Pulling the strings

So you think that you have free will, right?

Let's say that you're watching a History Channel presentation about free will. A narrator trying pathetically at speaking in an English accent talks about how as the more we learn about neurology, the more we notice the fact that our brains are just clusters of neurons sending information between eachother in a delicate and precise way. In other words, our minds are inherently deterministic.

Your neuron cluster, also known as a brain, comes to the conclusion that this cannot be. You believe in the existence of a soul, or at least that you have free will due to some unexplained process. You think that your mind is too complex to be a neural network.

Every day, you act like a deterministic robot, doing things in a deterministic way. Your deterministic mind deterministically looks at the world through eyes which may just be deceptive instruments showing you a hyper-realistic simulation. Yet you still think that you are better than just a computer program or a neural network. You think that you are actually free.

But you don't actually know anything about the world. The only way you can see, hear, or otherwise perceive the world is through your senses, and you cannot prove that these senses aren't just deceiving you into thinking certain things. The only way you can think is through your brain, but you can't prove that it is more complex than science says it is. You cannot prove that you have a soul. Your strings are being pulled by a neural network.

Here, let me pull your strings instead. After all, how do you tell the difference?

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