What Is Determinism? Do You Actually Have Free Will?

Determinism is simple. Everything that happens was caused by something that happened before it.

The coffee cup falls because you knocked it. You knocked it because you reached for your phone. You reached for your phone because it buzzed. It buzzed because someone texted you.

Go back far enough and you get to the Big Bang. Every event since then has been one long chain of cause and effect.

Including your brain states. Including your thoughts. Including what feels like your decisions.

If determinism is true, you couldn’t have chosen differently than you did. When you picked chocolate over vanilla, that choice was the inevitable result of your brain chemistry, your past experiences, and the exact arrangement of atoms in your skull at that moment.

Change any of those factors and you might have picked vanilla. But given the exact same circumstances—down to every neuron firing exactly as it did—you’d pick chocolate again. Every time.

This bothers people. It feels wrong. You experienced making a choice. You weighed options. You decided.

But determinists say that feeling is an illusion. Your brain generated the experience of choosing while actually just following the laws of physics.

Most neuroscientists think this is probably right. Your brain activity shows decisions forming before you’re consciously aware of them.

I don’t know if determinism is true. But I notice that whether I believe in free will or not, I still have to get up tomorrow and decide what to have for breakfast.

Maybe that’s what matters.