this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
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Research and brain scans indicate that your choices are already made and decided in the decision making portion of your brain before you're even consciously aware that you have a decision to make in the first place. The sum total of individual experienced reality is just your brain post-hoc rationalizing your sensory input and reactions.
Nah that's horseshit, and lowkey is predicated on maintaining the hypercapitalist notion of individualism. If I have a decision premade off of my own sensory input, that's one thing. But to call that a negation of free will is to discount the addition of input outside of my sensory input vis-a-vis other community members. If I packed my lunch, then David comes up to me and says "hey, I got a bogo coupon for wings, wanna come?" I didn't pre-decide to join him. He literally added this information to my life, and I immediately decided to join. Now I have friends, and wings, and the free will to enjoy them both.
Jesse what the fuck are you talking about
Bro, I'm not high enough for that shit.
Sir, this is Wendy's
Even if that's true, there's a bootstrap paradox with that though because the decision was still made in the decision making part of your brain. So what made that part of your brain make that decision?
What it implies is that decision making is entirely subconscious and the whole conscious experience of making a decision is just our brains way of providing a sense of agency where none seems to actually exist. You really wanna bake your noodle look into split brain experiments. There might be more than one person in our heads.
Think of it like this: once Goku and Vegeta did the fusion dance, there was only Gogeta.
Yeah but when they cut the corpus callosum it's like they're unfused but still one body. We're all Pacific Rim gundams.
But of course. Not more than one person, but certainly more than one part, right?
If you ever have meditated or attempted to meditate, you see this immediately. There is the portion of you that is trying to get you to concentrate on your breath or mantra, and there are the meandering parts of your mind that are more susceptible to moods and drawing your thoughts to other things.
The same thing goes for reading. Sometimes you'll be passing your eyes over the words on the page but most of your mind has vacated the premises.
There's also things like instances where you drive to a place where you used to live or used to work.
There are different processes running for certain, and the mind isn't a singular thing, but ultimately I'm not sure that anything is. I don't think that any of this says much definitive about free will though.