How free are we truly, and how much of us is instinct and biology?

Ever since the beginning of life, the path of evolution has led every organism to obtain behavioural patterns that, after trial and error, seem to work better. Some are simple: don't walk alone and defenceless into your predator's lair. For better or for worse, we have developed something we call “common sense” and trusting it has done us well for millions of years. We’re still alive and thriving, aren’t we? We could say that our patterns of behaviour are good for the survival of our species. Or… wait… it has been good up until now!

How many species are already extinct? It’s fair to say that we have a smaller chance of walking into that path because we’re already so smart, observant and adaptable, especially since our technological achievements have come to rival the powers of nature itself. However, even though we have such power to adapt our environment to serve us, do we as well have the power to adapt ourselves according to our observations? We are still bound to our nature, both in physical form and in mind.

The human physical form can be changed, and there are pro-bionic groups of people who believe in artificially improving the human physique through technology. However, our mind is still a mystery to science which is being explored day to day. One of the parts of our mind that we are mostly unable to change is our instincts, our “common sense”, the behavioural patterns that have led us by the hand till this point in history.

The unconscious things we assume to be true and which lead us in every action that we take.

Let’s say you’re going from work to a meeting in an area near your home, but as you’re driving, you become distracted by an interview you’re listening to on the radio. You grab the key to your garage door and you suddenly realise that you’re home, and that there’s somewhere else you need to be. Sometime during your journey, your mind took over. This magical autopilot is also called “muscle memory”. This is a familiar action that you take without conscious thought because of frequent repetition.

The existence of muscle memory raises a strong worry: What else is my mind hiding from me? What do I do because my unconscious tells me to instead of doing it due to an actual choice of mine? An exercise I like to do that proves how much control my unconscious has over me is suddenly becoming “present”. I don’t stop what I’m doing, but I look around, think about where I am, why I’m here, and most of the time I realise that I had been moving partly out of preference and partly out of impulse, but in most of my actions, there were rarely actual conscious choices. For example, right now, all I have to do is think about my ideas, but the text writes itself because my hands are familiar with the position of every key on the keyboard. I don’t even notice it’s there until I think about it. I don’t even choose which words I’m going to say. There are only two thoughts coursing through my mind right now:

• I think about the ideas I want to express and my body writes them on its own.
• I read the text as I write it, and if it’s ok, I keep going. If it isn’t, I edit it.

My mind is completely in abstract mode. The writing part, the watching part, the listening-to-my-environment part, they are all outsourced to the autopilot. This does not only happen during creation activities but during most actions. Which step goes first when you get up and walk? You just walk, there is rarely anything conscious about it. Polyglots will probably have experienced an unconscious language slip at a certain point in their life: speaking Spanish to an English speaker and vice versa. You don’t even choose the language you speak most of the time, it just comes automatically because your brain simply knows (or thinks it knows) what is appropriate. The ideas that you speak are mostly the “appropriate ideas”, but what is appropriate? You don’t usually think about this, the ideas just come out in words. You might wander through the ideas you can express, and then suddenly one clicks. That “click” is the conscious decision, done by an experienced brain, and it is so quick that it is imperceptible by humans.

Don’t believe that last point? Here’s a short documentary about it:
https://www.rulu.co/episodes/mind-field-1x5/

If decisions are ultimately unconscious, only thought about after they happen, how can you be sure that you made them consciously and in full exercise of our freedom and will? If your actions are controlled by muscle memory. If your mind is unknowable even by yourself. If emotions arise without your control. Where do YOU start? What part is you, and what part is your body/your circumstance?