← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Free Will Is A Biological Illusion — The Experiment That Proved It Changed How I See Everything
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In 2008, a team of neuroscientists in Berlin put people in an FMRI machine and asked them to press a button, left hand to right hand, whatever they wanted. The researchers then watched their brains and what they saw demonstrated that free will is an illusion based on brain signals. The researchers could predict which button each person was going to press up to 10 seconds to before the person became consciously aware of the fact that a decision had already been made. 10 seconds. The people weren't actually consciously choosing. Their conscious mind was the last to know. The unconscious processes were way ahead, and the conscious mind just stepped in at the end, layered on a post hoc rationalization for the action, and then took credit for something it actually had nothing to do with. The experiment has been reproduced with similar findings. And to be honest, if I'm right and we're all NPCs living inside of a simulation, this is exactly what you'd expect. For a lot of people, that is a triggering idea that invalidates their entire worldview and leaves them in a nihilistic spiral. But what I'm going to show you in this video is that while you have no free will whatsoever, this life is even more meaningful than you think. I know the primary objections, and I'm going to go through them all, including what many think is the silver bullet that destroys my entire quantum randomness. And by the time you finish part four, I predict you'll not only agree that we have no free will and we live in a simulation, but you're going to feel better about life. But if you don't, be sure to let me know in the comments. Welcome to part one. It's biology all the way down. On September 13, 1848, a railroad foreman known as Phineas Gage was packing explosive powder into a borehole with a 13 pound iron rod. A spark ignited the charge and the rod shot up through his cheek, passed through his frontal lobe and exited the top of his skull. The injury took Gage from responsible and disciplined to impulsive, profane, unreliable and unable to hold a job. His friend said he was no longer Gage simply because his brain was damaged, but that's what you'd expect, but only if we live in a deterministic universe that is computational in nature. If you don't yet believe that, make sure you watch this video right here. The scientific literature is clear on the point of biological cause and effect. There are myriad studies documenting how changes in the brain change the very decisions we make. If you adjust the right chemical or physical structure in someone's brain, they become a fundamentally different person. There are countless stories of things like patients with tumors that turn them into sexual deviants only for them to return to normal once the tumor was removed. Or split brain patients who will give you different answers to the same question depending on which hemisphere of their brain you speak to. Or people who become more aggressive and risk taking after being infected with the brain parasite toxoplasmosis, which is found in cats, by the way. The list goes on and on, and these are the kind of phenomena that convinced the Stanford neuroscientist and MacArthur genius grant recipient Robert Sapolsky to write the book, the seminal work on free Will. Sapolsky is one of the most cited behavioral biologists ever. Ever and indetermined. He offers up 700 pages and thousands of citations convincingly making a single point. Free will is an illusion. Every decision you make is determined by the brain state that came just before it. That brain state was caused by the hormones and neurochemicals running through you an hour earlier. Those hormones were shaped by the sleep you got last night. The sleep you got last night was shaped by the stress you felt yesterday. The stress you felt yesterday was shaped by an email you got from your boss. The email your boss sent was shaped by his entire career, his upbringing, his genes, his culture and the culture of his parents and his parents parents and a hundred generations of selective pressures stretching back to the African savanna. It's biology all the way down. There is no point in that chain where a Free, uncaused, you reaches into the system and somehow changes the outcome. The laws of physics are always in control. There's no pause button that lets your soul make a decision or cast a vote. Give someone enough LSD and they are going to go on a trip and nothing but time is going to get them out of it. Free will can't step in and make you less high. And the same is true of every moment in your life. You're beholden to your biology, to your chemistry. As Sapolsky says, we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck over which we had no control. Every input that goes into every decision is bound by your biology. The next decision you make will feel like it's yours, but it will inevitably be the output of 100,000 inputs that you didn't author and can't control. There's no way to transcend your biology. The very notion doesn't even make sense. Imagine telling someone who is profoundly autistic to simply use their free will and act normal. It's an absurd idea on its face, but it's what you'd have to believe is possible in order to think that you have free will. Biology isn't a constraint on you. It is you. The very thing you think of as you is simply the way your unique brain turns inputs into outputs. That's why when something alters someone's brain, people that know them end up saying that's no longer the same person. When you change the substrate on which thought itself happens, the thoughts