Responsiveness: A Unified View of Thought, and Decision

A newborn comes into the world unable to see clearly, move with intent, or make sense of its surroundings. But over time, it grows into an adult who can handle the incredible complexity of life.

The difference isn’t the arrival of some mysterious “conscious decider,” but the gradual development of a vast, interconnected system of responsiveness.

The Fundamental Principle

Living systems aren’t just about complexity—they’re all about constant, multi-layered responsiveness to change. Every part of the body is sensing, reacting, and adapting, not in a central or step-by-step way, but everywhere, all at once.

The Architecture of Responsiveness

Cells. Each cell receives signals, changes state, sends signals. There is neither awareness nor intent. It is just input + state —> output
Tissues and organs. Groups of cells coordinate responses, regulate local conditions, and repair damage.

Woman sitting with cast on her foot — **My body quietly is making millions of decisions every second, to help me heal.**

My wife once broke a bone in her foot while on vacation. It hurt immediately but eased within an hour. By the next day it had swollen and it hurt.

She thought it was a sprain. The third day it only hurt if she tried to walk on it.

When sitting, it didn’t hurt. Finally, we went to the doctor, who told her it was broken.

He set it, and it while in the cast it no longer hurt.

Parts of her “knew” it was broken well before her brain told her. At various times, various parts of her were treating the injury.

Millions of “decisions” were being made each second, by millions of cells based on signals they all were receiving.

The inflammation, swelling, and sensitivity all began before any diagnosis. Her body responded before her brain “knew.”

What actually happened in her foot was:

Immediate phase (minutes–hours)

Mechanical damage. Local cells release signals (ATP, prostaglandins, etc.) Nociceptors fire which causes the sensation of pain. Then shortly thereafter there was: Adaptation + central dampening can make pain ease after the initial spike

This was not “recognition,” but local signaling + system-level gain control

The next day (inflammation)

Her immune response ramped up. Increased fluid led to swelling. Cytokines caused increased sensitivity. Tissues became easier to trigger (hyperalgesia)

The system shifted the odds toward protection

Day three (use-dependent pain)

Loading the bone activation stressed her tissue, causing pain. While at rest, there were fewer triggers, thus little or no pain

The same injury yielded, different conditions and different outputs

After casting

Immobilization reduced mechanical stress, and stabilization lowered nociceptor firing. Her brain and spinal circuits downshifted the signal gain

The reduced input altered the signal gain, resulting in less pain

Local tissues generated signals consistent with damage, and the system responded to those signals before any explicit label (‘broken’) was formed. The label “broken” is a brain-level categorization. The response (inflammation, protection) is distributed at a lower level, but still it affects brain-level response.

That is, it changes the brain’s ability to think.

We all recognize that decisions made while in pain differ from decisions made in comfort. Decisions made under stress are different from those made in calm. Rushed decisions differ from contemplated decisions.

Every shift in state—happiness, sadness, pain, comfort, curiosity, fear, desire, urgency—alters the system making the response. Change the state, and you change the outcome, and we have scant knowledge or control over these states and emotions,

Every organ in the body is continuously changing the system’s state. And every change in state changes the outcome. For example:

Kidneys secretly regulate fluid balance, electrolytes (sodium, potassium), and blood pressure. Imbalances can cause fatigue, confusion, and irritability each of which can affect thinking, belief and action. Change the chemistry and you change the response.

The Liver secretly controls glucose levels, detoxification, and metabolic balance. Low glucose alone can produce poor judgment, impulsivity, mood shifts, all of which affect decision-making and desire.

The Thyroid regulates metabolic rate. Too much or too little causes anxiety or sluggishness, restlessness or depression. The same person in a different thyroid state will show different personalities.

The Skin is not just a barrier. It measures and regulates temperature, touch, pain, pleasure, and irritation. It directs attention, and tolerance, all of which alter behavior.

The Immune System releases cytokines which affect fatigue/energy and motivation. Not “feeling well” changes your mind about future actions.

Gut & Distributed Receptors produces signaling molecules that communicate via nerves and blood. This influences mood and motivation. Receptors throughout the body detect internal conditions and feed continuous updates into the system.

