At each moment in time, every day, our brain makes decisions. It weighs the incoming signals against the current activation of the driving forces, taking into account the neural paths strength and activation (vibration) and decides to act in a certain way.
The fact that we have the inner loop, allows us to glimpse upon this process and gradually become aware of it. We gradually become aware of our existence, by managing to observe our thought process.
And here is the catch... by doing that, we automatically THINK that we have free will as well! It's very logical: since you can monitor something and you have seen the way it works (actually, its effects only!), you believe that the power to change it is within your grasp, to alter the way it works, to modify it to suit... your... needs?!?!?!! (Do you see the contradiction?!)
Since your brain ALWAYS does what it judges will BEST suit your NEEDS, how can YOU alter your thoughts and actions to better suit your needs? You cannot change the way your neurons coordinate and orchestrate your thoughts; this is a mechanism that has evolved in the millions of years of species evolution. So how can you control your actions (and your future) then? Is your future preordained? Is there nothing you can do to shape your own course of future actions?
Well, the answer is that you both can and can’t!
You can’t stop your brain from always acting on what it thinks is best at any point in time. What you can do is this: by utilizing the knowledge of your disability of being unable to NOT act on your best interest, if you give your brain stimuli that prove that it’s in its best interest to act in a certain way, you can steer it towards making your body act in this way. So, possessing the knowledge of the way your brain works seems to be sufficient in tilting the scale in your favor… Right?
Wrong. The problem is that YOU can’t do that! Because to try and alter your environment to gather the evidence (/stimuli), you have to make an effort for it. And the “commander” that will order the execution of this attempt is your brain! But it will not give that order if it does not believe it’s for “your” best interest. So, your brain cannot escape from its own workings. Your companions however (fellow humans) can, because they are not trapped in YOUR brain’s vicious circle, but in THEIRS! So, they have the means to get YOU out of this situation and because of communion (ταύτιση), they have an incentive as well!
So, let’s be honest… we actually don’t have free will! For a predefined input and a predefined mental state (context) (=strength and vibration of neural connections), we will produce a predictable and always identical output (you can partially experiment on that on Memento-style patients). So since the way we judge all stimuli and define our actions is preset… in that sense, our actions/outputs are predictable and predefined as well. This makes us bystanders in our own lives, we can try as much as we like, but we cannot truly change the way we think and act.
We have the delusion of freedom, but if we somehow magically replayed our whole life from the start with exactly the same conditions, we would think and act in exactly the same way (since we wouldn’t carry back the feedback and knowledge that we now possess). This means that our life is not actually a random path that we happened to follow as we lived through time and space. It is a specific preset path (that is produced by specific inputs and calculations that produce specific outputs) and we have no means of escaping it, but we are also unaware of what lies ahead.
The difference now lies in that: the future is not unknown; it is just computationally impossible to calculate.
For now......