change. They become something else. Specifically, because there is no you that exists. You're not some little man hiding in your brain, driving your body. You are your body. And that is precisely why there is no free will. Now, I know people will say that these are overly dramatic examples and that when a normal person is presented with options, they will be able to freely choose between them, even if they are limited in some way by their biology. That's where I'll point you back to the FMRI experiment we opened with. The one where the researchers could see the brain decide seconds before the person was consciously aware that the decision had already been made somewhere more deep inside their biology. And of course it had. The universe is deterministic. We live in a world defined by and bound by physical rules that connect through a never ending string of cause and effect. Where would free will hide? How could it sit outside of that sequence of cause and effect? It couldn't. And while I share the strong intuition that I am in control of my decisions, the reality Is that the belief in free will is the last holdout of a superstitious species that tries to make sense of the world through magic rather than by mapping cause and effect. But the truth is, the universe is mathematics. Provably so. That's why every time mathematicians have invented something they thought was pure abstraction, Physicists have later discovered that that that mathematics isn't abstract at all. It actively describes some element of how the universe works. Newton and Leibniz discovered calculus simultaneously precisely because calculus was already there as a part of the fabric of the universe's operating code. Riemann's bizarre curved geometry sat on a shelf for 60 years until Einstein discovered it perfectly described gravity. Italian mathematicians thought they had invented fake numbers they needed as a bookkeeping trick. But it turns out that 300 years later, physicists would prove imaginary. Numbers, as they're known, are the core to describing quantum mechanics mathematically. Eugene Wigner, the Nobel laureate, called this pervasive truth the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. His point was that math has no obligation to describe physical reality, and yet it does, every single time with unreasonable accuracy. The simplest explanation is that math describes the universe, because the universe is math. The cosmos isn't a thing being described by equations. The cosmos is what appears when you run the equations. Physics is what the universe is doing. Mathematics is how the universe knows exactly what to do. Your brain is a product of that structural framework. Your brain is running a program. Literally. Your brain is a bundle of algorithms trying to make predictions about the world around you. The signals are being read, the decisions are being made, just not freely. The entire decision making process is entirely constrained by your biology, which is entirely constrained by physics, which is entirely constrained by the mathematical instruction set that puts it all in motion. Free will never enters into the picture, despite the fact that you're programmed to feel like it does. And none of that means you can't change. You can and will. You know that. We've all experienced it. But it's all part of the endless sequence of cause and effect. The programs our brains are designed to run include an algorithm to for goal acquisition and adaptation. There's a brutal experiment that proves that that's true. If your decision sat outside of pure cause and effect, your emotions wouldn't control your decision making. Your free will would. But unfortunately, due to a cruel twist of fate, we know that people's decisions are completely controlled by their emotions, not their logical brain, and not the magical idea of free will. If you selectively damage the area of the brain responsible for emotions, for instance, the person will suddenly be unable to make a decision. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio had a patient named Elliot, a successful businessman, father and husband. In the early 1980s, a tumor was discovered in his ventromedial prefrontal cortex, known as the vmpfc, the part of the brain that integrates emotion into reasoning. The tumor and the surrounding damaged tissue were surgically removed, and post surgery, his IQ remained in the 97th percentile. His memory was still intact. His logical reasoning was still intact. He could discuss moral dilemmas with sophisticated analysis, and he could still solve complex problems on paper. But he lost the ability to make decisions in his actual life. Picking a restaurant for lunch was impossible. Choosing which color pen to use to fill out a form was a problem he simply could not solve. His marriage collapsed. Every business he started failed. His entire life just fell apart. Biology drives all of our decisions. And to call the stochastically deterministic output of your biological system as free will is to make the definition of free completely incoherent. I'm going to talk about the stochastic part of that when we get to the quantum section. But just know for now this is a deterministic universe. Now, I know many of you are going to cry foul at the idea of the universe and your brain being deterministic. Many people are going to say that I'm ignoring quantum mechanics. Hang tight. We'll be back in just a moment.
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- [14:24]