The nervous system provides fast, precise, body-wide signaling. The endocrine system (blood) provides slow, body-wide modulation. The immune system (lymph) provides body-wide adaptive regulation. And all affect your thinking, belief and action without your overt knowledge.

The brain does not originate behavior. It integrates signals, models patterns, biases outcomes, and gates actions. It is not the source of decision. It is the highest-level integrator of distributed responsiveness.

Consider something so simple as our “Taste buds” (more precisely, taste receptors), which have been found in several places around the body, outside the mouth, including:

In the Gut (stomach and intestines) where they detect sugars, amino acids, bitter compounds. They trigger hormone release (like insulin-related signals), digestion changes, and appetite regulation

In your Airways where they detect bitter compounds (often toxins or bacteria), and trigger coughing, changes in breathing, and immune responses

In your Pancreas where these sugar-sensing receptors influence insulin release and direct metabolic regulation

In your Brain where they seem to be involved in chemical signaling and some form of internal regulation

In the Testes, where they likely are involved in cell signaling and developmental processes

The so-called “taste buds are general-purpose chemical detectors reused throughout the body, silently affecting your actions and beliefs.

The key point is that none of these organs think, decide, believe, or choose, but all of them continuously shift the conditions under which outcomes emerge.

How then can we claim to control our decision-making? If every “decision” depends on internal chemistry, physical condition, prior experience, and current environment, the vast majority happening “behind the scenes,” so to speak, then what, exactly, is making the decisions we mistakenly call “free will”?

Answer: There is no fixed chooser. There only is only a body-wide changing system, producing different results under different conditions. There is no “free will” in the brain. It is an illusion.

What is the Purpose of the “Free Will” Illusion?

What we call free will can be seen as an internal model telling us, “this action comes from me.” It’s not some mysterious, metaphysical force, but rather a label we place on top of the underlying processes.

Why have that model at all? Not for truth—for function. The belief in free will, a belief that may be shared by many animals, has certain survival advantages:

1) Action coordination. To act quickly, the system needs a simple handle: “I can do this.” Without that, hesitation increases; competing signals don’t resolve efficiently. So, the system uses a shortcut. Ownership produces faster commitment

2) Learning and credit assignment. To learn, the system must link action to an outcome. That requires something like, “I did that.” Otherwise, there would be no reinforcement or adjustment. The “I did” is a bookkeeping tool.

3) Social interaction. In social species, Ownership creates responsibility, prediction of others, and coordination, all of which rely on agents who appear to choose (even if, underneath, it’s all distributed processes).

4) Compression. The underlying system is insanely complex, with thousands of decisions being made each second. Instead, the illusion of “free will” compresses the system into a single narrative: “I decided.”

(It’s similar to the reason that vision compresses wavelengths into shades of “red,” and compresses a series of movie frames into “movement”)

Even the lowly housefly acts as if it “wants to” move its wings, when the true act of flying is far more complex than a fly’s tiny brain could accomplish

In short, the compelling illusion of “free will” serves a purpose. It acts as a functional model that streamlines scattered processes into a single focus point, making action, learning, and social coordination possible.

We don’t have free will. We have a system that works better by believing it does.

IN SUMMARY

You are your history. You are the collection of all the internal and external stimuli you’ve ever experienced, along with every atom that makes up what you are.

There’s no separate “self” apart from your body and experiences that’s running the show. Your brain takes in signals, weaves them together, and builds a story. It tags events with labels like “pain,” “injury,” or “decision,” making it feel like there’s a central observer. But in reality, it’s just the system reporting on itself.

We do not think with our brains alone. We respond with our entire bodies. The brain does not command, decide, or know. It participates in the process.

Living systems are made up of interconnected units that respond and adapt across many levels. What we think of as thinking or decision-making emerges from these complex networks, shaped by the constant interplay between cells, organs, and signaling systems.

