There is likely no free will in human beings. That sounds more dramatic than I mean it.
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The Choice Has a History
Robert Sapolsky puts it rather neatly in Determined:
We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.
Every decision arrives with a history: genes, childhood, culture, hormones, sleep, stress, and whatever happened ten seconds ago. I did not choose any of the machinery I use to choose.
Saying “I did it because I wanted to” only moves the question back a step. As Sapolsky asks in this short interview:
How did you become the sort of person who would have that intent at that point?
That is where I get stuck.
Randomness does not rescue free will either. Quantum mechanics often gets dragged in here because some interpretations allow genuinely probabilistic events, while others remain deterministic. Either way, if a quantum event tips a neuron one way rather than another, that adds chance to the chain. It does not turn chance into a choice I authored. A neurological coin toss is no more “me” than the causal history it interrupted.
Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff offer a more ambitious possibility in Orchestrated Objective Reduction, or Orch OR. They propose that coherent quantum states in neuronal microtubules undergo a gravity-driven “objective reduction”, with each collapse corresponding to a moment of consciousness. Penrose argues that this process could be genuinely non-computable, rather than merely random.
It is a beautifully fragile theory. Objective reduction remains unconfirmed, while the biology depends on quantum coherence surviving inside a warm, noisy brain. Max Tegmark calculated decoherence times of 10-13 to 10-20 seconds, against neural timescales of 10-3 to 10-1 seconds. Hameroff and colleagues disputed his model and derived much longer times under different assumptions. That enormous gap shows how much of the bridge still rests on theoretical choices rather than settled evidence. Even if the mechanism survives all of that, non-computable is not the same as self-authored. An unpredictable collapse may still be something that happens in me, not something an uncaused me controls.
An Event-Sourced Self
Here is the software analogy my brain keeps reaching for. Event sourcing records changes as a sequence of events. The current state can be rebuilt by replaying that history through the same logic. In Jeremie Chassaing’s Decider pattern, evolve folds past Events into the current State, while decide takes that State and a Command and emits new Events.
A person is not a Decider, obviously. Still, the parallel is useful: my current State is not an unexplained starting point. It is the fold of inherited biology, experience, environment, and perhaps chance. A present situation arrives as a Command; decide produces intent and action as new Events, which join the history shaping whatever comes next.
flowchart TD
accTitle: A person viewed through the Decider pattern
accDescr: Biological, environmental, and recent Events are folded through evolve into the current State. That State and a Command representing the present situation pass through decide, producing intent and action as new Events.
H["Past Events: biology, childhood, culture, recent events, chance"]
E["evolve: fold through a nervous system"]
S["Current State"]
C["Command: present situation"]
D["decide"]
N["New Events: intent and action"]
H --> E --> S
S --> D
C --> D
D --> NIn my own life, I have seen this pattern time and again. People with similar kinds of past Events and present conditions often evolve along recognisably similar paths. Never exactly, of course: differences in biology, timing, environment, and the vast number of possible atomic arrangements leave no two States identical. That complexity makes us difficult to predict, not uncaused.
Saying “I chose it” is a bit like pointing to decide while hiding the Event log and evolve. It tells us where the action emerged, not why the system was in that State.
This Is Not a New Suspicion
Spinoza made much the same point centuries before brain scans. In R. H. M. Elwes’s translation of Ethics, he wrote:
Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are conditioned.
We experience the decision, but not the absurd number of causes that produced it. The feeling of authorship is real. That does not make it the first cause.
Galen Strawson approaches it from another direction. To be ultimately responsible for what I do, I would first have to be responsible for the kind of person I am. I would then have to be responsible for whatever made me that person, and so on forever. As he puts it, this requires “the actual completion of an infinite series of choices of principles of choice”.
Choices Still Matter
Not believing in free will is not the same as fatalism. Fatalism says the result will be the same whatever we do. I am saying that what we do matters enormously, but what we do also has causes.
I still think, hesitate, ask for advice, change my mind, and occasionally make a complete mess of things. Deliberation works. It is simply another part of the causal chain.
None of this makes our emotions less real or less valid. We are human animals, and we are the ones experiencing them. Pain still hurts, love still matters, and anger still feels like anger, even when each has a history. Explaining a feeling is not the same as explaining it away.
Compatibilists argue that a person can have the control needed for responsibility even in a causally determined world. John Martin Fischer, for example, points to “reasons-responsiveness” as a key part of that freedom. It is a serious and useful account. I just do not think it preserves the kind of free will people usually reach for when they say someone truly deserved praise or suffering.
Less Blame, More Compassion
This is where the idea becomes useful to me.
If nobody chose their starting brain, childhood, trauma, temperament, or capacity for self-control, smugness makes less sense. So does revenge dressed up as justice.
Going Past Hanlon’s Razor
Hanlon’s razor is a handy start: do not assume malice when ignorance explains what happened. I find the no-free-will view more useful because it does not stop at deciding whether somebody was nasty or incompetent. It asks what produced the behaviour.
Say a colleague sends a cutting message after missing an obvious detail. I can call them malicious, invoke Hanlon and call them careless, or look at the causes: no sleep, pressure, unclear documentation, bad incentives, or learned defensiveness. The message can still be unacceptable, and I can still set a boundary. But the causes tell me what might prevent the next one. The labels mostly tell me who to blame.
More importantly, if the message was deliberately cruel, Hanlon’s razor has nothing left to say. The no-free-will view does not make the cruelty harmless, but it still lets me ask where that intent came from and what response might change future behaviour.
We still need boundaries and consequences. Dangerous people may need to be kept away from others. Harm should be repaired where possible. But the point should be protection, deterrence, and rehabilitation, not making somebody suffer because they could supposedly have become a different person from exactly the same causes.
Sapolsky’s longer Stanford talk describes those causes as one continuous biological and environmental arc, with no obvious crack where free will can squeeze in. That is an argument, not a laboratory proof of all metaphysics. Still, I have yet to find the crack.
I could be wrong. Perhaps compatibilism is the sensible way to use the phrase. But ultimate self-authorship still looks impossible to me. I cannot make sense of a choice that is neither the result of prior causes nor a matter of chance, and neither gives me the uncaused authorship people seem to mean.
That leaves me with a strange picture of us: biological machines, some of which have become aware that they are merely biological machines. That awareness is extraordinary. I just do not see how it makes the machinery an uncaused author.
In the end, I aspire to see our species become a post-free-will society: one organised around causes, prevention, rehabilitation, and compassion rather than moral revenge. I think humanity would be better for it.
And yes, I arrived at that conclusion through causes I did not choose. A bit annoying, but there we are.