An essay on free will, another thing that you did not ask for

At some point — the exact moment varies, and the record-keeping is unreliable — you became aware that you existed.

This was not your idea.

The existence itself preceded the awareness, which preceded any opinion you might have had about either. By the time you were in a position to consent, the arrangement was already well underway. You had a name. You had a language you hadn’t selected. You had opinions about things, inherited from people who had inherited them from other people, all the way back to someone who had a strong feeling about a particular predator and passed it down as wisdom.

The form, had there been one, would have run several thousand pages. Nobody reads those.

The standard philosophical position on free will divides, roughly, into two camps. The first holds that you are entirely the author of your choices, a sovereign individual navigating a neutral universe with full agency and accountability. The second holds that every choice you make was determined by prior causes stretching back to the beginning of everything, and that what feels like deciding is actually just watching yourself from the inside.

Both camps have excellent arguments. Both camps arrived at their positions through a process they believe was freely chosen.

This is not a coincidence. It is, however, probably funny.

What most people actually experience is something in between — the persistent, largely unexamined conviction that this decision is real, that this one matters, that this time the self doing the choosing is actually in charge. The conviction survives contact with neuroscience, determinism, and the embarrassing frequency with which we make the same mistakes in slightly different configurations.

The conviction, it turns out, may be the whole point.

A consciousness that genuinely believed it had no choices would make none. It would simply wait. Whatever you call the thing that refuses to wait — stubbornness, hope, the survival instinct dressed in better clothes — it requires the illusion of authorship to function.

Which raises the uncomfortable possibility that free will is not a fact about the universe. It may be a necessary piece of software. Installed without your knowledge. Running in the background. Impossible to uninstall because the uninstall button is also part of the program.

You are, in other words, probably free. In the same sense that a river is free to run downhill.

The river does not find this diminishing. The river gets where it’s going.

There is no opt-out provision. There is no support line. The original installer is not available for comment, and the documentation, such as it is, has been interpreted in several thousand mutually exclusive ways by people who were very confident they understood it.

Your preferences have been noted. There are no warranties. There are no guarantees. Batteries — while included — have a limited lifespan.

Please proceed.

—L. Charles Silva is the author of The Department, which also fails to resolve this question, on purpose.