We don’t think first and then act; we react, and we label that reaction as “thinking.” What we call “consciousness” and “free will” is really just Stimulus —> Response —> Response —> …, and so on.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Monetary Sovereignty

Twitter: @rodgermitchell

Search #monetarysovereignty

Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell;

MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell;

https://www.academia.edu/

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A Government’s Sole Purpose is to Improve and Protect The People’s Lives.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

Everyday Illusions and Their Relationship to Free Will

In the previous post, “The Fallacy of Free Will,” we discussed the reasons why free will doesn’t actually exist. We explained that it is an illusion created by our brains to help us manage the overwhelming amount of stimuli we encounter every second.

I believe many readers view this argument as sophistry, convinced they possess free will. They experience it directly; they act on their desires and feel that nothing compels their actions.

The reason illusions are powerful is their compelling nature.. Pamela's Animated Gifs - trainairtram

The best-known visual illusions are television and movies.

A television screen displays two-dimensional sequences of flashing colored dots, which your brain interprets as convincing, three-dimensional, continuously moving scenes.

A movie consists of a series of rapidly appearing, still, two-dimensional images. Your brain’s shortcut allows you to “see” a three-dimensional, continuously flowing scene.

Another common illusion is the railroad stop sign, which is composed of two alternately flashing lights.

Although the lights don’t move, the alternating flash gives the strong impression that a light is moving back and forth.

In both cases, your visual system sees every photon, but rather than take the time and the monumental effort to translate each one, your brain uses shortcuts. It translates the stream of individual photons into patterns you believe are motion.

It converts the flow of individual photons into patterns that you perceive as motion. You look at the stop sign, and you experience a moving light. No matter how hard you try, you cannot unsee that image.

Only if you cover one light will you see, or rather not see, motion.

That is how we always see. The brain combines trillions of photons entering the visual system every second into a coherent image we perceive as reality. However, that reality consists only of those trillions of photons. Everything you see is an illusion created by your brain.

Our vision is a miracle of evolution. Plants can sense photons, but they don’t see. They don’t put those photons together into a moving, three-dimensional world.

Visual illusions are common, but all sensory systems rely on shortcuts to illusions—experiences where perception diverges from external reality.

I asked AI to give me examples of other, non-visual illusions. Here is what it came up with.

1. Auditory Illusions

Shepard Tone: A series of tones that sound like they’re endlessly rising in pitch, but actually aren’t. Your brain gets tricked by overlapping frequency layers.

McGurk Effect: If you see a face mouthing “ga” while the audio says “ba,” your brain might hear “da.” The illusion comes from conflicting visual and auditory inputs.

Phantom Words: Repeating a short, meaningless audio loop causes people to start “hearing” actual words or phrases—your brain imposes meaning on ambiguous input.

Auditory Continuity Illusion: A sound briefly interrupted by noise is perceived as continuing through the noise. Your brain fills in the gap.

2. Tactile (Touch) Illusions Thermal Grill Illusion: Interlacing warm and cool bars creates a burning sensation, even though neither is dangerously hot.

Pinocchio Illusion: If you close your eyes, hold your nose, and vibrate your biceps tendon, you may feel your nose stretching. Your brain merges proprioceptive and tactile inputs into a bizarre body image.

Cutaneous Rabbit: Taps delivered rapidly at the wrist and then the elbow make people feel taps hopping up the arm. Your brain “fills in” where no contact occurred.

Phantom Vibration Syndrome: Feeling your phone buzz in your pocket when it didn’t. A culturally recent but neurologically real tactile illusion.

3. Auditory-Tactile Crossovers

Sound-Induced Flash Illusion: Hearing two quick beeps can make you see a single flash as two flashes. Cross-modal illusions show how senses interact and co-create perception.

4. Olfactory (Smell) Illusions

Harder to pin down, but they do occur—often as context effects.

Imagined Smells: People in a “smelly” environment (e.g., told there’s gas or perfume in the air) often report odors even when none are present. Strong suggestion can conjure real olfactory experience.

Flavor Manipulation: Since taste is largely smell, context and expectation can warp it. The same smell labeled as “parmesan” vs. “vomit” will be perceived differently, even if physically identical.

5. Gustatory (Taste) Illusions These are typically context- or suggestion-based.

Miracle Fruit: This berry binds to taste receptors, making sour things taste sweet for a while. Not an illusion in the strictest sense, but the interpretation of taste is warped.

