A lot of people argue that we are not free to make any decision, Sam Harris being one of them.

As a hard determinist one would believe that every decision we’ve ever made was already determined, supposedly our past experiences and knowledge influence our choices (which seems pretty obvious if you ask me).

But just because we had specific experiences, it doesn’t mean that everything is already determined based on them.

Let’s say you are born in a neighborhood where most people are earning around 20k a year the most obvious assumption is that you’ll end up making an amount of money close to that (unless you are Einstein, which I suppose is impossible if you’re reading this).

Now, let’s say that you’re born in a place full of rich people with successful businesses and a lot of experience in making money, which would result in you getting some of that knowledge, and some advice for free.

Then we can safely assume, that your probabilities of getting rich will be higher than those of the poor kid in the next neighborhood.

Imagine you go to an ice cream shop and have to make the decision between vanilla and chocolate ice cream (I would take both, duh), you either choose chocolate or vanilla, if you choose vanilla, it may be because your mother always had the same when she was pregnant with you, and unconsciously, you crave the vanilla ice cream.

Let’s say you get the chocolate ice cream, it may be because your aunt used to make you a great chocolate cake and you developed conditioning, making a relation between the taste of chocolate and the “happy” hormones (like serotonin, dopamine, and so on) that were triggered in those moments when your aunt baked the cake, and you were an innocent and happy little kid.

It seems that we can’t control what we like, which is pretty evident given the fact that people are extremely promiscuous.

You can’t choose not to love the married girl next door, you can’t decide to like apple pie and hate pecan pie, it is an unconscious process developed when you were an infant by the ID (the part of the psyche that looks for instant gratification and short term pleasure), or probably it was in your genes, long before you were born.

Take pedophiles, for example. A few cases found where people with brain tumors develop an attraction to children, the kind of disgusting attraction you’re thinking of, indeed.

When the tumor is removed, the attraction goes away, but in a few cases, it returns along with the urges, if removed once again, they vanish.

So, you can’t control what you like, what you crave or desire, but at least you can control your hand or limbs, right? Well, it turns out that an experiment conducted by Benjamin Libet found out something different.

After hooking up subjects to an EEG and asking them to press a button whenever they liked, the readings showed brain activity before the subject was conscious of the decision to push the button, suggesting that our choices are unconscious and we just become aware of them and interpret them as our own after the unconscious part of the mind makes them.

A lot of criminals and people with extremely sudden mood and behavior changes, even some of those who were calm and reasonable individuals before, have been found to become aggressive because of a brain tumor.

Even criminals who committed murders were surprised by their behavior, and the case of Charles Whitman in 1966 is an example of this, a guy who took several guns to the top of a tower in Texas and began shooting random people, killing about 16.

He left a note stating that he didn’t understand why he was committing these horrible crimes and asking to perform an autopsy after his death to find out what was wrong. The autopsy revealed a tumor pressing against the part of the brain that is supposed to control emotions.

While I agree that determinism is quite reasonable and logical, I don’t believe that every decision we make is biased or predetermined in some way.

There’s a middle point in which I stand, called Compatibilism, which states that free will and determinism are not mutually exclusive. While your decisions may be affected by previous experiences, say you read a book about how harmful fats are and then go to a McDonalds, you have the freedom to choose what you will, although not will what you will.

You can either ignore the facts that the burger is harmful to you and submit to the cravings of the ID, or you can neglect the desire of having the burger and move on.

The thing with determinism is that, just like religion, it has an explanation for everything. Hardcore determinists will say that either you choose to eat or not the burger due to your priorities about life, those were decided for you long ago through past experiences that you didn’t have control of.

The arguments of Determinism and Compatibilism are pretty impressive, but unfortunately, they are irrelevant. Whether we can freely choose what to do or not, it doesn’t matter on a day to day basis; we still have to go to work, do the laundry, study, etc. It is an exciting topic to discuss, but it doesn’t affect the outcome.

If we dig deeper and ask ourselves, what are our decisions based on? We realize that whether we commit a crime or not is solely based on our principles and values, which we acquired at a very young age, and are very difficult to change.

If we were born and raised by criminals, it would be very reasonable in our narrow perception of the world, to commit crimes. If religious parents raised us, we would probably be religious too, until we grow up and develop our views of the world.

But could those views be the total opposite of what we were thought, in an intend to differentiate ourselves from our paternal figures and become “authentic”?

Similarly, in the 1800s slavery was usual; it was accepted by most of society; people highly sensitive to the influence of others were quickly inclined to agree with the idea of it.

While people with a sharp mind and brave enough to follow their reason thought very different about it, the majority of the population, the masses, follow the trends, if something becomes usual for most, even though it could be considered an atrocity, they will merely neglect the consequences, saving some mental energy on thinking about it and moving on.

So, if our principle and values are subject to change, is there anything that is fixed, invariable, influencing our decisions? Maybe it all depends on the brain.

Psychopaths, for example, possess a smaller Amygdala, the part of the brain where empathy and sympathy manifests, which results in the lack or very little manifestation of empathy. Therefore they can commit horrible crimes and still sleep like a baby. But psychopaths don’t have any control of their emotions; they can’t intentionally modify their brains to be like anyone else.

It could be, that the decisions we make are based on our perception, which is based on the structure and neuronal patterns of our brains, which we can’t control. So, to some extent, we may have free will, not the conventional kind thou, but the kind that Compatibilists talk about.

While you can’t voluntarily change the way your brain makes you feel or think, you can surely choose whether or not to act accordingly. If you are filled with anger, instead of acting upon it, you can choose to let the anger pass, to breath deeply and relax (which is extremely hard btw but can be done), and wait for a more stable mental state to act upon.

Let us know your opinions in the comments below!

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