The 57-year-old woman thrashed and gasped for breath as an unseen hand suddenly tightened around her throat, trying to crush her windpipe. Only after struggling for some time did she free herself, and the hand fell limply to her side. It was her own left hand, yet it neither obeyed her nor could she predict what it would do next. This happened in 1908, making her the first documented patient with what is now called alien hand syndrome.
She survived, but that is not always the case when brain circuitry goes kaput.
In 1966, Charles Whitman killed his wife and mother, then reached the University of Texas and killed fourteen more people. An autopsy later found a brain tumour near his amygdala, which helps regulate fear and aggression. Whether it caused his rampage was never established. Two decades later, Kenneth Parks, a Canadian, drove to his in-laws’ house and killed his mother-in-law while sleepwalking. The court later acquitted him. Unlike Whitman’s case, the link between his brain circuitry and lack of conscious awareness during the act was clear.
If a person’s body can act without their awareness or control, how much of what we call ‘choice’ is truly ours, even when we are awake? Moreover, human behaviour is always a product of neural circuitry—malfunctioning or not—that we never chose independently.
Most of what the brain makes us do happens below our conscious awareness. In the 1980s, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet asked volunteers to flex their wrists whenever they felt like it, while measuring their brain activity. He found that a slow build-up of electrical activity—the ‘readiness potential’—began several hundred milliseconds before people reported deciding to do so. Though the interpretation of these findings remains debated, they do suggest the conscious ‘I’ does not always initiate the decision it becomes aware of. Another neuroscientist, Robert Sapolsky, in his book Determined, challenges anyone who disagrees to show him one neuron whose firing is independent of its own biological past. Sam Harris makes the same point at a more experiential level: you can do what you decide to do, but you cannot decide what you will decide.
Determinism is easy to mistake for destiny, but the two differ. Destiny says the ending is fixed no matter what happens along the way; determinism says the outcome depends on every step, including conscious effort and reasoning. The shift, then, is not from choice to no choice, but from self-authorship to participation in causation.
Modern non-duality teachers like Nisargadatta Maharaj, Ramesh Balsekar and Rupert Spira reach a similar conclusion. Belief in a separate self creates the very idea of free will; once that self is seen through, as Spira puts it, ‘the idea of free will dissolves.’
If free will is mostly an illusion, the honest response is not despair but compassion. Instead of asking who deserves punishment, we could ask what caused the behaviour and how to change it. We do not scold someone for having epilepsy; we treat the condition. A murderer must still be imprisoned for others’ safety, but if violence or addiction has roots in circuitry shaped by forces nobody chose, understanding, not blame, is the right tool.
We cannot think our way out of the illusion of free will any more than we can stop seeing the mirage by knowing the physics behind it. Knowing intellectually that we lack free will does not let us overcome the illusion of having it—doing so would itself take a free will we do not have. Perhaps it is a necessary illusion. But that understanding can still help, the way knowing the physics behind a mirage keeps us from falling into its trap. The illusion persists, but exposure, education and insight can create new causes that reshape how we respond to it. Two things still remain ours to do.
We cannot choose our genes or our earliest environment, but we can choose to understand rather than judge the circuitry they produced. Think of a broken television: when the picture fails, we blame the screen, but the screen may be innocent; the circuitry behind it is the real culprit.
In 2002, researchers Hedden and Zhang had participants play a game against an opponent following a fixed algorithmic rule—yet even when told this, participants still perceived intentions, strategy and cunning. We cannot help attributing agency to a pattern of behaviour, even if it belongs to a machine or to brain circuitry that simply knows no other way to behave in that moment. So let us focus on fixing the wiring compassionately instead of blaming the person.
Practise meeting life without the autobiographical self: close your eyes and assume, for a moment, a silent Being observing, not narrating, everything happening right now—thought, breath, sensation. Carry the same stance with open eyes and into ordinary days and conversations.
Seeing beyond the screen—circuitry, not the person—and watching rather than narrating experience is how we can begin. Meeting others with more patience and compassion is how we build a world the illusion, left unexamined, would never allow.