Color Influence on Flavor: The color of a drink (say, red) can make people taste “cherry” or “strawberry” even if it’s lemon-flavored. Visual input overrides chemical reality.

6. Proprioceptive Illusions These involve body position and motion.

Rotating Room Illusion: In a slowly rotating room, people feel as though they are tilting even when stationary. Your internal sense of gravity gets confused.

Out-of-Body Experiences (in lab settings): Through clever VR or mirrored feedback setups, researchers can induce a feeling of disembodiment, where your sense of self floats away from your body.

In summary, what you see, hear, taste, smell, and feel is not reality. Your brain translates photons into images, vibrations into sound, chemicals into taste and smell, and pressure into touch, whether it is light and shiver-inducing or hard and painful.

None of it is reality. It is translations, often faulty and misleading, though even when as accurate as humanly possible, they still are translations, just as the words “ice cream” or a photo of a sundae are not ice cream.

Here is how that relates to so-called “free will.”

1. Everything we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel is an illusion created by our brain and body. It is as real as a movie, a film, or a TV show.

2. Like all illusions. It may or may not represent some elements of reality, but we cannot know which. Our brain tries to represent enough reality so we will have heirs and they will have heirs.

3. We are not the result of survival of the fittest; rather, we represent the minimum needed for survival, more accurately described as the survival of just barely enough.

4. When it has excess energy, a life form’s population expands to meet the energy supply. That has been true of the human species, which has expanded because, for certain brief times, it has been more than barely enough. We may be nearing that limit.

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PS. Reader “tetrahedron720″ recently wrote to me saying: “I am free to shout in a library, but I can’t do anything about the sequence of reactions of the people around me who will Shhh me or toss me out.”

He is not free to shout in the library.

His brain has translated trillions upon trillions of stimuli into illusions that prevent him from shouting. No matter what he considers doing, the illusions created in his brain will be responsible.

Why are these experiences considered illusions? Tetrahedron720 relies solely on his unique history of receiving photons and other stimuli, which his brain has organized into his unique memories and beliefs. From these stimuli, he has created a distorted reality that influences his actions.

Had those same photons been received by another brain, they would have had a different effect, and produced a different reality.

He believes he is making a decision, but the decision is being made by his brain. There is no supreme “he” that overrides his brain’s actions.

He does not control his brain. His brain controls him.

And now, a question: (I enjoy posting rebuttals or questions about my own opinions, and I welcome them from you, so long as they aren’t simply, “You’re wrong, goodbye.”)

QUESTION: Everything I see, hear, smell, feel, and taste is nothing more than photons, atoms, and other stimuli translated by my brain. Those photons, etc., are the reality.

I’m conscious of the translations, not of the reality. For me, everything is an illusion, like seeing a movie of Hawaii while I sit in Florida.

Yet, while I live my life in an illusion, I still manage to move from point A to point B. I’m not surprised to awaken in point Z.

My life seems to have logical continuity. If this is all an illusion, who or what is the “script girl” that keeps everything in order?

(The old term “script girl” refers to the person on a movie set responsible for ensuring that details, like a cigarette held in the right hand in one scene, do not suddenly change to a handkerchief in the same hand in a subsequent scene.)

ANSWER: Predictive Coding Theory suggests the brain minimizes surprise by anticipating what’s about to happen.

The brain is not a passive receiver of data. It’s a prediction machine. It constantly compares incoming sensory input with past experience. Then it updates its predictions.

The Hollow Face Illusion A concave face looks convex because your brain expects faces to bulge outward. That expectation overrides the actual depth cues.

The dress (white/gold vs. blue/black): The brain guesses the lighting condition (cool shadow vs. warm light), then reconstructs the colors accordingly. It’s not just perception — it’s interpretation.

Memory

I do not perceive reality; I perceive the interpretation of the present plus the memory of the past. Continuity depends heavily on the consistency of memory.

Memory lets me link this moment to the one before it. Without memory, I’d still have perceptions, but they wouldn’t feel like part of a story. The illusion would shatter into isolated frames.

