Are We Really Free? (Spoiler Alert: Nope)

Are we really free? A lot of people think so. They think our thoughts and actions are all our own choices, like swiping away a video or picking out a shirt and eating a 'meat bun' for breakfast. 'Free choice', right? But we all know 'everything happens for a reason'. Every single thing happening right now is just a result of what happened before. You probably believe that we choose our own actions, but also that the world is governed by cause and effect.

Now let's talk about my breakfast. I ate two 'meat buns' and a cup of soy milk. The 'freedom lovers' would say those were just my choices, not caused by anything in the past. But the 'determinism folks' say those choices weren't just random thoughts. They were caused by lots of deeper things, like: 'Doughnuts are too greasy' and 'dry noodles need way too much water'. Plus, I'm lazy, the 'meat bun' place was right there, and the dry noodle place was across the street. So, following this logic, our 'free choices' are just the result of all those little mental things happening in our heads. Determinism says that 'free will' is just an illusion. As the 18th-century French philosopher Paul-Henri Thiry said, everything happening now is just a chain of events, and people are part of the physical world, controlled by the rules of physics. You think your mind makes choices? But your mind is just your brain, and your brain is biological, and biology is all physical. In the world of physics, there's no room for 'free will'. We're all just little gears in a machine, doing what we're made to do. Oedipus had to kill his father and marry his mother. I had to eat 'meat buns' and soy milk. And you had to watch this video. You couldn't help it.