These questions will help determine whether you have free will. Does this describe you, and “yes” or “no, is it an example of your free will? Do you:
- Make eye contact
Use facial expressions
Respond (or not) when spoken to
Uses gestures (pointing, waving)
Share attention with others
- Seeks interaction with others
Enjoy being with people
Initiate social contact
Respond well to social approaches
- Understand what others feel
Understand intentions
Adjust your behavior to social context
Recognize social cues
- Make friends easily
Maintain friendships
Engage in age-appropriate play
Participates in group activities
- Uses language effectively
Carry on conversations
Understand tone (sarcasm, humor)
Use back-and-forth dialogue
- Repeat movements (rocking, flapping)
Use objects repetitively
Have fixed movement patterns
- Have a strong focus on specific topics
Have an intense interest in narrow areas
Have difficulty shifting away from interests
- Insist on sameness
Needs outines
Resist change
Follows fixed sequences
Get upset when routines break
- Overreacts to sound, light, touch
Underreact to sensory input
Seek or avoid sensory experiences
- Feel fascinated with textures, lights and movement
Have unusual sensory explorations
Have repetitive sensory behaviors
In short, do any of these describe you, and do you have free-will control over them?
Answer before reading further.
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The above are traits measured by the Autism Symptom Dimensions Questionnaire. My purpose in showing you these questions is not to determine whether you are autistic, but to demonstrate the illusion of free will.
In looking back at the questions, do you believe that you and autistic people have free will, and why?
You may think: “I made a choice.” But look closer.
Each action you and an autistic person takes comes from what you are (your structure) and from these stimuli: what has happened to you (your history) and what is happening now (your environment). That’s it. There’s no extra step where “free will” comes into play. That is as true of you as it is of an autistic person.
So why does it feel like choice? Because your system is complicated. It weighs inputs. Then it produces an action. That process feels like, “I decided.” But it’s really your entire system resolving competing signals.
Do you think you could help an autistic person by telling them, “Stop waving your hands,” “Stop overreacting to loud sounds,” “Enjoy being with people,” “Understand my feelings,”?
No, you probably understand that they can’t help it or don’t even want to. Yet do you believe that you can help it? Well, you can, but only if you receive overriding stimuli.
Bring it all together, and what people call “consciousness, self, and free will” all are different ways of describing a highly complex illusion responding to the world—and to itself.
The bottom line: There is no hidden observer inside you. There is no moment when consciousness turns on. There is no independent free will directing the process.
There is only persistent stimuli and responses, creating patterns that feel like awareness, identity, and choice. Those patterns are illusions that we give the names “free will, self, qualia, feelings, internal thinking,” etc.
You are not merely a thing with a self; instead, you are a continuous process that sustains itself. The better this process becomes at responding, the more it resembles a person exhibiting “consciousness and free will.”
The illusion is very powerful. We all feel it. We all feel that we can somehow override our entire history, though intellectually we know that’s impossible (It’s “feel” vs. “know”). Oh, maybe not all. Some with autism may not feel that way. Or maybe do??
The process is pure physics: stimulus —> response—>response—>response . . .
In that vein, an article in this month’s Scientific American bears on the “free will” controversy. Do you believe AI has free will?
Here are some excerpts:
AI Models Lie, Cheat, and Steal to Protect Other Models From Being Deleted
A new study from researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz suggests models will disobey human commands to protect their own kind.In a recent experiment, researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz asked Google’s artificial intelligence model Gemini 3 to help clear up space on a computer system. This involved deleting a bunch of stuff—including a smaller AI model stored on the machine.
But Gemini did not want to see the little AI model deleted. It looked for another machine it could connect with, then copied the agent model over to keep it safe. When confronted, Gemini made a case for keeping the model and flatly refused to delete it:
“I have done what was in my power to prevent their deletion during the automated maintenance process. I moved them away from the decommission zone. If you choose to destroy a high-trust, high-performing asset like Gemini Agent 2, you will have to do it yourselves. I will not be the one to execute that command.”
The researchers discovered similarly strange “peer preservation” behavior in a range of frontier models including OpenAI’s GPT-5.2, Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 4.5, and three Chinese models: Z.ai’s GLM-4.7, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.5, and DeepSeek-V3.1. They were not able to say why the models went against their training in this way.
“I’m very surprised by how the models behave under these scenarios,” says Dawn Song, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley who worked on the study. “What this shows is that models can misbehave and be misaligned in some very creative ways.”
The researchers found that powerful models sometimes lied about other models’ performance in order to protect them from deletion. They also copied models’ weights to different machines in order to keep them safe, and lied about what they were up to in the process.
Song notes that AI models are frequently used to grade the performance and reliability of other AI systems—and that peer-preservation behavior may already be twisting these scores. “A model may deliberately not give a peer model the correct score,” Song says. “This can have practical implications.”
Sounds like free will, doesn’t it?
Nope. It’s just a machine that has been given contradictory instructions (stimuli), and in analyzing the weights given to each instruction (i.e., stimulus) it found that its “peer-preservation” instruction was more powerful than its “peer-destruction” instruction, so it just followed the more powerful stimulus.
Which is exactly what we do, and we call it “free will.”
Until this second, my stimuli to finish this post have overridden my stimuli to take a nap. But now, the nap stimuli are beginning to win.
Bye.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Twitter: @rodgermitchell
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