Is Your Head Ready to Explode?

You might have a head on the verge of exploding if you’re trying to operate under these two incompatible assumptions.

• You have free will, and you choose whatever you do or don’t do.

• You can’t do or not do a single thing without having a reason.

Our brains have been shown to be highly proficient reason-generating machines. It’s part of their hardwiring for survival. And we seem more than happy to go along for the ride without questioning the process or the result.

Here’s how it goes:

• We turn something into a reason.

• We act as if the reason has an independent existence.

• We impute a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the reason we have created and whatever we do or don’t do.

Maybe we think we freely chose whatever we turned into a reason for a particular action or non-action. But if we have to have a reason in order to act or not act, the reason doesn’t really matter. We still can’t simply act. We still have no power. And ultimately, we still aren’t responsible.

There’s no point in arguing for free will all the while operating as if we live in a deterministic universe in which everything that happens is the result of something that happened before. The mental gymnastics required to maintain these opposing beliefs keep us stuck in the status quo, chasing our mental tails, and sometimes going to extreme measures to defend our lack of power and responsibility.

Which explains quite a lot.