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Sellers on whatnot move 10 times more product than on other major marketplaces. And the number of people making over a million dollars a year on this platform has doubled. Buyers spend more than an hour a day in the app. That's not just random browsing. That is people developing a real relationship with the app. Beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury, fashion, even cookies, every category, real businesses are being built in real time on Whatnot. Download the Whatnot app today and get free shipping on your first order. Just search wh a t n o t whatnot in the App Store and start scoring amazing deals right now. All right, we're back. Let's get into it. Welcome to part two. Quantum mechanics bury the notion of free will. In 2022, three physicists won the Nobel Prize for experimentally proving that quantum mechanics are real. The universe is not locally real. Einstein could not wrap his head around this. He called it spooky action at a distance, but it turns out to be true. Now, I covered that finding and the science behind it in this video here, so check it out if you want the full version. But the short version is that at the quantum level, particles do not have definite properties until something measures them. The universe literally holds particles in a state of superposition. It's not a hypothesis. This is what's been proven. That superposition is a set of possible values, each with its own probability, but none of them definite until something forces the calculation to run and the concrete answer to be produced said super simply. Three guys won the Nobel Prize for proving that the moon only exists when someone looks at it. Yes, that is literally correct. The universe works exactly like a video game. If the system doesn't need to render something, it doesn't. The universe is not a static thing out there waiting to be discovered. It's a possible thing that only takes definitive shape when something needs to interact with it. Now, how is that relevant to free will? A lot of people hear about quantum mechanics, and they think, aha, I knew it. Free will lives in the quantum realm, where determinism doesn't exist. It's all random probabilities. If the universe isn't deterministic at the base layer, the argument goes, then maybe my decisions aren't determined either. Maybe somewhere in the quantum noise, there's room for an actual choice. And that is where free will hides. A lot of people find solace in that argument, but quantum mechanics actually prove the exact opposite. Opposite. The purpose of quantum mechanics is not to leave the door open for free will. It's there to make the simulation we all live in computationally efficient. Quantum mechanics is not the universe being mysterious. Quantum mechanics is a universe doing what every game engine does to avoid melting your computer while trying to render far too many polygons. When you're playing a video game, the hardware is super limited, so developers have to find clever ways to trick you into thinking you see a real world in front of you. But in fact, just like the real universe, it is all smoke and mirrors. The only thing that actually exists in our universe are the things something is interacting with. Everything else is just a probability. In a video game, that's called occlusion culling. Every modern game engine does it. It's how you build a system that has to create the illusion of an entire world in real time without cooking your gpu. Ok, you might be thinking, fine, the universe functions like a video game. But just because it works like that for computational efficiency doesn't mean it doesn't also open the door for free will. Unfortunately, it does. It closes the door and padlocks it. My hypothesis is that the probability wave exists to ensure the universe is computationally efficient. But when a specific variable is needed, the wavefunction collapses into a definitive variable. It's all math. And the probability has to become specific when the time comes to run the computation that requires that variable. It's not about free will. It's about a system that has the math formula but needs the final variable to complete the deterministic process. And since this is happening at the level of particles, it's not like you see the variable set and choose the one you want. The process happens automatically and the probability wave comes, collapses to a single variable, and then the simulation just renders, or the NPC chooses so on and so forth. It's known as stochastic determinism. There is an element of randomness, but the randomness is resolved procedurally by the system. It doesn't require a conscious agent to make a decision. In fact, it happens at a layer and a speed that a conscious agent could never access or process. When a quantum event happens in your neurons and the wavefunction collapses to a particular value, the value didn't come from you. It came from the same universal rng, which is a random number generator. It's an idea from video games that's been running since the Big Bang. We're all downstream of that roll of the dice. We're not the roller. It's just the universe doing what the universe does. It's holding a probability set, then collapsing it to a specific value and then feeding that value into the next deterministic step. The actual structure of stochastic determinism is very clean. Where the system is deterministic, you don't choose because cause and effect runs the show. Where the system is probabilistic, you don't choose because the dice run the show and the dice aren't you. The dice are part of the same system the brain is running inside of. And the reason that it remains in a probability set instead of something specific and thus requiring the randomness, is for the computational efficiency. If it's way out there and we're not interacting with it, then we're just going to say it's going to be something like this. And only when we need the specificity do we actually go and run the calculations. It's the only way to stay efficient. So, welcome