I know what you’re thinking: of course. Here I am, reading your blog. Look, I can choose to smile. I can choose to close my eyes. I am choosing to do these things. I have free will.

Billions of years ago, or something like that, the first life form was some microorganism thing. It had no brain. However, it had sensors which helped it move towards light for food and the such. It reacted to the environment, but you would likely not argue that it has free will, or is even conscious.

Add a few (trillion) more molecules. You now have a bee. The bee responds to the environment by moving towards pollen for food. It also has a community of sorts, a beehive. Yet, does it have free will, or is it simply a slave to its senses?

Add a few (trillion) more molecules. You now have a human. Yet, you consider this human to have free will, despite him being contained by the exact same limitations that constrained the bee and the microorganism — it is created by natural elements and therefore is limited by the nature of these elements. A molecule can only act in accordance to its nature. Increasing the number of molecules does not change this. We are so complex that we can do many things, but that does not change the fact that we are still molecules. We are just the result of many molecules acting in accordance with their own nature. We are just chemical reactions. We have no more free will than chemical reactions can choose when to occur.

Could somehow, by simply combining enough molecules together, this combination of molecules becomes free? Could a large enough quantity of molecules arranged in a complex enough form overcome its nature?

I doubt this. Regardless of how free we feel, that is just an illusion. Everything we are is defined by the rules which define everything else. Our will is not free just as an element of hydrogen cannot do anything uncharacteristic of itself.

We’re simply responding to stimuli and working in a way that would best further our own reproduction. We’re advanced in our responses, yes, but that does nothing for free will. Are lines of code free in their will? In the future, AI will surpass the abilities of humans. Yet, no matter how complex the intellectual capacity of the AI, they are ultimately only code. No matter how complex our intellectual capacities are, we still are restrained and defined by the characteristics of our body.

You may say, this is a completely theoretical argument and is completely invalidated by my experiences. But are you really experiencing free will right now?

You smile because you’re happy. If you’re smiling despite not being happy right now in order to prove me wrong, you’re smiling to prove me wrong. What you do is simply a reaction to the outside world. You go to work because your parents taught you to be productive. You make money because society taught you that money is good. You hate your cousin because he bullied you as a kid.

In the end, we’re no more than a bundle of experiences reacting in a way that it deems best to ensure its own reproduction.

Even me, writing this article, is an expression of that. I am writing this article because the outside world has molded me in a way to pursue this line of thought and my writing is an attempt to satisfy my ego.

Of course, we shouldn’t think this way. Studies have shown that people who don’t believe in free will commit more crimes or something like that.

Therefore, pretend that you never read this article and never research anything concerning this topic.