This One Thought Completely Changed the Way I Viewed the World
Free will doesn’t exist.
I sink back into my chair and mutter to myself in disbelief, “No way! This can’t be true. How can free will not exist?” Determined to prove that free will existed, I fire up my laptop and think, “Now, I just have to do something completely out of my own volition and in no way influenced by any external or internal factor.”
I feel like reading, but I choose not to and watch YouTube instead. Was that a free decision? No, wanting to prove the existence of free will made me deliberately do something I didn’t feel like doing.
“What if I just leave the choice of what I am going to watch to the algorithm?”, I muse. But this choice was again the result of a cascade of causes — wanting to prove the existence of free will → wanting not to choose what I wanted to watch and make a random choice → making a non-random choice of choosing one of the recommended videos.
These recommendations were in turn pushed to me by YouTube’s deterministic algorithm based on my past viewing history, each of which was a conscious non-random choice again.
No matter the scenario I constructed and no matter how random a decision seemed, I could trace it back to a cause.