to part three. The last hiding places of free will. Take three rocks, throw them into outer space, keep them close enough that their gravity pulls on each other. Now write down a formula that tells you exactly where all three rocks will be in a thousand years. You can't. Not because we lack the math. We don't. Newton discovered that in 1687, and today, every physicist on Earth understands it. The problem is that while two rocks pulling on each other is easy enough to compute, when you add a third rock, the whole computation breaks down. There is no closed form solution. This is known as the three body problem. And the physicist and mathematician Stephen Wolfram gave our inability to instantly compute the final answer a name, computational irreducibility. For most complex systems, there is no formula that lets you jump ahead to the answer. The only way to know what the system does is to actually run every step. Even an infinitely powerful computer can't skip ahead. It has to compute the whole thing moment by moment, exactly like reality works. Therefore, the only way to find out where our three rocks are going to end up is to simulate every single moment between now and then, step by step, year by year. The universe does not offer us any shortcuts. And this is the truth that puts another nail in the coffin of free will. How? Because it proves that a system can be completely determined and completely unpredictable at the same time. Exactly like life. When looking at the three body problem and computational irreducibility, you'll realize that those rocks are following physical law with perfect obedience. Nothing about their path is free. Nothing about it is chosen. Every position is dictated by gravity and momentum. And the positions that came before the system is 100% deterministic, even if stochastically so. And it is also impossible to predict ahead of time. You just have to sit back and watch as things unfold. And that's one of the things that fools our intuition into thinking we must have choice. We can't be predicted. Your future feels open, undetermined, full of choices that you haven't made yet. And you take that feeling of openness as proof that you are free. But the three body problem demonstrates that unpredictability and freedom are not the same thing. The fact that nobody can predict what you'll do next, including you, does not mean you're choosing it. It means you're a complex enough system that the only way to find out what you'll do is to Watch. You do it. That's the gateway to the remaining defenses of free will, and I'm going to address them now. Other than the quantum argument, the next one is probably the one that people feel most profoundly. People can change, and they change because of their choices. An addict who gets clean, someone with a temper who learns to control it, getting stronger, deciding not to eat bad food. People cannot help but have the feeling that all of those were conscious choices. I know how sacred that feeling of agency is, but stick with me until the end, because my position is not nihilism. It's the exact opposite. I think you're going to feel better about all of this once you realize how it actually operates. Because the reality is, you did change. The change is real. But when you look at what actually happened, you'll realize that you changed because some input came into your system and altered it. You hit a bottom that rewired your priorities. You met a person who showed you a different way to look at life. You read a book and you had a kid. You got scared, you got inspired. You grew up and your brain just reorganized itself. That is what we're designed to do. Your brain runs an algorithm for adaptation. It's one of the most powerful programs our brain has. You take in new inputs and the system updates and the outputs change, not only within us, but from generation to generation. We literally evolve. That's what growth is. It doesn't need to happen on a magical plane outside of our biology or outside of physics, but for to be incredibly cool, it is the program doing what the program is built to do. You may not have authored the change, but you are the change now. The next defense of free will goes something like this. But, Tom, I deliberate. I don't just react. I sit. I weigh the options for hours, sometimes days, months, or even years. That agonizing, careful weighing has to be free will. But it isn't, and we already prove why. Remember Eliot? The man who lost the ability to make decisions when his brain stopped integrating emotion? Deliberation isn't some free agent weighing pure logic. Deliberation is computation that takes a while. It's your brain running a longer calculation, pulling in more variables, waiting for an input that triggers a sufficient enough emotional response to force the system to return a value. For all the probabilistic stuff, left or right, yes or no, up or down, marry or divorce. The fact that it took a long time doesn't make it free, it just makes it slow. A computer running a hard problem isn't exercising free will. It's Just working through more steps, or contending with a decision gate that requires a high emotional amplitude to get a response. This is why so many people fail to change until they hit rock bottom. Rock bottom is a euphemism for sufficient emotional intensity to prompt a specific response. I know how much people initially hate that reasoning. But either physics doesn't matter at all and physics is the illusion, or the persistent feeling that we sit outside of our biology is the illusion. And that brings us to the next common defense of free will. This is the one that almost everybody falls back on. In the end, they're going to say, there's nothing you can tell me that will change my mind. I can feel the free will. Physics