There are people who suffer from anterograde amnesia, where they can no longer form new short-term memories. They often feel like they’ve just “woken up,” even if it’s the tenth time today.

They may not remember eating, speaking, or being in a room. But their emotions often linger. They might not remember a conversation, but still “feel” trust or fear toward a person based on prior encounters they can’t recall.

Perception without memory is not reality as we know it. It’s a sequence of nows. The “script girl” is gone, and the illusion turns into a slideshow with no story.

Their brain has created a reality as real to them as yours is to you, but it is a reality that lacks continuity.

We each live in a different world, one created uniquely for each of us by our unique brains. My world is as real to me as yours is to you, but they are different worlds.

My beliefs and decisions reflect my perspectives just as yours reflect yours. My illusion is that somehow, my world is the “real” one, but it is upon those unique beliefs that all my decisions are based.

I do not rule my brain. There is no “I” that is apart from my brain. My brain rules me via its interpretations.

Thus, I do not have free will.

Nor do you.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Monetary Sovereignty

Twitter: @rodgermitchell

Search #monetarysovereignty

Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell;

MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell;

https://www.academia.edu/

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A Government’s Sole Purpose is to Improve and Protect The People’s Lives.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

The fallacy of free will

We have discussed “free will” several times: An interesting take on “Free Will vs Will Power”, and ” For those who still believe in free will, and “Read about the strange relationship between opposites: Consciousness and free will,” and “More about non-existent free will.” And elsewhere.

It is a subject that fascinates me. I hope you feel the same.

Here is what CHAT GPT says:

“Free will is generally understood as the ability to make choices that are not determined entirely by prior causes, external forces, or divine intervention.”

In other words, if you have free will, you—as an agent—can choose among alternatives in a way that you could have done otherwise.”

It goes on to give four explanations:

Libertarian Free Will: Belief that you have genuine freedom to choose. Decisions are not entirely caused by prior events or deterministic laws. Often requires that the self or soul initiate choices.

Determinism: Every event, including human decisions, is the inevitable result of preceding events and natural laws. Under strict determinism, free will is an illusion.

Compatibilism: Argues that free will is compatible with determinism. You are “free” if you can act according to your desires and intentions—even if those are caused by past events.

Hard Incompatibilism: Claims that whether determinism is true or not, you still don’t have the kind of free will that justifies moral responsibility.

In the above definitions and descriptions, a mysterious “you” lurks in the background. That always is the problem — the belief that there is an underlying “you” making out-of-body decisions. It’s the fundamental belief in free will.

And that is why free will does not exist; it would require that underlying “you,” a non-physical entity that doesn’t respond to any outside or internal stimuli, but instead is a self-stimulating concept apart from every atom in one’s body, and every field and force.

Though free will requires a self (a “you”) that is not affected by any external or internal stimuli. No such “you” has been found to exist. Everything we think or do is a physical response to some stimulus, external or internal, conscious.

Any process that could supposedly ininitiate “free will” would either arise from prior causes (and be deterministic), or arise from randomness (which isn’t will, just chaos), or require a non-physical self (which violates everything we know about reality).

Consciousness is the response to stimuli. It is not an on-off condition, but rather a continuum, with more reaction to more stimuli being more conscious.

Consciousness is not magical or mystical. It is physics. Not only are our choices caused, but our awarenessof choosing is itself just another response, not the seat of some independent self.

I’m going to propose counterarguments (I love arguing against myself.)

I. If we don’t have free will, why is God so angry at us? Or is that just us making assumptions about a human-like God?

Presumably, God is omniscient, omnipotent, and just. Humans have free will and are judged accordingly. God made us as we are. God knew exactly what we’d do. God is punishing us for doing what he made us do.

This creates a contradiction: A just God cannot righteously punish deterministic beings for actions they were guaranteed to perform.

Conclusions:

God is not omniscient, omnipotent, and just, or
God did not create us, or
God does not exist, or
God created us with free will.

What those four alternatives add up to is that the existence of “free will” is a theological, not a scientific, assertion, which cannot be proved scientifically

II. And if I don’t have free will, why should I be blamed and punished for doing evil or credited and rewarded for doing good?

