the multiverse that time he jumped into a pool aged four and my friend didn’t reach him in time as he floundered about; that and a multiplicity of other ways perhaps, that is not certain. But what it, is that our future is already written – it just depends where you’re standing in the universe. There is no line. We are the line.

But that aside, for those who cannot or will not comprehend it, comprehend this. The idea that we have total control over our futures is a form of control spouted by the powers that be to shore up the status quo. It keeps us imprisoned, because if only we worked harder, or faster, we could change our fates. And we all know this is bullshit (except, of couse if you are a myth-peddling Tory). We are locked in a grid of existence, from which none of us can escape, no not even the powerful. But we can react to this structure, yes, like the birds swooping and soaring, where one rises up, so too can the others, if opportunity and conditions are ripe for it. But this is not a plea to protest, though we all should raise our heads above the parapet once in a while, however comfortable your seat is. The point here is to develop compassion for other people. I know Jonah’s label absolves him of some responsibility for himself. He can’t help the way he is, it asks people to understand. But neither can anyone else, and that’s how we can become more compassionate. But as we are tossed around by the tides of circumstance and the flotsam and jetsam of genes and experiences, our brains pick up and store new information which adds the melee of background noise, shaping how we react in the future. We are free, but only within the confines of the world as we know it. But the world as we know it is never the same as it was a moment before, as the second law of thermodynamics quietly plays out.