is the illusion. Everything about my life tells me I'm making choices. As I constantly remind myself, the emotions themselves make dots feel like they connect that don't actually connect. If you try to hold that worldview, you end up existing entirely on a magical plane, having to divorce yourself from everything you can see, touch, feel around you. Whereas if you adopt the frame that this is a stochastically deterministic universe and. And emotions are a necessary part of the processing, you only have to get over one thing, which is that it feels like I have free will even when I don't. The feeling that we have free will is the single most convincing illusion that our biology produces. But it's still a product of our biology. There are a lot of things that feel true but aren't. It feels like the sun goes around the Earth, but it doesn't. It feels like the ground is solid, but the truth is, it's almost entirely empty space. It feels like the table in front of you is one continuous object instead of a humming cloud of particles held together by forces you can't see. But that's what it is. Your feelings about reality are not measurements of reality. They are renderings generated by a computational system whose job is to turn inputs into outputs based entirely on mathematics. Whatever a soul is, whatever consciousness is, it arises as a mathematical phenomenon inside of a computational system. Some people will say that a soul is from God, and they'll be perfectly comfortable living on that magical plane. Others will say consciousness is broadcast from the outside. Others still will say that everything is consciousness itself. Sure, no problem. But for whatever reason, the substrate that it moves through and acts upon is pure, stochastically determined mathematics. Nothing sits outside of that. The feeling of free will creates a sense of immersion, but is still provably an illusion. Even if we are all touched by God, he's chosen to create us inside of a deterministic universe. So what does this all mean? Welcome to part four. Why being an NPC is the best news you'll ever get. As far as we can see in every direction, the cosmos is dead and silent. And as I argued in my first video in this trilogy, that silence is exactly what a resource efficient simulation would have to look like. It doesn't render the empty parts. Given that, my hypothesis is that this whole thing, all 13.8 billion years, trillions of dark galaxies, oceans of vacuum, it's all a sandbox built to run an evolution simulator so whoever is running it forward can see what emerges. That's why almost all of it stays switched off. The universe is simply the computational context that the simulation needs to run. And anything that doesn't need to be precisely measured just remains as a probability cloud. The only thing that collapses into a definitive state is what the simulation needs to render. And right now, on this tiny blue dot, one of the things it spends the energy to render is you. When you realize that your entire life is a simulation, you realize that the fullness, the richness, the loves, the losses, the triumphs, the tragedies, all of it is precisely what it feels like to be an NPC in a simulation. And it is incredible. Discovering that the substrate, God, whatever God is, chooses to work with, is mathematics shouldn't be distressing in the least. Think about love. We've known for decades exactly what it is. Oxytocin, dopamine and pair bonding circuitry that evolved to keep our ancestors children alive long enough to reproduce. Just chemicals in context. Knowing how it works, knowing that it isn't magic, still doesn't make it feel any less magical. No one in love cares how it works. They just know it works and it's awesome. Free will is the same. Sure, we're all NPCs running code that we didn't write, but. But the sunset is still staggering. Sex is still incredible. Holding your child still feels profound. This sandbox simulation has run for 13.8 billion years. Hydrogen has formed into stars, stars into elements, elements into chemistry, chemistry into life. And the entire time was reaching for something that could do exactly what you're doing right now. It wanted to see what you would do, what you would become. The simulation hypothesis is probably, probably an incomplete metaphor. Every model is. But sharpening the metaphor is how we unlock what comes next by freeing ourselves from the mystical metaphors we have historically been bound by. We prime ourselves for new insights that will drive a new era of results. And if this is what it feels like to be a bunch of lines of code in a video game, I'm here for it. It can be hard and terrifying at times, but the juice is worth the squeeze. Now look, I know I didn't choose to say that sentence, and I know you won't choose how you react. But I also know we are all changed by the ideas that we encounter. And despite the fact that we are stochastically determined, no one knows what tomorrow holds. And that's why this is the ride of a lifetime. And the cool thing is, we're not being judged by whatever is running the simulation. We're being witnessed. And here's the great irony. The more you realize that you don't have free will, the less weight the past has, the more free you are from the burdens that weigh some people down to the point of being crushed by them. And honestly, the more hope the future holds. Even if you don't have free will. Even if we are NPCs inside of a video game, the way to win this game is to play like you do. Have free will. Alright, that's it for today's episode. If you got value out of this, it would mean the world to me if you would go give us a 5.5star rating. It helps more than you know. All right, thank you. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.