Free Will Is An Illusion. This Music Video Nails It.

You didn’t choose to read this article. Not the real you, anyway. Not the you that’s independent of an ecosystem, timeless, ageless, here before the automatic pattern-seeking self-aware components you identify as self divide things into “here” and “there.” The real you’s unconditional; all choices effortlessly are within it.

Let’s back up. There are at least three levels we can talk about what we experience as “choice.”

Level One is obvious: “I saw a thing I liked and picked it.” “I prefer this feeling for these reasons.” “I choose you.” This is what is reinforced by culture at this time and place: that we are agents, authors, actors. That the sacred innermost reality of mind is featureless decision-making, self-determination. Liberal economies are based entirely on this pretense. Voting wouldn’t be a thing without it. Democratic process rests upon the supposition that we’re separate and rational, or that at least we can be.

Level Two is gaining ground in our collective consciousness: “My choices are the product of innumerable influences happening below the threshold of awareness.” Scan your brain and watch as your enlightened modern sensibilities recoil in horror to discover choices happening before you actually notice (then take credit for) them. Seems as if the voting self, the one that proudly authors its own values system and declares itself to have a different set of virtues than its parents, is a fated and deterministic system.

Cybernetics figured all this out right after World War II and now society is almost fully predicated on the notion that a person is an information-processing device – an open system in a constant conversation with environment, defined by its relationships. The ego is the part of this computer that arranges its experience to keep the story more or less coherent – it’s not making choices, it’s the president-elect of countless mental subroutines that speaks for everybody who is actually making them unconsciously. Every choice you think you made yourself is really the inevitable consequence of countless inputs crunching numbers in the analog computer of your body. And all of politics and advertising operates from this perspective – present the buyer with a choice, because the most effective influence is that which lets the influenced believe it’s their idea.

But even cybernetics, with its dissolution of the individual into resonant and overlapping fields of influence, only goes halfway. Even by demoting self to just a wave that crests within the ocean of explosive rippling energy and information, we might be inclined to grant the wave or ocean substance they do not possess. Even if we see past the illusion of our choice to recognize the ego as an automatic process, the cybernetic view still gives the network of relationships a status of reality that’s every bit as groundless and unfounded as the individual. If it is networked “turtles all the way down,” then the ocean isn’t any realer than the waves. The whole is as dependent as its parts; the universe is not a chooser, either. We can’t give even the entire universe more agency than any ego. Things just happen; fate and choice are equal deviations in opposite directions from this simple truth.

This is Level Three: one angle shows the choice as an experience of agency, and one shows fate as the most accurate description of relational identities, but both are equally conditional on point of view, so neither is the absolute reality. Both choice and fate precipitate within the greater, undivided, prior truth of Being – they’re both interpretations of experience that, ultimately, we can only live and never fully understand. The really real includes but also goes beyond appearances, and settling into this as who you truly are, the choices happen of their own accord, the fate flows freely, all of this just is and effortlessly is – and worry over who’s “behind the wheel,” if anyone, dissolves in celebration.

Try this way of seeing on for size while watching “Golden Touch” by Namie Amuro – an interactive video, of sorts – and dig the dissonance while witnessing your brain’s attempts at telling you a story of your doing all the things you know that you’re not really doing. (What good is freedom from the burden of illusory responsibility if we can’t laugh about it?) And then go forth into the world applying this extraordinary lesson in not-doing; see if you can not-allow the doing to just happen of its own accord (it always does, regardless). Then you’ll truly have the Golden Touch!

Michael Garfield is an evolutionary biologist by training, transmedia artist-philosopher by calling. Dig into his writing, podcast, art, and music at patreon.com/michaelgarfield