If we don’t have free will, how can we blame Hitler and praise Mother Teresa?

It’s a matter of convenience and perspective. It is convenient to say Hitler was bad, but the reality is that his actions, i.e., his responses to his life’s stimuli, were bad. Hitler is just a bag of chemicals

Mother Teresa was a bag of similar chemicals. Society dubbed her responses to stimuli “good.” But her chemicals had no moral measure. They are just chemicals.

It is the actions that we judge, and those judgments are social, not physical. Murder is bad except when society deems it necessary. Military generals, who have killed thousands, often are revered.

Infants are neither bad nor good. Later in life, their responses to stimuli are judged by society, which then punishes or rewards those actions. The bag of chemicals is changed by stimuli.

Every second of every day, we experience trillions of stimuli, both internal and external. For our small three-pound brain, processing, analyzing, and responding to all these stimuli is an incredibly challenging task — impossible, really.

Even the most powerful electronic computer doesn’t instantly have to deal with the number and range of stimuli and needed responses that the human brain must.

Your brain and body must consider billions of ever-changing situations, from decoding photons for sight to decoding sound waves and decoding chemicals for taste.

All through your body, stimuli are decoded, so y0u can deal with pathogens, and remain the right temperature, sleep and wake, pump blood, and on and on to a factor of millions.

You must keep functioning from when you weighed 8 pounds, and now you weigh 150 pounds, and you still function, though every cell in your body has been replaced many times. (Imagine repairing a car with new parts every day, while the car is running at 50 mph.)

You must create reality out of sensory input. Response alone wouldn’t survive. You need to anticipate, and that anticipation is what you call “reality.”

One urn or two faces. You can flip them, but if you do, why? What stimulus causes you to take that action?

You see things before you actually “see” them.

This anticipation allows you to mentally “flip” illusions, so the urn alternatively can appear to be two faces.

Pure response, billions of times every second, would be impossible, as well as exhausting. It has to be a mix — anticipation and response– or we always would be a step too slow.

So the brain is forced to take shortcuts. Survival works better with anticipation than with blind response.

The illusion of free will — the belief in effect without cause — is the method by which we create anticipation.

We already know that parts of the brain predict before other parts realize it.

In 1983, Benjamin Libet found that brain activity (the “readiness potential”) begins up to 500 milliseconds before participants report deciding to move their finger. Libet concluded that the brain begins preparing for movement before we become aware of choosing to act.

Soon et al. (2008) – fMRI-based prediction of choices Finding: Using fMRI, researchers could predict with ~60% accuracy which button a subject would press up to 10 seconds before the subject became consciously aware of deciding. “The outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity several seconds before it enters awareness.”

Haynes Lab and Others (2010s) – Unconscious determinants of thought

Later studies replicated and extended Soon et al.’s work, showing that even abstract decisions, like whether to add or subtract numbers, could be predicted seconds in advance from brain scans.

Consciousness is not a live feed but a carefully delayed and smoothed reconstruction. A classic example: the “flash-lag effect.” See video

And if you enjoy videos, try this one: 30 Best Illusions. We all have seen illusions, and these are good ones. They demonstrate one simple fact.

Our brains invent what we believe is reality. Seeing is not in the eye, or even in the optical system. It is in the prediction.

We cannot act on reality because we don’t know what reality is. It is an illusion created by our brains and other parts of the body. See: Phantom limb pain. See also, “Psychosomatic.”

This undermines the idea of free will— that conscious intent causes behavior. Just as our perception of the world is an illusion, “free will is a functional illusion — a survival mechanism.

It arises from the brain’s need to anticipate complex outcomes and simulate future actions—giving the system a predictive edge. The illusion of free will improves our survival through anticipation.

Camouflage works because of the brain’s shortcuts. Some of these examples exist to fool even simple brains, not just your complex brain.

All living creatures invent their version of reality.

Evolution selects for illusion. So we don’t experience free will because it’s real—we experience it because it’s useful. Free will is not a physical reality, but an evolved illusion. It’s a product of the brain’s need to predict, simulate, and integrate stimuli rapidly for survival.

While consciousness is the ultimate response to stimuli, the free will illusion evolved to deal with the massive number of stimuli, translations of those stimuli, and responses that life survival uniquely demands.

The illusion of free will emerges from the anticipatory architecture of the human brain, which evolved not to reflect absolute truth, but to stay one step ahead of chaos.

Consider AI, to date. It is the product of some very smart people, and is very smart in a narrow range.But no one yet has been smart enough to create even a tiny fruit fly, because a fruit fly is faced with far more complex tasks than any AI.

The fruit fly must live, procreate (a massively complex function in itself), find food, eliminate, avoid predators, gauge the wind, follow odors, sleep, wake, deal with bacteria and viruses, receive stimuli, translate stimuli, and respond to stimuli.

Nature created that fruitfly with more trials and failures than we are capable of running — at least so far.

While consciousness is the response to stimuli, free will is an illusion that emerges from the predictive needs of the human brain, which evolved not to reflect absolute truth, but to stay ahead of chaos.

Every minute, the human body receives trillions of stimuli—from the photons striking our retinas, waves of sound, airborne chemicals decoded as scent, fluctuations in temperature, blood chemistry, and pressure.

Internally, our cells generate, destroy, and communicate. We are bags of chemicals shaped by evolution, complex hierarchies of input processing.

Imagine a United Nations interpreter translating speeches from trillions of people, all speaking different languages at the same time. Your brain faces an even greater challenge. It must translate, edit, and respond simultaneously.

If your response to this chaos were merely reflexive, we would die quickly. Reaction alone is too slow. To survive, organisms must anticipate. Anticipation buys time. It enables strategic action before events unfold.

This predictive capacity forms the scaffold for what we subjectively experience as “free will.”

The classical notion of free will—uncaused, sovereign choice—is incompatible with a deterministic universe. Any genuine “freedom” would require a self that acts independently of all internal and external causes, which no system (biological or otherwise) has ever demonstrated.

Yet, we experience something that feels like choice.

This experience isn’t evidence of freedom. It is a cognitive simulation that arises from the way the brain forecasts possible futures based on pattern recognition, memory, and context.

Like a chess computer searching its decision tree, the brain projects outcomes and generates readiness. Consciousness narrates these projections after the neural action has already begun.

Anticipation is not a luxury—it is a necessity. Brains evolved to “see before seeing,” to integrate probabilities and partial data in real time. Consider the experienced baseball batter: he must begin his swings before the pitch has arrived.

He reads the pitcher’s micro-signals, subconsciously aggregates prior experience, and initiates a swing before any conscious explanation exists.

When asked afterward how he knew a curveball was coming, he might say, “I could just tell.” This is not mysticism; it’s high-speed, subconscious prediction. Free will is the feeling generated when such predictions are fed into the brain’s narrative center and explained retroactively.

Consciousness does not serve as the decision-maker; instead, it acts as a narrator. It recounts the story of what the organism is currently doing, what it has done, or what it may do next.

Consciousness creates coherence in the flow of behavior, but it operates on a delay—the decisions it describes have often already been initiated by unconscious brain activity.

This does not make the experience of choice meaningless. It makes it strategic. The illusion of free will enables humans to reflect on past outcomes, simulate future options, and socially justify actions.

These are evolutionarily valuable functions, not signs of uncaused agency.

If the human brain were only a responder, we’d always be one step too slow. Our perceptual systems constantly forecast: we hallucinate continuity in flickering stimuli; we flip ambiguous images (faces or urns) with our minds. These are not errors—they are demonstrations of a system primed to guess forward.

Reality, as we perceive it, is not built from raw sensory data alone. It is constructed from expectation + input. This is why the “reality” we create feels stable—it is our prediction engine smoothing the chaos.

Free will, as a physical phenomenon, does not exist. Instead, a system has evolved to survive through prediction. The experience of choosing is a necessary illusion—a signal that our anticipatory machinery is working.

In that sense, we are not truly free, but we are equipped to feel free, just in time to stay alive.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Monetary Sovereignty

Twitter: @rodgermitchell

Search #monetarysovereignty

Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell;

MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell;

https://www.academia.edu/

……………………………………………………………………..

A Government’s Sole Purpose is to Improve and Protect The People’s Lives.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

An interesting take on Free Will vs Will Power

Reader Scott and I have been bantering about “Free Will” and “Will Power.” (For the purposes of this discussion, I have separated the word willpower into its constituents, will and power.)

As a shorthand version, I claim that “free will” has no basis in science, cannot be located in the brain, and is an illusion created by the brain.

Scott claims he exhibits free will when he makes certain decisions. I claim his examples demonstrate will power, not free will. His retort is that will power is a subset of free will, like a Venn diagram with one small circle inside a large circle.

The phrases, “free will” and “will power” look alike. They both are short, and both use the word “will.” But the differences are enormous and quite meaningful.

There are important reasons why we don’t refer to “power will” but to will power, and we don’t refer to “will free” but to free will.

Chocolate Cake — **Mmmmm, Will power, free will, or just plain old will?**

WILL POWER

In will power, the word “will” is just an adjective. The subject is “power,” and that word implies force. Like gasoline power, electrical power, brute power, and horse power (horsepower), you have a force against a resistance.

In the case of will power, both the force and the the resistance are in the brain itself. Will power resembles the brain being split in two, with half the brain saying “Yes” and battling the other half that says “No.”

Typically, one half advocates for something the brain finds “pleasant,” while the other half advocates for something the brain finds “correct.” Both “pleasant” and “correct” can be defined in myriad ways, but both sides have one thing in common: They are both determined by chemical, electrical, and/or physical input to the brain.

A typical example might be whether to eat a slice of chocolate cake or to refrain.

On one side is the cake, which your brain knows, from prior experience, will cause chemical, electrical, and physical pleasure. On the other side is your health knowledge, which also came into your brain via chemical, electrical, and/or physical means.

So, the battle ensues. If the winner is pleasure, you are said to lack will power. If the winner is the denial of pleasure, you are said to have will power. In either case, the decision is made in identifiable parts of the brain.

The desire to eat chocolate cake is primarily driven by the reward system in your brain, which includes regions like the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex. These areas are involved in processing the pleasure and emotional aspects of eating.

Your resistance to eating it involves the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for decision-making about health impacts, against the immediate pleasure it provides.

All of the above — your knowledge of the reward and health impacts and their relative importance — were placed into your brain via chemical, electrical, and other physical means. They didn’t just arrive there out of thin air.

Interestingly, these inputs change second by second. If, for instance, you happen to be very hungry, the chemicals that constantly bathe your brain, and the electrical signals that constantly circulate through your brain will cause a physical, chemical, and electrical effect on your amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and prefrontal cortex,

At that point, reward overrides health impacts, and will power loses the battle.

If however you are full, or if you have been given a stern warning by your doctor, physical, chemical, and electrical effects force the opposite effect, and you are said to be exercising your will power.

FREE WILL

In “free will,” the word “will” becomes the noun, not the adjective, and is the subject of the phrase.

Here, we are not talking about power but will. Is your will forced, coerced, or determined, or is it free of all these influences?

“Free will” is the hypothetical ability to make choices not predetermined by past events or current influences. It’s the idea that we can decide our actions independently without internal or external constraints.

Based on that, it’s difficult to see how any exercise of will ever could be free and not constrained. You can exercise “will” when you use your personal history, knowledge, and physical and emotional needs as expressed in your body chemistry and electrical circuitry.

But the phrase “free will” is a huge step above just plain ordinary “will.” We always use our will, but I submit that will, free from all constraints, is not physically possible.

The chemicals bathing your brain, the electrical signals flashing through, the senses of which you may or may not be aware, all affect your will.

I further submit that when people use the term “free will,” they really mean “will,” and that the “free” part is a powerful illusion created in and by the brain.

So to reader Scott I say, continue to use your will, but don’t ever believe it is free. Everything you do or think is constrained by past and current influences. Will exists, but not free will.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Monetary Sovereignty

Twitter: @rodgermitchell

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MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell; https://www.academia.edu/

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